Can Dündar series “Die Neuen / Songelenler” – Culture

October 30, 2021 will mark the 60th anniversary of the German-Turkish recruitment agreement, as a result of which hundreds of thousands of so-called guest workers moved to Germany. Today people come from Turkey for other reasons – political ones. The journalist Can Dündar, who himself has lived in exile since 2016, introduces six of them in the series “Die Neuen / Songelenler” (Turkish for “those who came last”).

First scene: Istanbul 2016.

You come one day in August at 3 p.m. The block of flats is surrounded, and snipers are positioned on the surrounding roofs. A good twenty masked men in steel vests aim automatic rifles at the woman who opens the door in shorts. They don’t give her a chance to ask what’s going on, storm into the apartment and turn her upside down. Seven hours. The woman has to watch in horror as she searches through each of her 3,500 books. At 10 p.m. the men take her to the station.

The woman is Aslı Erdoğan, one of the “50 writers of the future,” as a French literary magazine called her. She had done what terrified those who had her apartment searched: she had written. About the women, children and young people who were arbitrarily liquidated in brutal government operations. The president, with whom she happened to share her last name, was convinced that some books are more effective than bombs.

For crimes that are otherwise charged with the heads of terrorist organizations, she should be behind bars for life

After three days at the police station in the midst of numerous people who were all waiting for the imminent arrest warrant, a judge in his mid-twenties announced his decision with a grin: “Detention for membership in a terrorist organization, propaganda for this organization and for sedition …” who would otherwise be charged with the heads of terrorist organizations, should they be behind bars for life. Aslı was sent to prison and isolated for ten days.

From her book “The Miraculous Mandarin”: An ugly old mandarin went to a whore exceptionally beautiful but hard-hearted for a night of pleasure he would pay for. When the old man fell asleep towards morning, the woman took the opportunity and called her thieving friends over. But the mandarin woke up from his feigned sleep and struggled with all his might. The robbers, however, outnumbered and masters of their trade, they easily defeated him. But as much as they beat him up, they had to see that his unsightly, lanky body was not wounded and that their fatal blows left no traces. They drew knives and sabers, but even the sharpest knives, the most ruthless sabers, could not harm the mandarin. Then they fled in fear. The woman had watched the fight, impressed by the wondrous power of the old man she wanted to sleep with him again, this time for love alone. She caressed him tenderly, full of admiration and desire. Every time the beautiful woman touched the mandarin’s body, a new wound opened. It was the wounds that the fight, the blows, the knives and sabers had inflicted. They were hidden until someone took them heartily. Eventually the mandarin collapsed in the woman’s arms, covered in blood, and died.

Second scene: Osnabrück 2017.

The German Book Trade Association and the City of Osnabrück award Aslı Erdoğan the Erich Maria Remarque Peace Prize. The writer was released after 132 days in detention, but was not allowed to leave the country. The lenders of the award asked the Turkish President in writing for an exit permit for Aslı. Amazingly, she got her passport back immediately and the terrorist suspect suddenly found herself at the award ceremony in Germany. Alexander Skipis said in his laudation that Aslı Erdoğan had put her life on the line for values ​​such as truth, justice and peace, “while we are negligent in dealing with these values ​​here in the excessive prosperity. (…) I bow to your courage and yours Commitment to freedom and peace. “

These words opened the wounds in Aslı that were hidden “until someone took care of them from the heart”. The wounds of the blows, knives and sabers in Istanbul dissolved to tears in Osnabrück. Weeping, she explained to the audience, who applauded her standing up: “I have not yet got over the pain and humiliation suffered. It is difficult for me to return to normal life. For fear of the police, I even thought of suicide. You made no concessions They say, but it’s not me who doesn’t make any concessions, it’s literature. “

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Third scene: Frankfurt 2017.

After receiving the award, Aslı did not return to her country. It wasn’t planned that way. She only had one suitcase with her for three days and left the window open at home. But friends persuaded her to stay. She went to Frankfurt on a grant from PEN Germany. Even the later acquittal did not change her decision.

She had spent thirteen years abroad; she was used to being expelled and excluded, to be traveling and in exile. When she was 24 as a young physicist in a team of internationally renowned experts at CERN, the European organization for nuclear research, working 14 hours a day, writing saved her from going nuts. It was then that she wrote her first volume of stories, “The Miraculous Mandarin”. The following year she won the authors’ competition Deutsche Welle with a short story translated into nine languages. Even when she went to prison, the literary business did not leave her alone and showered her with prizes.

Its protagonists are mostly travelers without a port, who are always in exile wherever they go. Now, in her mid-fifties, she shares the fate of her heroines and finds herself in exile because a metaphor has come true. Her life is marked by tragedies that she turned into literature. Your writing is a “literature of the wound”. She locked the readers in a “house made of stone”, dragged them into the wound, but never comforted them. Now she feels personally the worst of the wounds she has written about all these years.

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Fourth scene: Berlin. Today.

“Life is easy in Germany. You can solve problems by talking about them. You can sleep at night without fear of the police. But I am a person with a tragic past. Tragedies suit me. I miss that here. There are also.” no drama. Everything is normal. But you suffer in the midst of an affluent society. Inwardly, one gradually freezes. Literature can even break the ice of people with frozen hearts like a hammer, but first I have to break my own ice.

I have not yet found the strength to cast the wound in me in sentences. Few writers succeed in this, I am aware of that. I read a lot of concentration camp literature and saw the great writers who stumbled on the subject. Most of the writers I love most, like Primo Levi, chose suicide. So far, every break has loosened a plug in me. Not this time. It was not the prison that silenced me, but the exile.

Exile is like fog. It is difficult to describe fog

Exile is an extremely bitter experience. Prison is like stone, concrete, easy to tell. But exile is like fog. It is difficult to describe fog. A feeling like gradually sinking into a lousy, musty body of water. This gradually consumes you internally. For a writer, the worst thing about exile is being far from your own language. In a way, you are banned from your language too. I feel that I am losing my proficiency in Turkish here.

For a long time I had nightmares about prison and police cars. Then the gagging began. My memory faded. Last year my bowel suddenly failed and I had to go to the hospital. A fatal immune system disorder has been diagnosed, affecting five in a million people. Doctors said the detention had fueled the previously undetected illness. I need drastic therapy. I thought I wouldn’t be afraid of anything after I went to prison, but I’m afraid of that.

I have given up hope of returning to Turkey. Hoping for nothing is a kind of torture. Their hatred of texts and authors never ends. There is a brutal regime of repression, millions of people are systematically darkened. My case was also reopened in June this year, despite an earlier acquittal. At some point it will end somehow, but I don’t think I’ll see it anymore. Even if Erdoğan is gone, it will take ten years for Turkey to recover. I don’t think I have much time left. It would be unrealistic to make long-term plans. In a modification of the Althusser word, I want to say: The future is still a long way off. “

Translated from the Turkish by Sabine Adatepe. You can find the original Turkish contribution here.