9 - German-Islamic Literary Interperceptions in Works by Emily Ruete and Emine Sevgi Özdamar

Summary

IN THIS CHAPTER I WILL CONSIDER the encounter with Islam through the medium of language in literary texts by the contemporary Turkish-German writer Emine Sevgi Özdamar and the late nineteenth-century Arab-German writer Emily Ruete. The contexts in which the two women write are of course vastly different. Özdamar's short story “Großvater Zunge” and her novel Das Leben ist eine Karawanserei hat zwei Türen aus einer kam ich rein aus der anderen ging ich raus—her texts that engage most directly with Islam—were published in 1990 and 1992 respectively, at which time Turks and other ethnic minorities were already a substantial presence in Germany. In contrast Emily Ruete's Memoiren einer arabischen Prinzessin (now titled Leben im Sultanspalast) was published in 1886, while her text Briefe nach der Heimat, probably written in the 1880s, came to light after her death in 1924 but was first published in German only in 1999: she belongs far more to the European era of colonization, Orientalism, and the scramble for Africa. And yet Özdamar and Ruete share much in the critical “Islamic” encounters with German and Germany that they produce. This is demonstrated not least by the fact that there was support for publication of Ruete's Briefe in 1999 and that her Sultanspalast has recently been republished. As Fedwa Malti-Douglas observes, “her textual journey is more than simply a set of memoiristic … flourishes that keep the reader's feet firmly planted in the nineteenth century.”