identity

Like consciousness and language, human memory is acquired through communication, socialization, and acculturation. It is, therefore, about both one"s brain and one"s social and cultural relations and comprises three dimensions: the personal, social, and cultural. Human memory is "embodied" in living personal memories and "embedded" in social frames and external cultural symbols (e.g., texts, images, and rituals) that can be acknowledged as a memory function insofar as they are related to the self-image or "identity" of a tribal, national, and/or religious community. Whereas the social or "collective" memory comprises knowledge commonly shared by a given society in a given epoch, cultural memory in literate societies includes not only a "canon" of normative knowledge but also an "archive" of apocryphal material that may be rediscovered and brought to the fore in later epochs. The formation of a canon of "classical" or sacred texts requires techniques of interpretation to keep accessible the meaning of the texts that may no longer be altered or multiplied. At that stage of cultural evolution, cultural memory changes from ritual to textual continuity. Cultural memory becomes complex, splitting into the "classical" and the "modern," the "sacred" and the "secular."

The focus of the study are the autobiographical texts of immigrant Necla Kelek and Seyran Ateş of Turkey. Through their lives between German and Turkish-Kurdish culture, both artists get the chance to build a stable transnational identities beyond bipolar models. They undertake an attempt to trace the process of defining positions, based on the problematic fields of family habits and customs (relentless on mother tongue, forced or staged marriages, honor killings) and German worldview.