Emine Sevgi Özdamar reads the beginning of Die Brücke vom Goldenen Horn (1992, englisch: The Bridge of the Golden Horn, 2007). It is 1966, and the eighteen-year-old Özdamar, who tells her story in the first person, has just travelled from Turkey to work in a radio factory in Berlin. She talks about her passion for the theatre and her plan for work for a year so that she can go to drama school in Istanbul. About her arguments with her parents, who want her to get her university matriculation qualification. About the days she spent on the train and her arrival at the women's hostel. And about her first encounters with the German language, which she initially found as incomprehensible as the cackling of chickens.

Turkish words and phrases are repeatedly woven into the German text, bringing both languages closer together. German words are reproduced using Turkish phonetics, for example “Frauenwonaym” for “Frauenwohnheim” (women’s hostel), making the proximity of the foreign language audible to the reader.

Later, after developing a sound knowledge of German, the narrator begins to translate for the other factory workers. In an interview with the journal exilograph in 2014, Özdamar pointed out how tricky this was for the narrator: “Being a translator is dangerous. He is a messenger that takes words from one person to another, and that can be extremely dangerous. Messengers in Greek tragedies, for example, are always killed. […] A translator has to be able to dance well.”