Frauke Matthes

Introduction: Emine Sevgi Özdamar at 70

2016 marks the seventieth birthday of the writer, playwright, and actor Emine Sevgi Özdamar. In this opening quotation, Karl and Sevgi, a fictionalized version of Özdamar and her husband, the stage designer Karl Kneidl, drive through the German countryside on the date of an earlier birthday of the author/protagonist. Faced with old age and Karl’s cancer treatment, they are ambushed with visions of coffins on either side of the road as they drive. With nowhere to turn to escape instead the pair take a moment to celebrate life with an appreciative sip of water, followed by a bottle of champagne in honour of Sevgi’s birthday. Shifting as easily between three languages as between water and champagne, this small scene taken from Özdamar’s most recent play, Sterben in der Fremde (2011), captures many of the characteristics which have made Özdamar’s writing such a rich source of inspiration and study since her premiere as a novelist in 1991. Here we see the playful multilingualism which positions characters as players with multiple affiliations and highlights the everyday transnationalism of contemporary Europe. We also encounter, even in this theatrical piece, the blurring of the lines between fiction and reality which locates Özdamar’s work alongside the tendency to ‘autofiction’ prevalent in much fiction in the latter half of the twentieth century, as authors struggle to deal with complex national legacies and chronicle lives lived in these legacies’ shadow. A zest for pleasure in the small details of life is also prominent in this extract from Sterben in der Fremde and Özdamar’s work as a whole,