It was a great honor for us to welcome Doğan Akhanlı to Bremen yesterday! Not only with excerpts from his novel "Madonna's Last Dream", but also with stories and anecdotes from his personal life, he fascinated us and moved us deeply.
Siegfried Maschek, longtime actor at the Theater Bremen, read for us passages from "Madonna's Last Dream" in the recently published German translation by Recai Hallaç. In the panel discussion with Silke Behl, Doğan Akhanlı talked more about the importance of writing for him. He recounted drastic experiences such as his arrest at the age of 18, when he was guilty of nothing but buying a newspaper, the subsequent anger and his underground political activity. He talked about how writing had allowed him to calm down a bit, to take a more reflective and well-founded look at things. He talked about the disappointment that overcame him in relation to his fatherland and his mother tongue, after this country had treated him so badly again and again, spoke of the paradoxes of writing and the ambivalence of feeling a part of Germany as a person of Turkish origin and then again not in view of the unimaginable atrocities that are rooted in German history.
It was a multifaceted encounter with Doğan Akhanlı in the foyer of the Theater am Goetheplatz, dealing with literature and poetry, dealing with pain and loss, children's views of the world and the frightening topicality of some of the historical events that are depicted in "Madonna's Last Dream ” be taken up.
We would like to thank the Theater Bremen, the Bremen Literature House, the Heinrich Böll Foundation and the radio station COSMO for the good cooperation, without which the evening could not have taken place.
You can find the novel "Madonna's Last Dream". here.
