Doğan Akhanlı
Biography
Doğan Akhanlı, born in Turkey in 1957 and died in Berlin in October 2021, has written numerous novels and a play.
In 1991 he came to Germany as a political refugee. Since 1992 he lived in Cologne, later in Berlin. His core theme is the examination of the genocides of the 20th century. Due to his political stance, he was imprisoned several times in Turkey and most recently in Spain due to a Turkish arrest warrant in 2017, about which he wrote the book Arrest in Granada wrote.
The days without a father (German 2016) and Madonna's Last Dream (Eng. 2019) were chosen as the most important novel publications in Turkey. In 2013 he received the Pfarrer Georg Fritze Prize in Cologne, and in 2018 the European Tolerance Prize in Austria.
Last Released
Madonna's Last Dream
Dogan Akhanli Greift inMadonna's Last Dream the short storiesMadonna in a fur coat by the Turkish poet Sabahattin Ali and rewrites them. Akhanlı makes Ali himself a character in a novel. On his way into exile in 1948 he was killed by members of the Turkish secret service. Immediately before his death, he confesses that Maria Puder actually died differently than in his novella.Madonna's Last Dream is an attempt to discover the true story of the life and death of Maria Puder during the Nazi era.
The author takes you back to the world of his childhood, to the love story of Sabahattin Ali, to serious research into the historical events of the Holocaust, and to anarchist conversations among friends.
The historical mixes with the autobiographical and the fictional, resulting in a whirlpool of memories and events in which times and spaces sometimes become blurred.
Translated from Turkish by Recai Hallaç
