Interlacing archives: History and Memory in Emine Sevgi Özdamar’s Die Brücke vom Goldenen Horn MErT BaHaDIr rEi̇SOğlu new York university «Studies of immigrant cultures,» leslie adelson claims in 2002, «often tend to stress an obsessive longing for the lived pasts and familiar locales left behind» («Back to the Future» 103). By shifting the focus of Turkish-German literature from the figure of the isolated guest worker to reconfigurations of cultural memory through the medium of literature, adelson recommends investigating the «Turkish lines of thought» that «engage more pointedly with a highly mediated German past en route to a future that Germans and the Turks among them will most certainly share» (103). a further challenge, already suggested by adelson when she calls for «a scalar understanding of interactive contexts,» lies in reincorporating the Turkish archive, the traces of the Turkish past that have reached us via publications and audiovisual materials, into our studies without falling into the trap of situating these works between two «essentially different» cultures (The Turkish Turn 11). a comparative methodology that studies both German and Turkish archives becomes especially pertinent in the case of a novel like Emine Sevgi Özdamar’s Die Brücke vom Goldenen Horn (1998), the second part of her semi-autobiographical trilogy, since the political histories of both countries play an important role. While the novel’s historical setting (Berlin and Istanbul of the 1960s) points towards the internationalist aspirations of the student movement, the interaction between German and Turkish archives is hardly visible at the level of the plot. The interaction lies in the way the novel brings together the leftist literary cultures of both countries and in the similarity of problems posed by German critics like Michael Schneider and Hans-Christian Buch, who assess the successes and failures of new Subjectivity in depicting the German student movement in the aftermath of 1968, and Turkish literary critics such as Murat Belge, who, in the 1970s, wrote about the novels that depict the Turkish student protests. reading Özdamar’s novel through the lens of these debates shows us that her novel addresses these problems both in content and in form in such a way that the two debates enter into contact and give rise to solutions unforeseen by their contributors. as a result of this contact, both archives are changed in unpredictable ways. The first CG_44_4_s377-466_AK3.indd 422 11.11.14 17: 50 Interlacing Archives 423 issue concerns the relationship between authorial subjectivity and history. The German expressionism debate of the 1930s, particularly the lukácsian requirement of transcending one’s relationship to the environment in order to depict historical events realistically with a grasp of the totality of social and political relations, forms the conceptual background of both Turkish and German debates about the successes and failures of the literature about the student movements of the 1960s. This common conceptual heritage shows that national archives cannot be conceived of as essentially separate entities. Özdamar expands the horizon of the Turkish debate by utilizing documentary modes of literature that were neglected by Turkish critics of the time. The second common problem posed by the aforementioned Turkish and German critics is literature’s relation to mourning. While mourning for the losses of the student movement is interpreted by Michael Schneider as a way of highlighting subjectivity’s role in literature, for Murat Belge and his followers it is expressed through communal elegy, a genre that violates the lukácsian dialectic between subjectivity and objectivity. Mourning also concerns the narratability of history, since past traumas can resist literary expression by requiring either total silence or factual testimony. Özdamar reconfigures this communal aspect of mourning and thereby makes the Turkish archive more visible by reconnecting it to the German one in new and inventive ways that reveal the heterogeneous and ever-changing nature of both archives. analyzing the similarities and differences between the two aforementioned debates allows us to see their relevance for reassessing Özdamar’s novel and to understand how her thematic and formal concerns can be seen as closely related to the Turkish and German archives. While lukács’s concept of totality is no longer a criterion to evaluate literature’s relationship to history today, transcending one’s immediate surroundings to achieve critical distance vis-à-vis historical events is still important in the context of Turkish-German literature. Here distanciation no longer signifies an epistemological exercise in which the subject grasps the totality of social relations. It is rather interpreted materialistically as the result of mobility. Detaching oneself from one’s environment means physical and mental displacement. andreas Huyssen’s concept of «diasporic memory» is such an example. Writing about the differences between «national» memory and «diasporic» memory, Huyssen argues that the latter differs from the former in that it does not «[present] itself as natural, authentic, coherent» or «homogeneous» (152). For him, it is rather «cut off, hybrid, displaced, split» (152). It is precisely this «displacement» that seems to single out Özdamar’s representation of Germany in 1968 from others according to several scholarly analyses. When anıl Kaputanoğlu ascribes «ein ‹neues Sehen›» to the narrator’s CG_44_4_s377-466_AK3.indd 423 11.11.14 17: 50 424 Mert Bahadir Reisoğlu perception of Berlin stemming from her «ständiges unterwegssein» (which is also interpreted as «politische Subjektwerdung»), dislocation is seen not only as the condition of a fresh outlook, but also the prerequisite of political responsibility (268, 271). In addition to «[marking] an emergent individuality,» this departure to Germany even means, in Elizabeth Boa’s analysis, «the first step towards acquisition of the literary medium through which the narrator will recuperate lost time» (533). B. Venkat Mani also follows the same line of reasoning when he utilizes Huyssen’s terms and claims that the narrator of the novel displays «a studied distance and detachment» (Cosmopolitical Claims 117). For him, this also means that the narrator «remains anchored in multiple national frameworks without a complete identification with and investment in any one of them» (117). a similar interpretation is also provided by Monika Shafi who states that the narrator of Özdamar’s novel is «a sympathetic but unaffected observer of the German scene» (214) who has a «far more complex and cosmopolitan perspective on the events than the German students» (215). In all these analyses, mobility gives rise to a richer understanding of the German past and enables the narrator to experience the real internationalism of the student protests. as such, distanciation is still important for contemporary readings of Özdamar’s novel due to the role of mobility. For some critics, alongside the diasporic mobility of the author, the temporal distance that separates Özdamar from 1968 has important implications for literary renditions of this time period. Ingo Cornils claims that while the novels written in the 1970s - notable examples being Peter Schneider’s Lenz (1973), Katrin Struck’s Klassenliebe (1973) and uwe Timm’s Heisser Sommer (1974) - treat the protests with «nostalgia or conceit,» such affective attachment is replaced by attempts at «remembering and re-evaluation, perhaps even historicisation» in more recent works («long Memories» 91). Susanne rinner also subscribes to the same periodization when she claims that the novels that came out in the 1970s were «seemingly unmediated and therefore authentic insights into the experiences of the students» while those that appeared after 1989 led the public to a self-critical remembering through a «more reflective approach» (34). The critic’s sympathies lie with the latter: the novels written after 1989 can construct «a cultural memory» (16) and «represent a plurality of memories» that might contradict each other much more effectively (17). Distanciation is not only based on spatial but also on temporal coordinates. In addition to giving the narrator a unique international perspective, mobility can also be expected to reveal the connections between German and Turkish movements. The narrator’s relationships with German, Greek and Spanish communists throughout the novel attest to the transnational charac- CG_44_4_s377-466_AK3.indd 424 11.11.14 17: 50 Interlacing Archives 425 ter of the movement and the vibrant political culture of Berlin. Yet, the transnational connections of the protests all intersect in the figure of the narrator who establishes contacts with people from different countries. When it comes to the dialogue between the movements in Germany and Turkey without the mediation of a central character, it is more difficult to talk about a transnational network. This becomes clear when an international meeting of students is organized at Istanbul university in Turkey. The festival of leftist students from Europe and Turkey is interrupted by the icon of the Turkish student movement, Deniz Gezmiş, who shouts: «In Mittelost gibt es Krieg, in Vietnam gibt es Krieg, aber ihr tanzt hier zu amerikanischer Musik. Tod dem amerikanischen Imperialismus, es lebe der revolutionäre Kampf der Völker der Welt» (Özdamar 248). The dialogue, initiated by a shared preference for music, comes to an abrupt end. This episode is followed by a conversation among the narrator’s friends and her father about the difference between Germans and Turks according to whether they feel better on the sea or in the forest (248). What starts as the collective meeting of leftists from several countries ends in the declaration of an essential difference between Turks and Germans. That Deniz’s name means «sea» in Turkish only seems to highlight essential differences between the two movements. It conveys the idea that the gravity of the political situation in Turkey does not tolerate enjoyment of oneself. But it is possible to interpret this dialogue in a different way. The images of the sea and the forest do not highlight essential differences between Turks and Germans. The markers of supposedly essential identities do not refer to people, but to different environments with the sea and the forest standing for mobility and stability respectively. Detachment and mobility as the preconditions of establishing transnational relations become the traits of not only the Turkish guest workers in Germany that the reader encounters in the first part of the novel, but also of the Turkish leftists in Turkey. as such, one should look beyond the narrator’s mobility on the surface for a communication that is not immediately visible in the novel. If a more subterranean communication between the two movements exists beyond the figure of the narrator, one possible source is the history of the student movements in both countries. However, the Turkish and German archives do not seem to intersect here. Instead, what one finds at first is an ineliminable gap that seems to have been opened by the fictional figure of Deniz Gezmiş in the novel. While Susanne rinner claims that «the political situation in Turkey is significantly different» due to the «brutal regime» (135), Monika Shafi avers that the reader «could be tempted to argue that [the narrator’s] portrayal of the Turkish student movement shows the more significant issues at stake» (216). Elizabeth Boa, who also argues that the situation is more seri- CG_44_4_s377-466_AK3.indd 425 11.11.14 17: 50 426 Mert Bahadir Reisoğlu ous in Turkey, goes further by suggesting that even fiction itself runs short of testifying to the gravity of the situation in Turkey: The veneer of fiction is very thin in this last chapter which exemplifies the need to resist theories which would undo distinctions between history and invention. (Tortured bodies are not a discursive construct; whether they were tortured is not a matter of competing fictions, but is either true or false, though why may be a matter of political debate). (537-38) The difference, at this point, no longer concerns the severity of the political situations in the two countries. It is rather the difference between reality and fiction. Once representing violence and trauma becomes a problem, the playfulness of both the movement and the fiction gives way to either silence or the bare facts of testimony. reconsidering Germany’s 1968 by comparing it to the movements in countries in which the situation is seen as more serious in its causes and consequences is certainly not unique to these critics. at issue here is not only 1968 itself, but also its aftermath, namely the German autumn of 1977. Cornils already reminds us that many literary works written after the 1980s establish a link between 1968 and 1977 («Joined» 152), and scholars like Gerd Koenen are of the opinion that the causes of the actions of raF and the red Brigades are very different since the West German republic was not in danger of an impending fascism at the time (28). Certain Turkish journalists and intellectuals writing in the 1970s are also of the same opinion, as in the case of Burhan Felek who speaks of the harmony between the capitalists and the workers in Germany in contrast to Turkey, where workers were very active in the protests (cf. Tek 218). needless to say, a comparison of the left in Turkey and Germany is beyond the scope of this paper. The differences between the two movements, however, have implications for the consideration of the Turkish archive’s role in Özdamar’s novel. Stopping at the history of violence that cannot be reworked through literature might give us a narrow view of the Turkish archive by limiting it to the scope of national history. Where «invention» fails, the turn away from fiction to testimony invites the reader to interpret the second part of the novel within the context of modern Turkey’s history. The partial and subjective testimony of the narrator, who owes her detachment from her immediate surroundings not to a higher and more objective standpoint but to constant mobility, is then juxtaposed to the objective and macro-historical picture of Turkey. Historiography here provides us the lukácsian totality of social relations to make sense of the novel’s relationship to the Turkish archive. Moreover, this archive is presumed to be unchanging and self-identical. But silence in the face of unrepresentable violence or partial and subjec- CG_44_4_s377-466_AK3.indd 426 11.11.14 17: 50 Interlacing Archives 427 tive reports of historical facts are not the only options for Özdamar. When B.- Venkat Mani interprets her novel «as an extension of a Brechtian play» and resorts to the traditional Turkish Meddah-plays in his analysis, a different way of considering Turkish and German archives beyond macro-history becomes visible («The Good Woman of Istanbul» 52). This approach focuses on genres, literary histories and histories of ideas. In short, not «the history» but micro-histories are of utmost importance. Micro-histories as various components of the national archives can also include threads that traverse multiple cultural and historical configurations. When rinner claims that transnationalism can be defined as the use of a shared language across borders as well as common cultural representations in theory, film, book and music, she points towards such a micro-history. Thematically, this cultural transnationalism is most apparent in Özdamar’s work in the emphasis on the role of movie houses, which play a certain role in bringing leftists both in Germany and in Turkey together to watch films mostly by European auteurs. as Bodo declares in the novel, «Filme sind die einzige gemeinsame Sprache dieser Welt» (153). Delving into this archive of cultural exchanges bypasses the silence of solemnity. Very much like the dialogue about the sea and the forest, the Turkish student movement’s relation to the European one turns out to be complex and heterogeneous. What appears to be homogeneous and self-sufficient inside the national archive, then, reveals itself to be always changing and mobile like the narrator of the novel. In this regard, it is fruitful to closely investigate literary debates. as debates, they already mark a plurality of different voices that disrupt the presupposed homogeneity of the national archive. The debates that I believe bridge the two cultural contexts are the discussions around «new Subjectivity» in Germany and the writings on the March 12 novels («12 Mart romanları») by Turkish literary critics. The «new Subjectivity» debates of the 1970s in Germany can be seen as the continuation of the debates around realism in the 1960s, when, with the rediscovery of Brecht against lukácsian realism, a new avant-garde questioned the possibilities of politically engaged literature (Briegleb and Bullivant 313). after the heyday of documentary literature’s «unmittelbarkeit,» which aimed to overcome the boundaries of literature and to have a direct effect on politics, the end of the student movement is marked by the reintroduction of the subject into narrative (Briegleb 24). referred to as «neue Sensibilität,» «Betroffenheit,» or «Innerlichkeit,» these works aim at displaying «[die unmittelbare], persönlich [erlebte] Wahrheit» (Schlösser 392). The works included in this category are diverse, but many of them - including the ones Cornils contrasts to Özdamar’s novel - exhibit the disillusionment of the student protesters after 1968. These authors’ «aversion CG_44_4_s377-466_AK3.indd 427 11.11.14 17: 50 428 Mert Bahadir Reisoğlu gegen das Begriffliche und politisch Verbindliche,» for example, is best displayed by Peter Schneider in his novel Lenz, in which the protagonist, who participates in a public reading of Mao’s ideas about the function of concepts, is distracted first by the physicality of the auditors and then by his own experiences and memories (Schlösser 392; P. Schneider 27-31). The debate on the «March 12 novels,» a term coined by Murat Belge in 1976, concerns the novels written after the military coup on 12 March 1971 against the leftists. zürcher claims that the number of arrests neared 5000 and that the military targeted and reportedly tortured many prominent leftists, including authors, academics and journalists (259). after the coup, the activists Deniz Gezmiş, Yusuf aslan and Hüseyin Inan were hanged. These executions are mentioned at the end of Özdamar’s novel. March 12 novels are the works that narrate the lives of the activists before and after the military intervention. Some of the notable works among many are Erdal Öz’s Yaralısın (You are Wounded, 1974), Sevgi Soysal’s Şafak (Dawn, 1975), Füruzan’s 47’liler (The Generation of ’47, 1974), Pınar Kür’s Yarın Yarın (Tomorrow Tomorrow, 1976) and adalet ağaoğlu’s Bir Düğün Gecesi (a Wedding night, 1979). 1 In addition to dealing with novels that were written during the same period, the literary debates in Germany and Turkey operate within the same conceptual framework, namely that of the expressionism debate of the 1930s among renowned theoreticians like lukács, Brecht and Bloch. It is in this exchange of ideas that we can detect movement once again: the Turkish literary public navigates towards Germany and gains mobility outside the confines of a «national culture» by reaching towards a past that is shared by both German and Turkish literary cultures alike. This mobility is certainly not confined to the Turkish archive. German literary culture reaches towards its past and discovers new possibilities too. One example is the fact that Brecht’s polemic against lukács, which provides important support for the documentary literature of the 1960s by pointing towards new models of realism that incorporate modernist techniques such as montage, was published for the first time in his Nachlass in 1966 (Schmitt 8). The polarity between subjectivity and objectivity of the work underlies the problems that occupy critics in both countries. In the periodization of novels through the category of distanciation and reflection looms large the figure of one literary critic, namely lukács, who prescribes a necessary detachment from sense experience for the novelist. already in 1966, Klaus Völker reintroduces the main problematic of the expressionism debate between lukács and Brecht to the readers of Kursbuch and highlights its relevance for his time. In 1975, Hans Christoph Buch declares in his article on the new Subjectivity that «es geht, wieder einmal, um den realismus» (14). lukács’s imprint CG_44_4_s377-466_AK3.indd 428 11.11.14 17: 50 Interlacing Archives 429 bridges not only the famous expressionism debate of the 1930s, debates on new Subjectivity in the 1970s, and literary renditions of 1968 in the 2000s, but also the debates in Turkey. This lukácsian critical perspective can be seen after the 1970s too. For example, Ingeborg Gerlach refers to lukács’s reflections on the literature of disillusionment after the failed revolution of 1848 to explain «den neuen Kult der Subjektivität» in what she terms «abschiedsliteratur» (9). The «cluelessness of the narrator,» «[die] unmittelbarkeit» of Karin Struck in the expression of her feelings, and «[die] gesellschaftliche atomisierung der Individuen» reflected in the new Subjectivity literature seem to repeat lukács’s condemnation of literary modernism (Gerlach 26). unmediated subjectivity that has severed all ties to an objective reality is a concern for Turkish critics as well. In 1976, Murat Belge initiates the discussion by accusing the aforementioned Turkish authors of not being able to comprehend their characters in their political lives - a requirement for lukácsian realism - but of focusing too much on their victimhood to the seemingly irrational wrath of the State («12 Mart» 123-29). adherence to lukácsian principles becomes more explicit in the 1990s, when Ömer Türkeş asserts that in these novels reality is replaced with emotions and that the real issues the workers in the 1960s were concerned about are ignored in favor of the patriotic and altruistic virtues of the protagonists (80-81). Medet Turan complains further that causality in the narrative is treated lightly (62). The heritage of lukácsian criticism, in which the dichotomy between subjectivity and objective reality plays a crucial role for the literary work, influences German literary critics who praise new Subjectivity too. Marcel reich-ranicki famously celebrates the return to storytelling in the 1970s with the belief that literature should focus on «[den] leidenden Menschen» who struggles against political institutions. He does not refrain from offering a historical explanation in a surprisingly lukácsian vein: Wahrscheinlich verbirgt sich hinter der Tendenz zum autobiographischen unter anderem auch die resignation der Schreibenden, nämlich die Einsicht in ihre nur beschränkten Möglichkeiten, die Gegenwart zu begreifen. […] Je dunkler, je unverständlicher die Welt, in der wir leben, desto mehr sieht man sich auf das nächstliegende verwiesen, auf einen eng umgrenzten Bezirk, womöglich auf das heimatliche Dorf. und je schwieriger, je komplizierter die Fragen, die uns bedrängen, desto häufiger zeigen die Schriftsteller die Welt am Beispiel einer einzigen Person - der eigenen. (27) What lukács condemns as «degenerate,» reich-ranicki embraces as the true calling of literature. a self-critical distance of the left towards itself is also already visible in some writings well before 1989, when critics such as Hazel E. Hazel, Michael Buselmeier, Volker Hage, Hermann Piwitt and Michael CG_44_4_s377-466_AK3.indd 429 11.11.14 17: 50 430 Mert Bahadir Reisoğlu Schneider point out the necessity of addressing emotions in a literary work not only for the sake of aesthetics but also for the political agenda of a leftist culture. Schneider writes: Eine Bewegung, die unfähig ist, um ihre Opfer zu trauern, hat natürlich auch kein Talent zur Freude. Sie wird sich auch an ihren Erfolgen nicht begeistern können und sich so den Menschen kaum vernehmbar machen. […] Was der Intellektuellen- Bewegung vielmehr fehlte (bzw. schon früh wieder abgehanden gekommen ist), war eine radikale, mit politischem Inhalt gefüllte Bedürfnis- und Gefühlssprache. (178) at issue is then not only a return to aesthetics, but a reconsideration of the practices in the student movement itself. Inability to mourn the losses and the repression of feelings inevitably result in the return of the repressed, Schneider claims, which is most visible in the turn against Marxism itself, as well as in the fascination with a «Sprachlosigkeit» that he detects in certain novels. When subjectivity is not given its due, it is avenged at the expense of the movement’s conceptual heritage. It is in this framework that scholars like Sabine von Dirke can celebrate Struck’s Klassenliebe or Peter Schneider’s Lenz as a return to or a «rediscovery of the antiauthoritarian positions that dominated the beginnings of the student movement» (79). This is where the transnational exchange of concepts between Germany and Turkey comes to an end, for in the discussion of the March 12 novels, we do not see such an alternative. The lack of a positive approach in the Turkish context is a missed opportunity for the discussion of the representability of torture. This option signals a way to break the silence of solemnity that surrounds violence. One possible explanation for this difference is that, contrary to the case in Germany, literature has never been announced dead à la Enzensberger in Turkey, and documentary literature has never been considered a viable option for class struggle. The renowned Turkish literary critic Berna Moran even argues that the March 12 novels are too sociological, and hence not literary enough (17). What he has in mind is, however, not the genres that emphasize the effect of the work on the audience. rather, for Moran and others, the problem is the incongruity between the richness of personal experiences narrated by the authors and the poverty of the political experiences that are not represented truthfully by the authors partly due to their own ignorance of the activists’ lives. Once schematically constructed memories are imputed to the characters, realism, the critics believe, is tainted by falsity. One such example is Pınar Kür’s first novel Yarın Yarın. It tells the lives of several characters from different walks of life, but the story centers on the love between Selim, a young revolutionary who comes back to Turkey after having studied in Paris like the author herself (who lived in Paris and new York), and CG_44_4_s377-466_AK3.indd 430 11.11.14 17: 50 Interlacing Archives 431 Şeyda, the wife of a wealthy industrialist. at one point in the novel Selim tells his friends in Turkey about his experiences of May 68 during his stay in Paris, which is a rare instance of transnational exchange in the March 12 novels. His insistence on the fact that he has witnessed police brutality with his very own eyes adds credibility to his account, while his resentment that he could not tell his friends about his own personal journey from being a petit-bourgeois to a revolutionary on the streets of Paris reveals the tension between the personal and the collective. For the Turkish critics, the problem is the superficiality in the representation of the latter. an author who has not participated in the protests herself does not have the knowledge of the totality. Where there is an assertion that one has witnessed the events himself, false authenticity casts its shadow on the ingenuity of descriptions of personal lives as well. This is especially true for Selim’s character, for the role he plays at the end of the novel as one of the leaders of a political group that robs a bank in Turkey places him too much at the center of political history, thereby making a perfect representation nearly impossible. We could compare this to Özdamar, who, surprisingly, always situates the narrator as a bystander vis-à-vis historical events. The narrator learns about the protests, the clashes with the police, Ohnesorg’s death, and the hanging of Deniz Gezmiş and his friends either through friends or through newspapers. One exception is the well known protests against the 6 th flotilla in Turkey, which the narrator witnesses not as a participant, but as an observer traveling on the ship, the very symbol of mobility that we have seen earlier. The interplay between mediation and immediacy in this choice of positioning is interesting. While the accounts given are mediated through reports, they do not pose the problem of false attribution. Decentering the narrator in the face of history, however, bestows onto the narrative (particularly the parts concerning the events in Turkey) a facet that cannot be found in the Turkish novels depicting the same period: history is treated not through subjective experiences, but through the documentary. What is missing in the Turkish debate is introduced in a narrative, not as a threat to storytelling, but as a complement to the personal experiences of the author. This solution is certainly not what lukács would have envisioned. a total disjunction of the personal from the social would result for lukács in the reduction of reality to sense perceptions and to montage. But it is the very «splitting» and hybridity of forms and the dislocation of history and personal life that enable the author to do justice to both. Özdamar offers a Brechtian solution to a problem posed by Turkish critics by reevaluating it in the context of the German debate. The use of the documentary form, however, is not enough to do justice to personal experiences. While their lukácsian perspective forecloses the pos- CG_44_4_s377-466_AK3.indd 431 11.11.14 17: 50 432 Mert Bahadir Reisoğlu sibility of considering the work as performative rather than representative, Turkish critics still discuss how tales of torture and violence can be incorporated into literature. Murat Belge argues that the March 12 novels derive their emotional power from their elegiac quality («Bir Edebiyat» 150). But the lukácsian emphasis on distinguishable intellectual physiognomies for the characters in a narrative forces him to criticize the communal nature of elegy and mourning. as a traditional genre, elegy, Belge claims, falls short of responding to the problems after the student protests, since it cannot provide a ground for self-criticism. I would argue, however, that far from providing a communal mourning for the losses, the March 12 novels offer highly individualistic and isolated views of the predicament of student activists. Both the authors and the critics share the same subject-oriented outlook on the role of fiction. The two authors who had actual experiences, Sevgi Soysal and Erdal Öz, exemplify this trend well. Soysal, who is also the author of the novels Yürümek (To Walk, 1970) and Yenişehir’de Bir Öğle Vakti (High noon in Yenişehir, 1974), was arrested and spent more than two months in prison for her political involvement. Similarly, Öz was arrested after the coup d’état. Both authors dedicate their oeuvres to the sufferings and disappointments of the 68-generation; their personal experiences give credibility to the subject matter of their novels. While Soysal’s novel Şafak describes the interrogation of Oya, a revolutionary activist who has recently been released from prison but is taken into custody under suspicion of her continuing her secret operations, Öz’s Yaralısın tells the story of nuri, who is imprisoned after having been tortured during his interrogation. The psychological state of the protagonists mostly revolves around feelings of guilt, suspicion of others, disillusionment, and exhaustion. as in the literature of the new Subjectivity mentioned above, the inability to communicate with common people gives rise to self-accusations due to one’s middle class aspirations. Here, absolute detachment does not stem from mobility, but its opposite, since the characters are confined to prison. Communication is not entirely absent, but is hampered by obstacles. In the narratives of Sevgi Soysal and Erdal Öz, characters constantly try to understand what the other is thinking or feeling, and the prison functions as a gateway to knowing the stories of common people, whom the narrators do not encounter in their daily lives. The prison is also a place for remembering and for the most part, the novels are comprised of these stories of the past. In Özdamar, however, subjectivity is not closed in on itself. Communication with other people does not become an existential problem. This is best exemplified in one passage in which Özdamar shortly mentions the life stories of several inhabitants of the «Wonaymsalon» without dwelling on any detail (30-31). In contrast, life stories of the inmates comprise most of CG_44_4_s377-466_AK3.indd 432 11.11.14 17: 50 Interlacing Archives 433 Yaralısın and Şafak. Instead of intersubjectivity, what matters in Özdamar’s narrative is the communal. She describes the experience of the Turkish workers as follows: «Jedes ‹Ich› nähte sich an das nächste ‹Ich› und machte ein ‹Wir›» (46). as Kader Konuk reminds us, the communal in Özdamar is established through mimicry, in which there is no origin, but only «Varianten» (96). The internal divisions of «Kinder,» «zucker,» «Esel» and «Huren» in the dormitory and their subsequent intermingling and elimination testify to the continuous procedures of community formation (Özdamar 43). The narrator is only one of the many characters whose daily lives alternate between detachments and reattachments in which an essential core of subjectivity is not sought. It is important to note that this category of the communal is also effective in the use of the hen metaphor, which the narrator first hears on the radio and then uses to describe the transnational experience of the communists in Berlin (159). By referring to Turkish, Greek and German communists as «Hühner,» Özdamar establishes transnational connections not through personal experiences and sufferings, through a face-to-face dialogue about the past, or through lukácsian representation of the historical context of events in their totality, but through words. She thereby creates a commune out of people from various nationalities and carries one national struggle to the other with the help of a metaphor. Mimicry in the March 12-novels, on the other hand, is generally denigrated for its use of lies: in Kür’s novel, for example, aysel, the woman Seyla’s husband has an affair with, derives her strength from her ability to adjust herself to each and every situation. Yet, in her inner monologues, she accuses herself of inauthenticity, in a vein very much like that of the characters of Yaralısın and Şafak. Being an autonomous subject signifies detachment for Kür. But this detachment from immediate surroundings, unlike that of the diasporic identity, does not go through reattachments and enter into new relations; it is immobile. Due to this isolated subjectivity and its drive to go outside, I would argue that the March 12 novels cannot be read as eulogies, in which one mourns for the loss of another, but rather as stories of willful de-individualization, in which the protagonist strips himself or herself of his or her class through the radical passivity of being tortured in order to become one among the many, most notably symbolized by the protagonist of Yaralısın, who at the end names himself «nuri» like everyone else in the prison. In other words, the limiting subjectivity of the narrator is overcome only through the dissolution of the self by this horrid exposure to violence. To use the well-known distinction of Freud, the narrators’ self-accusations, feelings of guilt and drive towards annihilating their own identity suggest a melancholic attitude rather than one of mourning (244). In Özdamar, on the other hand, this dissolution CG_44_4_s377-466_AK3.indd 433 11.11.14 17: 50 434 Mert Bahadir Reisoğlu is not an issue. While the characters in Kür, Soysal and Öz do not know the stories, feelings and thoughts of other characters, but claim to know where they stand in history, for Özdamar’s narrator, communal experience is no mystery. But history, which is represented as a heap of reports coming from all over the world, is untotalizable and hence mysterious. as such, neither expressions of personal feelings, nor a realistic analysis of characters can sufficiently express the horror in the face of history itself. The lukácsian conceptual framework of subjectivity versus objective reality that is so important for both debates, then, cannot resolve the problem of reworking past traumas, since it relies on representation. Only absolute detachment seems to be the way out. reversing azade Seyhan’s argument that «archaic, forgotten, and modern signifying practices, such as homilies, litanies, ancient curses and politicians’ promises» serve as the «linguistic remembrance» of the home country (144), Yasemin Yıldız suggests that these practices «can also function to liberate from and challenge the mother tongue» (21). as opposed to a melancholic de-individualization, mourning can be interpreted as a liberating practice. It is only with a collective eulogy through the voices of mothers that Özdamar can express her grief for the losses of the student movement (326). When Benno Ohnesorg dies, he turns back into a human being from being a hen, and when Deniz Gezmiş dies, «Der Mensch geht» (326). What connects the two parts of the novel is this double loss: Once someone is lost, the narrator leaves one country to go to the other. Transnationalism through mourning for the losses mobilizes the narrator not only through the metaphor, but also through its elimination in becoming too real. as such, this reality does not signify silence or a halt. The passage from figures of speech to reality is a detachment as well, after which the author reattaches to new metaphors and to new «inventions,» just as the narrator departs from one place to go to the next. Thus, mourning goes beyond representation and opens up to performance. When Michael Schneider highlights the necessity of mourning for the left, the way in which this can be done in literature remains a question mark, since what is to be mourned is a collective loss, while the protagonists they have in mind are «subjects.» Just as Özdamar transforms the problem of history’s representation raised by Belge by reconsidering it within the context of the German debate, Özdamar carries the problem of mourning raised by German critics in reverse direction to give it a new meaning in the Turkish context of communal eulogy. The process of mourning is freed from the representational restraints of subjective and personal storytelling by being reinterpreted as a performance, an operation that the German critics consider a remnant of 1968’s experimentalism. But this connection is established only through CG_44_4_s377-466_AK3.indd 434 11.11.14 17: 50 Interlacing Archives 435 the concept of eulogy that is suggested and underestimated by the Turkish literary culture. The juxtaposition of the two national archives, then, can be seen like the two parts of Özdamar’s novel. By traversing them in both directions, Özdamar’s novel participates in their communication, a communication which preceded her. Notes 1 none of the Turkish novels and articles mentioned in this article are translated into English. The translations of their titles here and in the rest of the article are mine. Works Cited adelson, leslie a. «Back to the Future: Turkish remembrances of the GDr and Other Phantom Pasts.» The Cultural After-Life of East Germany: New Transnational Perspectives. Ed. leslie a. adelson. Washington. D.C.: american Institute for Contemporary German Studies, 2002. 93-110. -. The Turkish Turn in Contemporary German Literature. new York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005. ağaoğlu, adalet. Bir Düğün Gecesi. i̇stanbul: Türkiye i̇ş Bankası Kültür Yayınları, 2006. 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