Melancholia and community

In his well-known 1917 essay ‘Mourning and Melancholia’, Freud describes melancholia as a state of mind in which some people lapse after having suffered an important loss. Melancholia is a pathological form of mourning with persistent disruptive consequences, diverse symptoms and an unpredictable end. A major characteristic of melancholia is the melancholic subject's identification with the lost object, which is internalized as part of his or her identity.Reference Freud¹ Melancholia and mourning can be caused by the loss of a beloved person, or indeed by the loss of ‘some abstraction which has taken the place of one such as one's country, liberty, an ideal and so on.’Reference Freud² Yet in melancholia, Freud notes, ‘there is a loss of a more ideal kind’. More than in the case of real mourning, melancholia has an imaginary conditioning, ‘one cannot see clearly what it is that has been lost […]’ and the patient may know whom he has lost, ‘but not what he has lost in him.’Reference Freud³

Freud's suggestion that melancholia may be caused by an injury that has an imaginative dimension widens its applicability considerably. Judith Butler, for example, traces melancholia to a state caused by the loss of homosexuality due to the imaginative – yet omnipresent – ideal of heterosexuality.Reference Butler⁴ Melancholia can also be diagnosed on the level of community, as Julia Kristeva does in her analysis of the general depressive state of mind in contemporary France.Reference Heigh⁵ As Kristeva argues, this collective melancholia is caused by a feeling that the nation has lost its former power and prestige and now needs to redirect its emotional energy differently, for instance fostering the ideal of a multicultural nation instead of that of a colonial world power.Reference Heigh⁶ What both Butler and Kristeva reveal, is that melancholia need not be the result of a personal inclination to pathology, but can just as well be the result of common cultural ideals, which means practically all people are vulnerable to this state of mind. To a certain degree, the sense of community has become problematic, as collectivity is associated with a history of totalitarian abuse and a present of exclusivist morality. Hence contemporary intellectual discourse is sceptical about the idea of self-identical societies and opts for loosely knitted, non-exclusivist collectivities.Reference Liska⁷ However, as Vivian Liska indicates in her monograph on German-Jewish literature, these alternative designs of community tend to underestimate the impact of community-building forces such as language, religion or memories, even if they are ‘invented’ or imaginary. Therefore, they cannot account for the forms of tormented identification or love–hate relationships in a world where collective ideals are omnipresent, either in mainstream discourse or minority statements.

In what follows, I will look at the meaning literature may have from the perspective of what one could call ‘community melancholia’ (the genitive is double: caused by and longing for). The idea that literature and melancholia are somehow connected has a long tradition in Western culture, so much that Freud refers to Hamlet for his clinical picture as if the fictional Danish prince were a real person. Melancholia and literature can be looked at from different angles. One can consider literature and melancholia in the realm of the biographical and read the literary text from a mimetic point of view, sounding it for representations of the author's sadness and torment. One can also look at the formal dimension of literary language, from the point of view of the economy of textual aesthetics. Cutting across these various levels I want to consider two German authors from different periods in order to gauge how their texts deal with ‘community melancholia’. My focus will be on theatricality as a literary device that replies, attenuates, defends, or complies with the imperative of being part of a clearly defined culture or nation. Both authors have received extensive attention in German studies the last ten years. Both have acquired canonical status. In view of the historiography of literature this is not a bad state for women authors, especially since neither is a straightforward figure of national identification.

Else Lasker-Schüler (1869–1945) was a German-Jewish poet and performer, Emine Sevgi Özdamar (1946–) is a Turkish-German author and actress, who belongs to the so-called ‘new German literature’, or migrants’ literature. Considering these two authors together does not only imply a comparison of two historical periods, but it also brings together two different disciplines that live separate lives in the academic world. In spite of the fact that, in both cases, one is dealing with German literature, German-Jewish literature is nowadays often considered a part of Jewish Studies, which fosters an interdisciplinary profile (in spite of the fact that a strong link with German departments remains, due to the impact of German thought on ‘the emergence of European Jewish culture since the Haskalah of the late eighteenth century’Reference Morris⁸). The so-called New German literature, or migrants’ literature, which arose as a marginal cultural phenomenon in the early 1970s, today comprises the work of ‘non-native’ German authors and forms part of contemporary German Studies.Reference Chiellino⁹ I do not want to make an in-depth study of the history of academic disciplines and institutional policy, yet returning to the historical situation of both literatures, and especially from the point of view of national identity, some striking similarities exist in the rhetoric of the historical intellectual discourse that surrounds, on the one hand, German-Jewish literature during the first decades of the twentieth century, and contemporary migrants’ literature on the other. In fact, it is surprising that they have been overlooked so often. Looking at these two periods from one particular perspective I do not mean to level differences between different historical events. The comparison is provoked by similarities between the discourses on culture and nationality at the beginning and the end of the twentieth century in Germany as well as by some likenesses in the lives and work of both authors. The first was a performer, the other is an actress, and in the lives of both the real world and the theatre somehow merge.

Both women are also surrounded by intense debates about minority and mainstream society. They are to some extent drawn into them, although their precise attitude towards these discussions remains rather opaque. Özdamar's work is largely autobiographically inspired. Her main theme is her story of migration between Turkey and Germany and the world of her parents in Turkey, torn between tradition and modernization. This is less the case in the oeuvre of Lasker-Schüler. She addresses Jewish themes in her work, in particular in her Hebrew Ballads (1923). However, as Vivian Liska points out, she does so in a very imaginative and unorthodox manner. In some of her dramas she evokes her ‘origins’ and the world of her parents, as in Die Wupper (1909) and Arthur Aronymus und seine Väter (1932). Overall, though, Jewish identity is not a very clear-cut motif in her work.Reference Bauschinger¹⁰

Obviously, quite a number of authors might be compared with these criteria. In the case of Lasker-Schüler and Özdamar, though, a direct intertextual reference makes the link between them compelling. In Özdamar's 2003 novel Seltsame Sterne starren zur Erde, an autobiographical narrative of her stay in Berlin as an apprentice at the Volksbühne in 1976/1977, the protagonist receives a volume of poetry by Else Lasker-Schüler. One of the poems provides the title to the novel: ‘Seltsame Sterne starren zur Erde/ Eisenfarbene mit Sehnsuchtsschleifen/ Mit brennenden Armen die Liebe suchen’.Reference Özdamar¹¹ A flatmate informs the young Turkish narrator about Else Lasker-Schüler, a poet ‘who lived in Berlin and had to flee for the Nazis. Died in Jerusalem.’Reference Özdamar¹² Berlin is the junction where both paths cross. Although they lead in different directions, as Özdamar migrated from Turkey to Berlin and Lasker-Schüler from Berlin to Palestine, both are associated with the ‘oriental’, which has a long tradition of functioning as the other in the construction of the European – German – self.Reference Kontje¹³ The protagonist reads the Lasker-Schüler poem and on the night of Christmas, when she is left to herself because all her housemates have left the communal flat to visit their families, she goes up to the roof terrace to look at the stars the poem evokes. Walking through the flat the young woman describes what she sees: ‘In the large room next to the pingpong table and the broken, limp seats there stood a Christmas tree, in which colourful lamps hung, and a piano. […] In the kitchen: the remains of spiced cake.’Reference Özdamar¹⁴ Although this is the interior of an unconventional house, actually a factory that is being squatted, the setting is the epitome of German bourgeois culture: deeply Christian in its habitus, life rhythm, and group formation.

Not surprisingly, one finds the same symbol – the Christmas tree – in German Zionist discourse at the beginning of the century as associated with the assimilated Jew. In an article published in 1912, the Prague journalist Moritz Goldstein, one of the spokesmen of Jewish self-consciousness, speaks scornfully of assimilated Jews, who deny the differences between Jews and Germans and ‘have themselves photographed under the Christmas tree.’Reference Baioni¹⁵ This is a significant tertium comparationis in the comparison between a German-Jewish author from before 1933 and a Turkish-German one nowadays. As Sigrid Weigel points out, the rise of German national culture is often considered as a process of secularization, whereas in fact it consists of an absorption of Christian traditions and symbols. This is one reason for a mainstream resistance to the idea that other religions might be part of German identity.Reference Weigel¹⁶

Belonging or being?

In his autobiography Die Welt von Gestern. Erinnerungen eines Europäers (1942) the Austrian-Jewish author Stefan Zweig notes: ‘From the disgrace of being a Jew, there is but one escape – to fight for the honour of the Jewish people as a whole.’Reference Kristeva¹⁷ Writing in the late 1930s, in exile, and looking back in extreme bitterness, Zweig realized that the idea of assimilation turned out to be an utter failure. Humiliated, bereft of his home – Austrian-German bourgeois culture – and his idea of European citizenship, Zweig fell between the chairs of belonging to a nation. He had felt part of a culture until he was brutally excluded from it without having an alternative. As Julia Kristeva notes, ‘Zweig's rejection forced him to confront the reality of the Jewish people, but because he was incapable of political engagement, this ‘exile from the paradise of cultural enjoyments’ – as Zweig described himself – could contemplate only the quiet despair of suicide.’Reference Kristeva¹⁸ The ‘reality of the Jewish people’, however, does not only mean the plight of the Jews under National Socialism. It also refers to the identificatory claims of Jewish self-consciousness that Zweig had never fully engaged with before 1933, and which he was unable to embrace under the brutal force of the Hitler regime.

Jewish identity movements in Germany and Austria arose around the turn of the century in response to a latent but persistent anti-Semitism in mainstream society, which reinforced a sense of community and proper identity among members of the Jewish minority. A source of inspiration was the presence of Eastern European Jews who had migrated from isolated communities in the Russian empire to escape oppression. The possession of a language of their own, along with strict religious traditions, appeared to many Western Jews as the remnants of an authentic Jewishness they themselves had lost. It inspired the renewal – revival rather – of a true Jewish identity and the establishment of a self-conscious Jewish minority in mainstream German culture.Reference Gelber¹⁹ In its most extreme form – Zionism – the ideal was to uplift the Jewish minority from its ‘diasporic’ state and ‘return’ it to its ‘home nation’. In its more moderate forms, such as cultural Zionism, the idea was to establish a nation within the nation. Using Freudian terms: to reorient the libidinal energy of belonging to mainstream community into the direction of another object, a minority community, by underscoring terms such as common race and descent, religion, language, and tradition.

The Jewish movement was accompanied by a proliferation of discourses on Jewish identity, on the nature and being of the ‘oriental’ fellow-citizen in the occidental world.²⁰Ost und West. Illustrierte Monatsschrift für modernes Judentum, which appeared between 1901 and 1923, is one example among many that summarizes some constitutive features in this Jewish discourse. The editorial of the first issue states: ‘Thus we want to praise Jewish life, not as it is today, but as it ought to be and begins to be. This includes a self-conscious, inwardly rooted, sacred, true and fertile Jewish life, that is built on the soil of a beautiful humanity and on the silent work for the general progress of culture, that develops the good characteristics of our race.’²¹ The idea is to attain a unitary community (‘einheitliche Gemeinschaft’). In the same first issue, Martin Buber, spokesman of the cultural-spiritual revival of Jewishness, expresses the hope for a ‘Jewish Renaissance’ that would arise in contrast to the ‘miserable episode of ‘assimilation’ that should be substituted by a new powerful fight against destructive forces.’Reference Buber²² From this situation a ‘positive, solid activity program should follow. Not the program of a political party, but the unwritten program of a movement.’Reference Buber²³

The awareness that assimilation as a means to ascertain the viability of a ‘national’ community appears in fact as unacceptably coercive is equally present in contemporary minority discourse in Germany. The desire for a seamless acculturation is the other side of the coin of the ghetthoization of minorities. Turkish-German author Zafer Senocak comments on both options: ‘Everyone should be blissful as he sees fit, keep his eye on his own plate, and make himself comfortable in the ghetto. Integrate, say the others. By this they mean nothing short of absolute assimilation, the disappearance of Anatolian faces behind German masks.’Reference Senocak and Tulay²⁴ Assimilation is not only the loss of oneself, it means exchanging a genuine identity for something utterly different, in fact something artificial, as the metaphor of the mask in Senocak's phrase denotes. (As such this statement is comparable to Buber's, who describes the rise of a new Jewish identity as a process of naturalization, stressing that one should look deep into ‘the heart of nature’ in the course of the process of finding oneself.) However, it is not only the idea of a ‘natural’ belonging that is at play here. Refusal of acculturation is closely connected with German society and its deeply defensive attitude toward the ‘other’. In one of his newspaper columns, German-Iranian author Navid Kermani remarks that his parents never called themselves ‘German’ in spite of having lived in Germany for over 50 years, and concluded: ‘I do not think that this is simply because of my parents. I think it might be because of Germany.’ No one formulated this same problem sharper than Hannah Arendt in her well-known (1944) essay ‘The Jew as a Pariah’: ‘If Western Jewry of the nineteenth century had taken assimilation seriously, had really tried to resolve the anomaly of the Jewish people and the problem of the Jewish individual by becoming ‘indistinguishable’ from their neighbors […] they would only have found in the end that they were faced with inequality and that society was slowly but surely disintegrating into a vast complex of inhuman cross-currents.’Reference Arendt²⁵ Arendt is convinced of the ultimate inaccessibility of mainstream German society, uncovering an eternal undercurrent of excluding energy that disables even the most desperately desired integration. The various voices of the Jewish movement, Zionism, cultural Zionism, Jewish Renaissance: they all reject assimilation as the seemingly most obvious road for existing within mainstream society and seek the option of self-definition and acknowledged minority existence. In comparable terms, Zafer Senocak says about Germany's contemporary Turkish minority: ‘When we speak of a comprehensive change in consciousness, we mean that it is time to take up a long overdue discussion of repressed problems of identity and fears of contact. The Turks must finally speak up to situate themselves anew, to orient and define themselves. This holds above all for the so-called second generation and the coming generations.’Reference Arendt²⁶

In 1995, Turkish-German author Feridun Zaimoglu published his manifesto Kanak Sprak. 24 Stimmen vom Rande der Gesellschaft, which, as the title indicates, literally gives voice to second and third generation migrant youngsters who mainly live on the fringes of society and for whom assimilation is not an option anymore. Angrily they have come to define their own identity in defiance of mainstream society: ‘der Kanake’.Reference Cheesman²⁷ The tone of this ‘Kanak generation’ balances between defensiveness and extreme assertiveness and in that sense complies with Arendt's finding that ‘under unfavourable conditions [minorities] strive to create factors of disturbance.’Reference Arendt²⁸ Zaimoglu's protagonists do not anticipate any goodwill gesture from ‘the Germans’ (die Alemannen) anymore, and repudiate the idea of belonging to the nation they were born into, let alone conform to its standards of decency. They do not want to live through the disappointment of the older generation. The second and third generation experiences how, in this increasingly cool and threatening country, ‘the old and exhausted guest workers pack their suitcases […] return to their home country, so that their dream of happiness might still be fulfilled.’Reference Zaimoglu²⁹ This difference between generations is also present in the Jewish discourse a century earlier. In his 1908 novel Der Weg ins Freie (The Road to Freedom) Arthur Schnitzler's Jewish protagonist describes his father as someone who: ‘[…] belongs to that liberal epoch of the seventies and eighties when even shrewd men were overcome by the catch-word of the day. A man like that would certainly appear ridiculous nowadays.’Reference Bronsen³⁰ Both the Jewish discourse as well as the intellectual discourse of the Turkish-German minority seek a new identity that does not suppress their ‘origin’ but considers it as the core component of who they are. As Joseph Schönfeld says of the Jew: ‘[…] he does not feel Prussian in the least, he has no obligation to the powers of its past […] his proper place is not Germany but his Jewishness.’Reference Schönfeld³¹ Although the rhetoric has changed – concepts such as race, blood and origin have been replaced by words such as ethnicity and culture – the fierce self-definition against an exclusively German community appears as similar, as does the contempt for those who have followed the road of assimilation. Hannah Arendt speaks of the fiasco of Jewish emancipation, which has not been ‘an admission of Jews to the ranks of humanity [but] rather […] a permit to ape the gentiles or an opportunity to play the parvenu.’Reference Arendt³² Zaimoglu remarks that ‘some Turks have learned to imitate the German petty-bourgeois and have transformed into the nice colleague “Ali”, whom one can invite once in a while to the local pub.’Reference Zaimoglu³³

In both historical cases, the impact of war intensified the positions and heightened the strain of committing oneself to a nation or culture. The outbreak of the First World War divided the Jewish movement on whether to identify with the German cause or to consider oneself as a Jew in the first place, and as such transcend the fronts. Convinced Zionists like Max Brod and Gershom Scholem were clear in their refusal to sympathize with any nation in this conflict, let alone with Germany. Yet a majority of German Jews did side with the nation they lived in, encouraged by the emperor's notorious statement that from now on he would not distinguish between parties anymore, but only recognize Germans as such.Reference Craig³⁴ Reading through Jewish periodicals and newspapers between 1914 and 1918 however, reveals a growing sense of disappointment and bitterness, because as the war progressed, it became clear that it did not function as a harmonizing force. Rather, on the contrary, as the prospect of a glorious final chord vanished, the suspicion of ‘the German nation’ toward its Jewish citizens grew, mistrusting their loyalty and commitment up to the point that an official counting of Jewish soldiers was commissioned in order to record their participation.Reference Ellbogen and Sterling³⁵ Stranger became enemy. What the editorial of the journal Ost und West diagnosed in a general tone at the outbreak of the war became applicable to the way the Jews were viewed in particular: ‘There are also snipers of the feather, they spill their ink in the service of the fatherland. They proclaim an ineradicable hate against all strangers; for them the stranger means the enemy.’³⁶ It is interesting to compare the phenomenon of shifting sympathies and hardening positions in minority discourse during the First World War with the changing tone in media and public opinion during the Gulf War(s) and even more after 9/11 and comparable catastrophic events. Public scepticism and suspicion about the presence of the ‘other’ in an accepted Western context grew considerably and was increasingly met with a defensive tone, sealing borders between migrant communities and mainstream society. No one has recorded this process of growing distrust more accurately and sensitively than the journalist and author Kermani. In one of the columns he started writing after the terrorist attacks on 11 September 2001, he quotes as a matter of example the public performance of former GDR poet Günter Kunert, who declared on television ‘he would not, in God's name, say anything against his Turkish fellow citizens. But unfortunately they have a different attitude towards violence. When you tell a catholic: go and kill that person, he will not do it. A Muslim will.’Reference Kermani³⁷ That precisely Turks should be identified with Islam is symptomatic of the emergence of an enemy stereotype unhampered by precise knowledge.

Yet Kermani's worry is not merely about uninformed or stupid opinions. The root of his anger is the fact that several authors have contributed to the emergence of a monolithic image of the ‘other’ in Western community. Günter Kunert, ‘who wrote some of the most subtle political verse in German literature’, and even Noble prize winner Elfriede Jelinek, have each in their role as public intellectuals let their hair down and ‘have converted to the end of difference’.Reference Kermani³⁸ Kermani's indignation about Jelinek and Kunert sprouts from his incomprehension at the irreconcilability between these authors’ blunt political comments and the subtleties of their literary texts, which, as imaginary practices, have proven to be stubbornly resistant against communitarian allegiance. Although in different identity discourses – certainly in times of political pressure – literature is expected to take sides, its complex process of ‘mediatization’ often fails to be conclusive for those hungering for replies. No author has been more read in this light than Franz Kafka, whose life, as Vivian Liska and others record, indeed betrays a growing commitment to the movement of Jewish cultural emancipation and even Zionism. In reading his fiction, however, ‘one has no verifiable way of identifying what the different groups and communities […] might refer to, and any attempt to assign them specific correspondence in the real world reveals only the choices and concerns of the reader.’Reference Liska³⁹

Feridun Zaimoglu's early literary texts, such as Kanak Sprak or Abschaum. Die wahre Geschichte des Ertan Ongun (1997), can be regarded as uncompromising literary statements of a new community formation, be it that the tone is extremely defensive and does not exhibit the confident attitude of many Jewish authors committed to the cause of a Jewish community in Germany. The real life story of Ertan Ongun is about the consequences of being excluded from mainstream community. In his afterword, the author comments: ‘[Ertan Ongun] told me his story, because the problem nowadays is not that of Christiane F and the “Children of Bahnhof Zoo”, but of the many migrants’ children, whose life is such, and who will be like what Ertan has lived through. Ertan's message is: we are the Kanaks, for which the Germans have always warned. So now we really exist, totally in accordance with your image and your fears.’Reference Zaimoglu⁴⁰ Although written in a very different form and mode, this kind of positioning corresponds to Max Brod's demand that literature should reveal commitment. In an essay written in the periodical Der Jude, ‘Unsere Literaten und die Gesellschaft’, Brod heavily criticizes Jewish poets whose work does not bear the sign of the messianic spirit that is needed and whose talent and linguistic creativity is thus wasted in idle aesthetic productions.Reference Brod⁴¹ In this particular case, however, one has the impression that the texts Brod berates for their lack of dedication seem to escape the melancholia that has overcome the critic.

Refusal of melancholia

The relationship between literature and identity representation is one with a history of tension and conflict. Within this context of ideology and disruption let me turn to, and compare the work and lives of, Else Lasker-Schüler and Emine Sevgi Özdamar, who, as I hope to show, may illustrate how literature can both explicitly articulate and at the same time escape the questions of belonging that have been a predicament during the twentieth century and beyond. The work of the German-Jewish author on the one hand and the Turkish-German on the other can each be situated against the background of an identity discourse that evolved from thinking in terms of difference to demands of belonging and exclusion. Lasker-Schüler's career began in a period that witnessed discussions on Jewish identity in an atmosphere that allowed for a non-committal interest. National-socialism with its brutally enforced policy of exclusion and eventual annihilation of Jewishness left her bereft of her citizenship and forced her to move to Palestine, where she faced yet another claim of belonging.Reference Bauschinger⁴² Emine Özdamar's life moved in an opposite direction as she decided to leave Turkey and move to Germany in order to – both politically and artistically – gain free space. She eventually acquired German citizenship. The focus of my analysis will not lie on Lasker-Schüler's experience in Israel but on her association with identity discourse before 1933. As such, I will compare her to Özdamar and the coercion of community in Turkey as well as in Germany in the context of contemporary German debates.

Both authors have lived through the realities of national culture. Their work is often read as representational from this point of view. Yet, as both have always been more engaged with their aesthetical and literary projects than with persuasive political action, it seems equally challenging to look at the disruptive side in their work from this angle. In this vein, I want to focus on the theatricality that is so conspicuous in the life and work of Lasker-Schüler and Özdamar. Both authors seem to engage in what Sam Weber calls ‘theatrocracy’. This consists of having the theatrical act overflow the institutional borders of theatrical space and, as such, adds to ‘the dissolution of universally valid laws and consequently the destabilization of the social space that those laws both presuppose and help maintain.’Reference Weber⁴³ The transgression of the theatrical cannot even be brought back to a democratic program, Weber argues, it is merely the intrusion of ‘an irreducible and unpredictable heterogeneity […].’ The mise en scène that is so present in the work of both women, and so disturbingly out of context, can be read as an instance of theatrocracy that disrupts concepts of community time and again. As such, it equally appears as a refusal to undergo the melancholia inherent in community belonging.

Emine Özdamar was a professional actress even before she was an author, and her autobiographical novels to a large extent deal with her training, career and experiences as an actress and a playwright. Her first novel, The Bridge of the Golden Horn, published in 1998, is the story of a young Turkish woman who leaves her hometown Istanbul in 1966 to go and work in a factory in Berlin. After a year she returns to Turkey, but goes back to Germany after a while in order to learn German this time. The acquisition of the new language opens up a world that reaches far beyond the walls and the narrow view of the Turkish factory workers’ quarters. Through her new acquaintances the nameless protagonist begins to participate in the political manifestations and student revolts in Berlin. After her return to Istanbul, she attends drama school and engages in the ‘Enlightenment’ of her home country by spreading progressive political ideas as far as deep Anatolia. During the military coup of 1970 she is arrested. After her release she decides to return to Germany. Özdamar's 2003 novel Seltsame Sterne Starrren zur Erde (Curious Stars Stare at the Earth) in a certain way continues this life story, as it deals with a nameless Turkish actress who has left her country and its political tensions in order to work at the famous Volksbühne in East-Berlin while living in the West, where she experiences the dead-end atmosphere of the post-revolutionary mid-1970s.

Özdamar's novels are often considered as a contemporary form of ‘Bildungsroman’, as they narrate the protagonist's growth to maturity against the background of social and political events in Turkey's process of modernization and in Europe's last flare of this same process. Her work, however, is written in the totally different context of post-socialist, post-post-modern, post-9/11 Germany, in the atmosphere of renewed awareness of belonging and non-belonging that Navid Kermani evokes in a sneering address to his German audience: ‘[…] integration is so terribly good, that no one could say, we had something against Islam, I mean, that you had something against Islam, well against me, to be more accurate, I keep forgetting I belong to the evil side, although I do not really feel evil, but then I have not known the Enlightenment […] but thank you for educating me […].’Reference Kermani⁴⁴ Özdamar's work evokes the atmosphere of leftwing idealism and its sense of universality of the 1960s. But instead of historicizing the story it may be read in the entirely different context of the turn of the millennium and its renewed community stakes. The Bridge of the Golden Horn certainly deals with the process of conforming to community demands. This is a typical element of the ‘Bildungsroman’: the protagonist has to face the wish of her parents to opt for a decent education, the expectations of the Turkish workers’ community in Germany to behave like a ‘decent daughter’, the demands of the socialists to be a loyal party member, the expectations of the drama school crowd to be sexually uninhibited, of the Turkish establishment to be a loyal citizen, and of occidental society to be refreshingly oriental. The encounter of the protagonist with Turkish fellow students during her stay in Paris functions as a pars pro toto for the omnipresent demands of membership in society and the narrator's incomprehension: ‘At night someone knocked at my door, a beautiful Turkish man came in and sat on my bed, the room was very small. He said: “We are both far away from our country, we are both Turks, we should comfort each other.” I did not know why Turks should comfort Turks in Paris, laughed and pulled the blanket over my head.’Reference Özdamar⁴⁵

In spite of the fact that the author's picture is on the cover of the book, in spite of extended autobiographical references and a chronicle of historical events, Özdamar's narrative leaves little room for identification with the protagonist. Rather, the contrary. Although this life story is narrated by an I-narrator, the mode for introspection and emotional identification of the modern subject, there is a curious lack of emotional language in the narrator's account. The gravity or comedy of situations is expressed by means of gestures instead of emotive terms. When she is imprisoned in the police headquarters with a number of dissident students and witnesses their being tortured, no expression indicates her anxiety or her own state of distress. It is only through the gestures of other protagonists that the danger of her situation becomes clear. When her father tries to see his daughter in prison the following happens: ‘The policemen said “get out, go away”. My father screamed “I want to see my daughter”. The policemen opened the door for him a short time. He immediately fell silent and said softly “My daughter”.’Reference Özdamar⁴⁶ Also in her love life, which is at times ruthlessly promiscuous, and at times passionately devoted, and which lies at the root of much of her political engagement, the protagonist does not utter a term of emotion that might be recognizable for the reader. After she has had an abortion, she goes home: ‘As I walked with Hüseyin over the Bridge of the Golden Horn, I did not know whether it was the bridge or I that staggered.’Reference Özdamar⁴⁷

This unusual narrative technique is one aspect of Özdamar's theatricality that functions as a disruption of the ‘universally valid laws’, or, somewhat less ambitiously, that suspends a form of identification that eventually adds up to a sense of community. Özdamar's novel deploys one of the key concepts of Bertolt Brecht's epic theatre practice. Brecht does not allow the investment of an actor's private temperament in the story he/she is participating in, as it would endanger ‘the line of reasoning of the scene’.Reference Brecht⁴⁸ The idea of Brechtian drama is to fathom and lay bare the mechanisms of society and history by means of disrupting stage acts that move the audience from the notion of ‘katharsis’, i.e. the release of personal emotional batteries, to a form of reflection. The aim is to make the audience understand that all social relations can be changed. ‘The actor has to show the social coherence of people’, Brecht argues, which in drama terms means that the personality of the protagonists should be composed before the eyes of the audience, ‘who […] will remember this forever.’Reference Brecht⁴⁹ The detached, non-emotional look of Özdamar's narrator and her detachment even in the most drastic circumstances have intrigued readers and are usually interpreted as the unprejudiced attitude of the stranger toward an unknown world.Reference Minnaard⁵⁰ According to this logic the protagonist's environments, be it the home community or the terra incognita, are the object of the detached look of what Hannah Arendt calls the ‘schlemil’, i.e. the one who is forever outside society and in a certain sense does not want to comply with the rules, knowing he will never be accepted, no matter how hard he tries. This is plausible. Yet following the idea of ‘theatrocracy’ and the disruptive impact of the excessive presence of theatre within the order of community (Weber's example comes from the writings of Plato, who records the disturbing of a sacred ritual in the polis by the wild performance of a choir in the midst of public space),Reference Weber⁵¹ the narrator's amazed look – rooted in her non-emotional and gestural depiction – might just as well be a strategy in accordance with Brecht's provision that it is advisable that an actor should have a surprised attitude toward the happenings of the plot, but also toward the persona he is to figure: his/her ‘gestural disposition toward the world of the author is one of amazement, and such is the attitude he has to hand on to his audience.’Reference Brecht⁵²

In addition, on a second, diegetic level, theatricality is present in Özdamar's prose and illustrates the force of theatrocracy's wild performance in the public space: time and again in the course of the story the narrator assumes theatrical roles outside the institutional borders of the theatre and confuses her surroundings by acting and quoting scenes that are out of joint. As such, her commitment to any cause always appears more as a form of play than serious engagement. One of the early scenes of the story is representative of her later acts: as the narrator recounts the fight with her parents about her wish to go to drama school, she is shown replying to her mother's (bitter) arguments by quoting dialogues from Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream, unsettling attempts at a serious conversation that could mend the disorder. This kind of enactment is repeated in the course of the story and shows the I-narrator fulfilling roles in scenes she gets involved in. In other words, the narration shows the act of taking on a role in various situations complying with Brecht's rule that ‘an actor has to make herself up for every scene, so that when she looks alike for a long time, this appears noticeable.’

With Else Lasker-Schüler, theatricality functions quite differently than with Emine Özdamar, yet nevertheless it is comparable in its disruptive mode. Let us turn to one striking contrast first: the evocation of an oriental world. This is what the title of Özdamar's novel seems to promise: Brücke vom Goldenen Horn at least reminds us of Istanbul's mythological ‘golden past’, although in the novel it has nothing to do with the imagination of the ‘East’. The Bridge of the Golden Horn connected both ‘European’ sides of Istanbul and as such does not provide or symbolically represent a link between East and West.Reference McGowan⁵³ Moreover, nowadays it does not exist anymore as it was demolished in the late 1960s. So the golden dream is left without real reference. Özdamar's Brechtian representation of the ‘orient’ is quite different from Lasker-Schüler's encompassing oriental evocation in her stories Die Nächte Tino von Bagdads (The Nights of Tino of Baghdad, 1907) and Prinz von Theben (Prince of Thebes, 1914), two pieces of prose fiction in which the life of a poet-princess (Tino) and a royal prince (Jussuf) in a lush oriental setting is evoked. Whereas the name ‘Golden Horn’ may somehow still be reminiscent of orientalist images of a romantically different East, nowadays reference to the geographical site of Baghdad is nothing but a chafed sore. Yet for Lasker-Schüler and her world, Baghdad fulfilled the role of Özdamar's only ironically summoned ‘Golden Horn’ and likewise did the author in her public appearances. Lasker-Schuler did not only create her oriental fictional characters on paper, she identified with and enacted them in various public occasions, and signed her letters with their names. In current research, these performances are read as acts of postcolonial, queer and gender awareness,Reference Webber⁵⁴ yet in her days they merely vexed a number of intellectual contemporaries. In one of his letters, Kafka wrote about the appearance of the ‘Prince’, that to him Lasker-Schüler appeared more as ‘a cow from Kurfürstendamm’ than the exotic character she wanted to be.Reference Decker⁵⁵ Benjamin remarked on her worked up behaviourReference Bauschinger⁵⁶ and Brecht, who watched one of her performances on a literary evening, noted that it was a mixture of beauty and hysteria, but completely ‘over the top’ (übersteigert) and added ‘the woman is completely worn out’.Reference Brecht⁵⁷ It is interesting that Brecht should have remarked on Lasker-Schüler's broken-down state while she was reciting her poetry. He could have considered the discrepancy between person and role as an off-stage example of his own epic drama theory creating distance to illuminate social constraints. Instead, role and performer appear to him as an irritating entity with ill-fitting parts. Brecht's reaction may be an indication of the persuasive mode of Lasker-Schüler's ‘theatrocracy’ that tears down the walls of the theatrical institution he himself represented and that appears impossible to reassemble into a recognizable unity.

The fictional setting for the princess Tino from Baghdad consists of an amalgam of elements typical of the fashionable orientalist interest of the fin de siècle.Reference Webber⁵⁸ More than being a reflected selection of artefacts and habits, ‘Baghdad’ is constructed with assets that belong to both Jewish and Arab culture and even contemporary Germany.⁵⁹ It is literally a mise en scène, a setting piled with eclectic acts, expressions and paraphernalia that are assembled to set the stage for the oriental protagonist's dramatic, poetic and intensely erotic experiences. Its power to disturb clearly emerges when we think of the intense contemporary debate about Jewishness and the philological, theological and historical arguments involved.Reference Efron⁶⁰ ‘Tino von Bagdad’ is thus ‘the disruption of the theatron, that goes together […] with a concomitant disruption of theory, which is to say, the ability of knowledge and competence to localize things, keep them in their proper place and thus contribute to social stability.’Reference Weber⁶¹ Another aspect of theatricality, again quite unlike the Brechtian script but nevertheless comparable to its use by Özdamar, is the corporeal (and erotic) presentation of the protagonist. Just like the material assets – gold, sand, palaces, animals – that make the oriental scene, the protagonist Tino, in spite of being a poet and thus representative of the logos, appears as a creature of bios, desire, flesh and blood, loved and punished in her physical being. Thus, for example, the encounter of the princess with Minn, the mysterious son of the sultan of Morocco, during a feast ends in an intense, naked dance that has cruel consequences. The young man takes off his clothes to reveal himself to the princess: ‘The evening paints his limbs softly and tenderly. […] We dance until our feet are one in turning. Then my father orders that the tongues of the black servants whose naked eyes witnessed our naked dance, my body and most of all my face, are to be pierced, the noble court people are blinded.’Reference Lasker Schüler⁶² Comparable scenes of bodily pantomime are present throughout the story.

The encounter between the princess and the fakir of Thebes, who desires her beautiful ring ends with the following scene: ‘In greed he looked at my ring, onto the wonderful stone, in which I carried the sky. He wished to have it in exchange for his mercy. Stubbornly I shook my head and that same day all the women in the city bled. And it was like a gruesome sea over Thebes, from the lush green of the woods all these human drops!!! And no house remained that was not coloured by the blood of its woman and that screamed up to the sky.’Reference Lasker Schüler⁶³ The conspicuous presence of the body in this story could be read as part of the orientalist setting, reinforcing the idea of the carnal exotic that stands in contrast to the metaphysically oriented occident. But these scenes are equally reminiscent of the theatre of the carnal after the concept of Antonin Artaud, whose non-verbal Theatre of Cruelty is determined not by logic but by the rhythm of the body that dominates the centre of the stage and relieves the world of metaphysics. Thus, the Artaudian mise en scène in Lasker-Schüler's oriental prose world can be read as a form of theatricality that disrupts the discourse of identity construction on both sides of society: the oriental projections of Western mainstream society as well as the constructive projects of Jewish minority discourse. The nuisance value of this theatrical mise en scène is reinforced by the protagonist's use of an imaginative (Semitic) language in between the standard poetic phrases. These expressions of sound stress the physical aspect of language in accordance with the prominence of the body instead of adding to the unity of meaning.⁶⁴ The first chapter of the story, I Dance in the Mosque (ich tanze in der Moschee), recounts the princess’s dance in a rhythmical, jolting language that underscores the materiality of the body: ‘Machmêde macheii, my lips do not hurt anymore, sweet as a flush my blood drips and […] ever more dreaming my finger is raised – mysteriously like the stem of the Allahflower Machmêde macheii […].’Reference Lasker Schüler⁶⁵ Given the importance of language in the discussions on Jewish identity, ranging from ideas of purist German (Karl Kraus) over renewed forms of German (Martin Buber) to the use of Hebrew (Achad Ha'am), Lasker-Schüler's sound language is a subversive force, the acoustic quality of which is a form of theatricality that refuses the employment of her prose in identity formation. Like Özdamar's use of Brechtian theatre principles outside of their proper sphere and institution, the Artaudian mise en scène in Lasker-Schüler can be read as literature's resistance to being mobilized in the service of identity discourse, by whichever party. Literature as such does not add to the construction of community. Although it does not entirely dissolve the foundations of identity thought, what the mise en scène in Emine Özdamar and Else Lasker-Schüler seems to enact is what Jacques Derrida defined in his essay The Other Heading: ‘What is proper to a culture is not to be identical with itself. Not to not have an identity, but not to be able to identify itself, to be able to say “me” or “we”; to be able to take the form of a subject only in the non-identity to itself […].’Reference Derrida⁶⁶ Hence, the refusal of melancholia.