REWRITING HOME AND MIGRATION: SPATIALITY IN THE NARRATIVES OF BARBARA HONIGMANN AND EMINE SEVGI ÖZDAMAR

This dissertation explores the creation of a personal sense of home within the experience of migration in two semi-autobiographical trilogies by contemporaries Barbara Honigmann and Emine Sevgi Özdamar. The interdisciplinary literary analysis draws on the fields of Urban Studies, Gender Studies, and Human Geography to examine the interdependence between these seeming binaries – home and migration – in six works: Honigmann’s Roman von einem Kinde (1986), Eine Liebe aus Nichts (1991), and Damals, dann und danach (1999), and Özdamar’s Das Leben ist eine Karawanswerei (1992), Die Brücke vom Goldenen Horn (1998), and Seltsame Sterne starren zur Erde (2003). The dissertation begins with a discussion of scholarship on Özdamar and Honigmann, and on concepts of home, space, and place, migration, exile, and nomadism. Four central chapters examine each protagonist’s critical engagement with and reinvention of the varied spaces she inhabits. The textual analysis explores physical, social, linguistic, spiritual, and gendered spaces as points of contact between home and migration. It demonstrates the ways in which artistic and literary spaces blur the boundaries between home and away, familiarity and foreignness. In these texts, home and migration emerge not as static concepts, but as two very similar dynamic processes. Özdamar and Honigmann create new and particular perspectives that come out of allegiances to multiple localities, and from real and imagined “double locations.” By taking these works out of their potentially competing fields of German-Jewish Studies and transnational studies and examining them instead through the common lens of spatiality, this dissertation challenges the discourse that locates Honigmann’s and Özdamar’s texts as marginal or “Other” in relation to the German literary canon. The dissertation concludes with speculations on the term “cosmopolitanism,” arguing that Özdamar and Honigmann rewrite the term cosmopolitanism as a highly personal and individual patchwork of allegiances to people, places, communities, and traditions. This dissertation extends existing ways of thinking about home, and migration, and cosmopolitanism and explores the permeability of boundaries, not only between these concepts, but between the disciplines of scholarship it draws upon.