Berlin im Plural: Affektive Topographien bei Emine Sevgi Özdamar, Aras Ören und Tomer Gardi

Abstract

This article traces different literary ways of engaging with Berlin’s historical topographies in works by Emine Sevgi Özdamar, Aras Ören and Tomer Gardi. It regards their texts as being an integral part of the city in an on-going dialogic process. This process is deeply interwoven with the poetics of each of the authors. The concept of affective topographies proposes to think of this relation as a dynamic of affecting and being-affected. In this view, affective topographies are explicitly including historical layers, temporalities as well as ›memory gaps‹. Reading Özdamar, Ören and Gardi alongside each other, the article lines out how the texts are linked and overlap, especially with regard to Berlin time-spaces. This dialogical reading is underscoring that Berlin’s topographies as well as Berlin’s literature are social phenomena constitutively shaped and formed by processes of (post-)migration. It sets out to provide a first sketch of what could be a literary history of Berlin within the horizon of postmigrant society.