Isabelle Lacoue

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. 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.

Since its creation in 1948, Israel has been seen as a privileged place for women: pictures of women ploughing, building streets and houses or guarding rural settlements set up by the Jewish settlers from the 1880s onwards suggested the emergence of a new egalitarian society for women and men. Letters, diaries, memoirs, life accounts and a variety of personal papers written by famous or unknown women contradict this idyllic picture. These texts show another facet of the Yishuv, where equality and harmony between the sexes were quixotic. Rather than a paradise flowing with milk and honey, the country appears as a hostile land where life was hard for everyone, leaving many to leave or to commit suicide. These written traces profoundly alter representations of the Zionist experience and offer an opportunity to write a new version of this history.