Seltsame Sterne starren zur Erde

Seltsame Sterne starren zur Erde. Wedding – Pankow 1976/77 (2003)

Strange Stars Stare to Earth. Wedding – Pankow 1976/77

This is the third volume of Özdamar’s autobiography, covering the years 1976 and 1977.

Unlike the other three volumes, which are titled as 'novels', this text is more a straightforward autobiography. Unlike her other texts, it contains diary extracts and the narrator is named explicitly as 'Emine'.

The title is taken from a poem, ‘Liebessterne’; ‘Stars of Love’, by the German-Jewish poet Else Lasker-Schüler. Other poets cited in this novel are Cavafy, Heine and Brecht. This text has not yet been translated into English.

The scene shifts mainly between East and West Berlin. There are also early scenes in Istanbul, and Istanbul remains a continual presence in the novel, as the narrator’s Berlin experiences are often juxtaposed with her memories of Turkey. Later on, she also visits Copenhagen and Paris.

In West Berlin the narrator lives in a Wohngemeinschaft (a communal shared apartment) with a group of West German students. The students experiment with sex, drugs and alternative philosophies. One character comments: ‘Westberlin ist eine Jugendherberge’ (‘West Berlin is a youth hostel’, p. 52). Later, the narrator learns that the apartment was used as a meeting place by members of the Red Army Faction (p. 68).

Soon the narrator begins commuting to the Volksbühne (People’s Theatre) in East Berlin. Benno Besson, the director of the Volksbühne, gives her permission to study the rehearsal notes for his production of Brecht’s Der gute Mensch von Sezuan; The Good Person of Szechwan (1970/1971/1975). She translates these notes into Turkish for her friends back in Istanbul. Later, she participates in the Volksbühne productions of Heiner Müller’s Die Bauern; The Peasants (1976); Goethe’s Der Bürgergeneral; The Citizen General (1977) and Shakespeare’s Hamlet (1977). Özdamar’s own sketches and notes for these productions are reproduced alongside the text, enhancing its documentary quality.

The narrator has love affairs with Peter, a West German, and Graham, an English (Jewish) set designer. She becomes friends with the actress Gabriele (Gabi) Gysi (daughter of Klaus Gysi, sister of Gregor Gysi), who gives her advice about relationships and about the politics of the GDR. She encounters the dramatist Heiner Müller, the directors Fritz Marquardt and Matthias Langhoff, and the dissident writer Rudolf Bahro and his wife Gundula. Later, the narrator falls in love with an American academic called Steve who teaches at the University of Copenhagen. In August 1977 the narrator learns that her grandmother has died in Istanbul aged 96 (pp. 226-28). Soon afterwards, the ‘German autumn’ of 1977 happens. On 18 October 1977 the RAF leaders Baader, Ensslin and Raspe were found dead in their cells in Stammheim prison. The narrator’s friend Gabi refuses to believe that the RAF leaders committed suicide (p. 235). Gabi’s new boyfriend Sebastian confesses to her that he is a Stasi spy (p. 236). The narrator decides to write a dissertation on the people’s theatre movement from the 1920s to the present day.

At the end we finally learn the narrator’s name: ‘Emine’ (p. 240). She follows Besson to Paris to assist him with his production of Brecht’s Der kaukasische Kreidekreis; The Caucasian Chalk Circle. She uses twenty wine bottles to make figurines of the different characters in the play.

Further Reading in English

Gizem Arslan, ‘Animated Exchange: Translational Strategies in Emine Sevgi Özdamar’s Strange Stars Stare to Earth’, The Global South 7:2 (2014), 191-209

Laura Bradley, ‘Recovering the Past and Capturing the Present: Özdamar’s Seltsame Sterne starren zur Erde’, in New German Literature: Life-Writing and Dialogue with the Arts, ed. by Julian Preece, Frank Finlay and Ruth J. Owen (eds.), Leeds-Swansea Colloquia on Contemporary German Literature (Oxford et. al.: Peter Lang, 2007), pp. 283-95

Claudia Breger, An Aesthetics of Narrative Performance: Transnational Theatre, Literature, and Film in Contemporary Germany (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2012), pp. 112-23

Ela Gezen, ‘Staging Berlin: Emine Sevgi Özdamar’s Seltsame Sterne starren zur Erde’, German Studies Review 38:1 (2015), 83-96

Margaret Littler, ‘Cultural Memory and Identity Formation’, in Contemporary German Fiction: Writing in the Berlin Republic, ed. by Stuart Taberner (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), pp. 177-95

B. Venkat Mani, Cosmopolitical Claims: Turkish-German Literatures from Nadolny to Pamuk (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2007), Chapter 2 on Seltsame Sterne starren zur Erde, pp. 87-117

Moray McGowan, ‘“Sie kucken beide an Milch Topf”: Goethe’s Bürgergeneral in Double Refraction’, in Language – Text – Bildung: Essays in Honour of Beate Dreike, ed. by Andreas Stuhlmann and Patrick Studer with Gert Hoffmann (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 2005), pp. 79-88

John Pizer, ‘The Continuation of Countermemory: Emine Sevgi Özdamar’s Seltsame Sterne starren zur Erde’, in German Literature in a New Century: Trends, Traditions, Transitions, Transformations, ed. by Katharina Gerstenberger and Patricia Herminghouse (New York: Berghahn, 2008), pp. 135-52

Silke Schade, ‘Rewriting Home and Migration: Spatiality in the Narratives of Emine Sevgi Özdamar’, in Spatial Turns: Space, Place, and Mobility in German Literary and Visual Culture, ed. by Jaimey Fisher and Barbara Mennel (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2010), pp. 319-41

Monika Shafi, ‘Open Houses: Emine Sevgi Özdamar’s “Der Hof im Spiegel” and Seltsame Sterne starren zur Erde: Wedding-Pankow 1976-77’, in Monika Shafi, Housebound: Selfhood and Domestic Space in Contemporary German Fiction (Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2012), pp. 140-68

Further Reading in German

Ernest Schonfield, ‘Linksalternatives Leben: Wohngemeinschaften in Özdamars Seltsame Sterne starren zur Erde und “Ein unzeitgemäßer Üsküdarer”’, Oxford German Studies 45:3 (2016), 308-29

Web Link in German

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9dH3ILfuF3A

Emine Sevgi Özdamar reads an extract from Seltsame Sterne starren zur Erde, on the occasion of Gregor Gysi’s seventieth birthday in 2018 (duration: 12 minutes)