Suche nach den Spuren eines Selbstmordes

Fearless and captivating in its freedom, this volume breaks all notions of what a woman of her time and background is allowed to write. Tezer Özlü places herself alongside Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton. She narrates both autobiographically and surrealistically, with confessional openness and emotional immediacy – in a vivid, enchanting, and inspiring language.

"We loved your books very much in Istanbul," writes Emine Sevgi Özdamar in her afterword to Tezer Özlü's search for the traces of a suicide, which the Turkish author and translator wrote in German in 1982 but published only in Turkish. In it, Özlü takes us on two journeys: one from West Berlin to Prague, Trieste, and Turin, to the places of her revered writers. The second leads into her inner self, to her dreams, feelings, and desires. She boards the train and sheds everything: the "irrational chains of society," the "cold nights of childhood," the "bedrooms of psychiatric clinics," the persecution following the military coup in Turkey: "Here in the gardens of Valentino, it becomes clear to me that my only happiness lies in escaping everything.".