This article proposes a transdisciplinary reading of the works of the Turkish-German author Emine Sevgi Özdamar (born 1946). By taking both a historical and a literary approach to her trilogy Sonne auf halbem Weg : die Istanbul-Berlin Trilogie (Sun at mid-way : the Istanbul-Berlin trilogy), we set out to analyse this first-person narrative of a woman’s migratory journey that defies traditional literary categories, being on the borderline between autobiography, novel and historical testimony. Rat…
Read moreThis article proposes a transdisciplinary reading of the works of the Turkish-German author Emine Sevgi Özdamar (born 1946). By taking both a historical and a literary approach to her trilogy Sonne auf halbem Weg : die Istanbul-Berlin Trilogie (Sun at mid-way : the Istanbul-Berlin trilogy), we set out to analyse this first-person narrative of a woman’s migratory journey that defies traditional literary categories, being on the borderline between autobiography, novel and historical testimony. Rather than defining new criteria of classification, our article aims to show how a literary text that tackles gender-related perspectives can help build an alternative historical discourse, one that dismantles the dominant historiography of the late twentieth century, the age of a massive arrival of Gastarbeiter (guest workers) in the Federal Republic of Germany.
