Description

"Doğan Akhanlı creates this “togetherness”, creates encounters, exchanges and dialogue,
Listening and speaking instead of remaining silent, understanding instead of condemning, compassion instead of hating.”

- Laudation by Fatih Akin on the occasion of the Pastor Georg Fritze Prize

Doğan Akhanlı In Madonna's Last Dream, the novella Madonna in a Fur Coat by the Turkish poet Sabahattin Ali is taken up and rewritten. Ali's novella tells of a love affair in Berlin in the 1920s between a young Turkish man and a young Jewish painter who dies giving birth to their child. Ali's novella is considered one of the most important Turkish prose works of the 20th century. Akhanlı makes Sabahattin Ali himself a character in the novel. On his way into exile, he was killed by members of the Turkish secret service in 1948. Immediately before his death, he admits that Maria Puder actually died differently than in his novella. Madonna's final dream is an attempt to discover the true story of Maria Puder's life and death during the Nazi era.

Maria Puder's escape from the Nazi regime is linked to the fate of the refugee ship "Struma", whose Jewish passengers were prevented from continuing their journey in the port of Istanbul in 1942. On another narrative level, the nameless author and exiled writer from Cologne is commissioned to write an essay about racist violence. However, the task is complicated by reading Sabahattin Ali's novella and encountering the traces of Nazi history. He sets out to find Maria Puder's true biography.