"Madonnas last dream” – reading with Doğan Akhanlı as part of the STRAZE opening

Wo? Stralsunder Str. 10/11, 17489 Greifswald

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.

Dogan Akhanli, born in Turkey in 1957, has written numerous novels and a play. In 1991 he came to Germany as a political refugee and has lived in Cologne for most of the time since then. Recently published in German: "Madonna's Last Dream" (2019). Other works: »The Judges of the Last Judgment« (German 2007), »Fasil« (Turkish 2010), »The Days Without a Father« (German 2016). Having been imprisoned several times in Turkey, he was arrested in Spain in 2017 on the basis of a Turkish arrest warrant and wrote the book "Arrest in Granada" about it, which was staged at the Cologne theater in 2020. Also in 2020 he participated in Volker Loesch's production of the Beethoven opera »Fidelio«. In 2013 he received the Pfarrer Georg Fritze Prize in Cologne, in 2018 the European Tolerance Prize in Austria, and in 2019 he was awarded the Goethe Medal.