Rabea Klesing

The Politics of Estrangement: Urban Imaginaries between Istanbul and Berlin in Emine Sevgi Özdamar’s The Bridge of the Golden Horn

Emine Sevgi Özdamar’s The Bridge of the Golden Horn (1999) connects the urban landscapes of Berlin and Istanbul to reflect on the political upheaval of the 1968 student movement at the backdrop of postwar German Gastarbeiter-politics, showing how these intersect with the lived realities of the novel’s characters. This paper argues that the political awakening of the narrator is produced through a continuous practice of “bridging” the two urban spaces, a movement that restructures her understanding of each city and of her own identity.

Bridges, both present and absent, operate as a spatial figure for the relation between public and private revolts. Berlin’s protest spaces foster a publicly oriented, intellectually awakened self of the narrator while Istanbul recalls a prior, private self that is tied to family and childhood. The missing bridge between Istanbul’s Asian and European sides becomes the spatial analogue of her difficulty reconciling these selves upon returning to her parents’ home. This unresolved gap surfaces when she cannot join nearby protests in Istanbul, questioning whether there is a ideological and geographic discontinuity not only for the narrator, but also in terms of the transnationality of the 68 movement.

A second layer of analysis works at the level of narrative technique: multilingualism, code‑switching, and reader estrangement reproduce the narrator’s articulation of belonging and extend the bridge metaphor into language. Her identity is formed across languages and locations, registering the development of a self that is shaped by migration, political engagement, and emotional displacement. These strategies emphasise that her personal character development depends on ongoing crossings and bridges between Turkish and German languages, public revolt and private memory in the urban spaces of Berlin and Istanbul.