Discovering Amsterdam through Özdamar’s Visual Writing

Emine Sevgi Ozdamar is one of the most representative authors of contemporary literature in German. Her protagonists spend most of their lives in big cities passing through different neighbourhoods which are still far apart in time and space: from European Istanbul to Asian Istanbul, from West Berlin to the East Berlin of the Cold War, and vice versa. In Fahrrad auf dem Eis her writing succeeds in depicting the urban “stage” of a city like Amsterdam, full of non-places,  provoking a sense of disorientation, a city – as Marc Auge would put it – of supermodernity. The protagonist experiences Amsterdam with an intensity that allows her to create poetic images. The visuality of her language is a fundamental part of a writer who trained at drama school and worked for a long time in the theatre as assistant stage manager, actor and director. Here Ozdamar goes beyond what Mieke Bal would define as “word images”, while at the same time using an approach similar to that attributed to Van Gogh’s painting method, far closer than those of any other painter to the labour of an artisan.