Dogan Akhanli in Cologne

An event by Gerrit Wustmann, in cooperation with the NS Documentation Center of the City of Cologne, Aphellofplartz

In his novel "Madonna's Last Dream", Doğan Akhanlı interweaves fictional elements with true events. He takes up the novella "Madonna im Pelzmantel" by the Turkish poet Sabahattin Ali, which tells of a love affair between a young Turkish man and a young Jewish painter in Berlin in the 1920s, and makes Ali himself a character in the novel who confesses that he was the Jewish painter Maria In reality, Puder died differently than in his novella. The painter's escape from the Nazi regime is linked to the fate of the refugee ship »Struma«, which was sunk off Istanbul in 1942, and to contemporary escape experiences.
Doğan Akhanlı, born in Turkey in 1957, has written numerous novels and a play. "The Days Without a Father" (German 2016) and "Madonna's Last Dream" (Turkish 2005) 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.
In 1991 he had to flee Turkey and came to Germany as a political refugee. He has lived in Cologne since 1992. His core theme is the examination of the genocides of the 20th century. Because of his political stance, he was imprisoned several times in Turkey; Most recently, he was arrested in Spain in 2017 on the basis of a Turkish arrest warrant and wrote the book “Arrest in Granada” about it.

Price: €4.50 | reduced: € 2.00