Once she had made the figures from Brecht's “Caucasian Chalk Circle” as puppets with a few bottles from the Paris hotel bar, wool and cotton, scraps of fabric and nylon stockings from the theater stock.

They came to the festival in Avignon with the production and were exhibited there in the museum.

Once, at a “Woyzeck” production in Bochum, she hung up her entire room with copies and tears from art books and comic books, from magazines and newspapers, with notes and a manifesto, only the bed was left free.

The director saw the collection of materials and asked his set designer to recreate the room in the theater foyer so that the audience could get an idea of ​​this way of working on a play.

Fridtjof Küchemann

Editor in the features section.

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When Emine Sevgi Özdamar lets an unnamed narrator tell of her work at the theater in her new book “A Space Limited by Shades”, the biographical connections to the author are so obvious that the reader can find himself without well-known names from her theater career such as Besson, Langhoff and Peymann thinks he can be found in memoirs of the writer and actress instead of in a novel. But when scratched frescoes begin to move in an abandoned church and instead of biblical figures, former powerful figures appear there, when crows make prophecies to the narrator and, towards the end of the book, inquire about their occurrence, when a reflection authorizes itself to tape her mouth shut to replace her To answer questions she would have preferred to remain silent about,when the narrator lets herself be led by a sea urchin across the sea from the neighboring Turkish island to Lesbos, to Europe and when she sees herself suddenly transferred to the Armenian cemetery of Istanbul in the cemeteries of the cities in which she is currently working, there are poetic freedoms So natural in Özdamar's writing that the reader involuntarily begins to wonder where exactly the line between what is remembered and what is invented runs in the many theater talks, but even more so in the moving scenes with the narrator's parents or in some dreamy chance acquaintances.The poetic freedoms in Özdamar's writing are so natural that the reader involuntarily begins to wonder where exactly the line between what is remembered and what is invented in the many theater conversations, but even more so in the moving scenes with the narrator's parents or in some dreamy chance acquaintances runs.The poetic freedoms in Özdamar's writing are so natural that the reader involuntarily begins to wonder where exactly the line between what is remembered and what is invented in the many theater conversations, but even more so in the moving scenes with the narrator's parents or in some dreamy chance acquaintances runs.

In the end, this question must remain completely unproductive for a novel, especially for someone who, like “a space limited by shadows”, lives from the use of materials that characterize the narrator and the author in theater work: from the link between what is found and what is conceived , free variation and combination in recourse and time leaps over decades of the narrated.

If only the sensual connection is not lost: Once your theater teacher comes from Istanbul to West Berlin for a play about “guest workers”.

Texts, articles and studies pile up over the course of weeks, and the material in that room 18 of the theater grows into the threatening and unmanageable.

Years later, the narrator and the author for her first play "Karagöz in Alamania" will have found the language and form for it elsewhere.

For a Turkish woman there is only one existence in Germany, that of the cleaning lady, the young actress's crows had prophesied before her departure.

And she actually does the cleaning in a couple of productions on the open stage.

A personal reduction?

An artistic decision, taken further, which in the book leads to an illuminating reflection on the disdain for such a role.

"Where do you live, Madame?"

The view that Özdamar shares on being a stranger and being made stranger, on loss of language and language empowerment, is one of the book's great gifts to its readers.

Istanbul and the island, Berlin, Paris and Bochum are his important stations, theater productions structure friendships and loves, a fascinating freedom and openness in the encounters permeate it.

“From now on you are the porter of the dead”, it says on the first pages of the novel, and even if the narrator counts among the horrors of fleeing and the stranger that one has to leave one's dead behind in the cemeteries of the homeland, the dead are Always present in this lively book: The genocide of the Armenians in 1915 and the suffering of the forced "exchange of peoples" between Greek Turks and Turkish Greeks in 1923 are major points of reference in her narrative. The mother collects newspaper articles with news about political murders in Turkey in the 1980s until a shoebox overflows. In cemeteries, the narrator communicates with Piaf or Brecht. The Paris terrorist attacks in 2015 are affected as well as those who drowned during the flight across the Mediterranean Sea.

“Once you have left your own country,” it says at one point, “you will no longer arrive in a new country.

Then only some special people will become your country. ”So the narrator has herself asked again and again:“ Where do you live, Madame? ”In Besson, in Deneuve's hair, in the shining eyes of Brasch and Bondy.

Once she replies that she lives in love or in fear, sometimes in a Parisian coffee cup or in a telephone book.

Once she said: “I live in the shadows that fill themselves with life.” This is how the author fills her book: Emine Sevgi Özdamar brings shadows and shadows to life.

And the space that they delimit, that they illuminate like a stage.

Emine Sevgi Özdamar: “A space limited by shadow”

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Novel.

Suhrkamp Verlag, Berlin 2021. 763 pp., Hardcover, € 28.