Das Leben ist eine Karawanserai

Das Leben ist eine Karawanserei hat zwei Türen aus einer kam ich rein aus der anderen ging ich rausLife is a Caravanserai Has Two Doors I Came in One I Went Out the Other (1992)

This autobiographical novel begins when the narrator is still a foetus in her mother’s womb, boarding a train from Istanbul to Malatya in Eastern Anatolia, where the narrator is to be born. The novel describes the narrator’s childhood and teenage years. The novel is set in various cities in Turkey including Malatya, Yenişehir, Bursa, Ankara and Istanbul: the narrator’s family is continually on the move because of the father’s financial difficulties.

Das Leben ist eine Karawanserei explores the regional tensions and linguistic differences which exist within Turkey, in particular between the more Westernised, cosmopolitan Istanbul and the rural Eastern province of Anatolia. When the narrator moves to Istanbul and goes to school there, she finds it difficult to adapt to her new surroundings, which are very different in terms of culture and dialect; this has been interpreted as a form of ‘inner migration’ (see below, Frauke Matthes, p. 51).

The novel is extremely alert to linguistic diversity and it plays with the musical and onomatopoeic qualities of language. For example, the sound of men turning their rosary beads is rendered as ‘çikçikçik’ (p. 85); at another point, the syllable ‘çit çit çit’ is repeated for two whole paragraphs in order to convey the sound of the narrator’s brothers munching sunflower seeds (pp. 107-08). The narrative is interspersed with songs and poems which are presented in Turkish and in German translation.

At the end of the novel, the nineteen year old narrator leaves Istanbul and gets on a train bound for Berlin. The date is 1965.

For an analysis of the function of metaphor in this novel, see below, Stephanie Bird, pp. 209-16.

German Edition

Page references above in brackets refer to the German edition of Das Leben ist eine Karawanserai [1992] (Cologne: Kiepenheuer & Witsch, 1994)

English Translation

Life is a Caravanserai Has Two Doors I Came in One I Went Out the Other, trans. by Luise von Flotow (London: Middlesex University Press, 2000)

Further Reading

Stephanie Bird, Women Writers and National Identity: Bachmann, Duden, Özdamar (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), Chapter 7 on Das Leben ist eine Karawanserai

Elizabeth Boa, ‘Özdamar's Autobiographical Fictions: Trans-National Identity and Literary Form’, German Life and Letters 59:4 (2006), 526-39

Soheila Ghaussy, ‘“Das Vaterland verlassen”: Nomadic Language and “Feminine Writing” in Emine Sevgi Özdamar’s Das Leben ist eine Karawanserai’, The German Quarterly 72:1 (1999), 1-16

David Jennings Gramling, Where Here Begins: Monolingualism and the Spatial Imagination (PhD thesis, University of California, Berkeley, 2008), Chapter 3, pp. 144-99

Margaret Littler, ‘Özdamar, Das Leben ist eine Karawanserai’, in Landmarks in the German Novel (2), ed. by Peter Hutchinson and Michael Minden (Bern and Oxford: Peter Lang, 2010), pp. 91-110

Nora Maguire, ‘Reading and Writing the Child’s Voice in Emine Sevgi Özdamar’s Das Leben ist eine Karawanserei hat zwei Türen aus einer kam ich rein aus der anderen ging ich raus (1992)’, Forum for Modern Language Studies 49:2 (2013), 213-20

Frauke Matthes, Writing and Muslim Identity: Representations of Islam in German and English Transcultural Literature, 1990-2006, igrs books vol. 6 (London: Institute of Germanic and Romance Studies, 2011), Chapter 1, pp. 45-78

Agnes C. Mueller, ‘Female Stories of Migration in Emine Sevgi Özdamar’s “Das Leben ist eine Karawanserei” and in Toni Morrison’s “Beloved”’, Colloquia Germanica 36:3/4 (2003), 303-14

Kate Roy, ‘“Unsere Schatten [mischten sich] mit Totenschatten, Ameisen kamen, setzten sich auf unsere Beine”: Narrative and Narrator as a Body without Organs in Emine Sevgi Özdamar’s Das Leben ist eine Karawanserei’, Oxford German Studies 45:3 (2016), 275-89

Azade Seyhan, ‘Lost in Translation: Re-Membering the Mother Tongue in Emine Sevgi Özdamar’s Das Leben ist eine Karawanserai’, German Quarterly 69:4 (1996), 414-26

Azade Seyhan, Writing Outside the Nation (Princeton and London: Princeton University Press, 2001), Chapter 5 on Özdamar, pp. 125-50