Precarious Prose in Emine Sevgi Özdamar’s “Bitteres Wasser” (2009)

Emine Sevgi Özdamar’s 2009 text “Bitteres Wasser” is a complex prose lament addressing the murder of Armenian activist Hrant Dink, the historical fate of the Pontos Greeks, and the death of a homeless man in Berlin. This article investigates the formal and ethical role of these connective narratives of death and vulnerability, bringing understandings of Özdamar’s work developed by literary scholars such as Liesbeth Minnaard, Leslie A. Adelson, and Kader Konuk into conversation with recent theorisations of “precarity” in the work of Judith Butler and Marianne Hirsch. Moving from performativity to precarity, from the ethnic to the ethical, this article explores how theoretical concerns with “precarity” and the related “ethical turn” in German literature extend understandings of Özdamar’s aesthetic project.