Brecht, Turkish Theater, and Turkish-German Literature: Reception, Adaptation, and Innovation after 1960 by Ela Gezen

Abstract

Reviewed by: Brecht, Turkish Theater, and Turkish-German Literature: Reception, Adaptation, and Innovation after 1960 by Ela Gezen Britta Kallin Ela Gezen. Brecht, Turkish Theater, and Turkish-German Literature: Reception, Adaptation, and Innovation after 1960. Camden House, 2018. 159 pp. Cloth, $85.00. This cohesive, well-written, and overdue analysis examines the interconnections and intersections of Brecht's political aesthetics, Turkish theater, and Turkish-German literature. Ela Gezen's methodological approach builds on intersectional scholarship in German studies such as Leslie Adelson's "Turkish turn" in German literature, B. Venkat Mani's "cos-mopolitical claims," and Fatima El-Tayeb's investigation into Germany's racist history that created "non-Germans/ Undeutsche" The first chapter covers the period after the military coup in Turkey in 1960 and explores how Turkish intellectuals were drawn to Brecht's approach to use theater as a political tool that supports working-class efforts to limit capitalist exploitation. The first translation of Brecht's works into Turkish was published in 1956. In 1964 the first theater department was established at a Turkish university. In the same year, the staging of Brecht's play The Good Person of Szechwan in a theater in Istanbul, Dram Tiyatro, was interrupted by protests. This was called the "Brecht Incident" and led to an investigation into the play's communist message. During that time Turkish theater practitioners started referring to plays as "ex-periments" and troupes as "ensembles" to underline the experimental aspects of theater. Brecht's epic theater and Verfremdung became part of many Turkish plays, such as Haldun Taner's The Ballad of Ali of Keshan. Taner uses culture as a weapon to counteract suppressive governmental strategies. In the 1960s, international theater festivals such as the one in Erlangen, Germany, allowed Turkish student groups to perform, interact, and exchange ideas about Brecht's aesthetics. This exchange was mediated through new Brecht translations and synopses of plays in Turkish, English, and German that were available at the festivals. In the second chapter, Gezen explores the writings and adaptations [End Page 141] of Brecht's works by Aras Ören, who has made use of Brecht's dialectical approach to support Turkish guest workers in Germany by providing them agency and opening up spaces for a political education for Turks and Germans who provide manual labor. Ören made a critical intervention into the reception of Brecht's oeuvre by changing some aspects to fit the needs of the new situation of Turkish workers in Germany. Similarly, other artists such as Wolf Biermann changed the official Brecht reception accepted by the East German government to an approach that was critical of the dictatorial aspects of that government. In the third and last chapter, Gezen examines Brecht's influence on some of Emine Sevgi Özdamar's novels. Özdamar came to Germany to work at the Volksbühne as a theater practitioner. She lived in West Berlin, worked in East Berlin, and crossed the German-German border on a daily basis. (Because of her Turkish passport, she had no problem crossing the border.) Özdamar compares Brecht's literary reaction to fascism with her own writings against suppressive political developments in Turkey in the 1960s and 1970s. Gezen's book also includes a number of rare photos of Ören and Özdamar as actors in Brecht's plays. Gezen makes a particularly interesting connection between Brecht's montage strategies of including music and visuals and Özdamar's novels. Özdamar makes use of montage when the narrator changes the temporality of the plot and superimposes images from her past in Istanbul onto her life in East and West Berlin. The often-used Brechtian theatrical technique of the revolving stage is mirrored in Özdamar's text when thought processes go in circles rather than following a linear path. Even though Gezen does not emphasize her feminist perspective, she draws on feminist scholarship such as Claudia Breger's work on montage, Monika Shafi's view of the female narrator, Yasemin Yildiz's argument about "translational exchange," and Sonja Klocke's research on the revolving stage. Gezen correctly points to connections between her research and that of Turkish-German scholarship on post-Wall literature, in particular the post-migrant theater of...