Emine Sevgi Özdamar

Emine Sevgi Özdamar is a writer, director, and actress of Turkish origin who resides in Germany and has resided there for many years. Özdamar's art is unique in that it is influenced by her life experiences, which straddle the countries of Germany and Turkey throughout times of turmoil in both. One of her most notable accomplishments is winning the 1991 Ingeborg Bachmann Prize.

Özdamar's literary work has received much recognition and scholarly attention. A lover of poetry, she found great inspiration in the works of Heinrich Heine and Bertolt Brecht, especially from an album of the latter's songs which she had bought in the 1960s in Berlin. She later decided to study with Brecht's disciple Benno Besson in Berlin, where she currently resides.

Emine Sevgi Özdamar was born the tenth of August 1946 in Malatya, Turkey. She grew up with her grandparents and lived in the Turkish cities of Istanbul and Bursa. In 1965, Özdamar travelled to Berlin for the first time and got a job in a factory there. She originally came to Germany to be near her older brother, Ali, who studied in Switzerland at the time. It was not easy to immigrate to Switzerland, hence her move to Germany. Emine Sevgi Özdamar had acted and performed plays since she was twelve years old and originally wanted to do both when she came to Europe: acting and seeing her brother. Özdamar's parents were against their 18-year-old daughter's plan, but gave in eventually. She lived in a residence in West Berlin with 120 other Turkish women. When she came to Germany for the first time, she did not speak a word of German, so she faced the challenges of learning the language as an adult. Özdamar began by memorizing street names and headlines of newspapers without knowing the actual meaning behind them. 1 After seven months, her father finally paid for her to take language classes at the Goethe Institute in order to learn the language properly. Özdamar still wanted to become an actress, so she went back to Istanbul after two years, where she started to take acting lessons and got her first big roles in theatre productions. In 1971, a military coup in Istanbul resulted in persecution of citizens and had a great affect on citizens' freedom of speech. It became suddenly important for those in Turkey to choose their words wisely and to start using language differently. This was when Özdamar started to abalienate with her mother tongue, Turkish. She moved back to Germany and fell in love with the German language and authors like Bertolt Brecht. Özdamar went back in 1976 to work as a director’s assistant for the Volksbühne in East Berlin. She lived in West Berlin, but worked in East Berlin at the time. While touring with a play she also lived in France for another two years, before coming back to Germany and working at a theatre in Bochum in 1979. Emine Sevgi Özdamar currently lives Kreuzberg, Berlin with her husband Karl Kneidl.

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