Lesung mit Doğan Akhanlı in Nuremberg

As part of the 25th Film Festival Turkey Germany from 18th to 25th July 2021 will Doğan Akhanlı together with the translator Recai Hallaç read from his work Madonna's Last Dream. The reading is accompanied by Mikail Yakuts virtuoso accordion playing.

In Madonna's Last Dream, Doğan Akhanlı takes up the novella Madonna in the Fur Coat by the Turkish poet Sabahattin Ali and rewrites it. 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 trying to discover the true story of Maria Puder's life and death 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.