“People took to the streets again as Danton or Woyzeck”

Anyone who followed the presentation of the Georg Büchner Prize to the writer Emine Sevgi Özdamar on Saturday could not help but think that the most prestigious German literary prize was in the 71st had only gone to a woman twelve times in the years of its existence. In addition, never before to someone who has what is described with the unscriptural word "migration background" or, in the language of the Minister of State for Culture, is a "mediator between cultures".

In fact, Özdamar, whose multifaceted work has less to do with mediation or transfer than with an osmotic relationship to the world, as her colleague Katja Lange-Müller once put it, did things differently from her price predecessors by analyzing Georg Büchner less than him from her life: She talked about her childhood in Istanbul, the cinema, the sea, the dead, especially her brother who died young, the grandmother, who said that one should not forget the dead, "otherwise their souls will get pain".

Özdamar explained that she first heard of Büchner in 1966 in Berlin on a cold West Berlin night, then in 1968 at the drama school in Istanbul. In the 1960s there was a lot of revolutionary literature in the city's steep streets. "All the killed, strangled, beheaded, tormented, who had not died in their beds, rose up in those years"; the people who read the books "went back onto the streets as Danton or Woyzeck." Özdamar ended with a sentence that could have sounded banal, but how the result of their world osmosis worked: "Everyone has a personal heaven in heaven, in which not only the stars but also the people who have touched us very much shine constantly". . One of them is her "brother Georg Büchner".