Dogan Akhanlı was arrested for the first time in 1975 at the age of seventeen. That was the beginning of a lifelong state persecution. Most recently, Akhanlı, now a German citizen, was deprived of his freedom in Granada in 2017. He wrote an impressively concentrated book about it.
“Arrest in Granada” is an autobiography and poetics, a brief history of Turkey in the 20th century. It is a comedic farce at times and at the same time an agonizing confrontation with the feeling of having become guilty of one’s own children. With this book, Doğan Akhanlı has achieved an act of resistance – and a plea for a sincere life.
Doğan Akhanlı is often said to be a quiet, humble man. What is meant by that: He listened. Not only when others spoke, Dogan Akhanlı has also listened to himself in his life, listening inwardly. Many people avoid this because what one has to say to oneself is seldom pleasant. Most live in situations where they can afford not to listen to themselves.
At an early age he tried to open spaces of memory and to bring them into contact with one another
“Arrest in Granada” shows that his experiences of impotence and the feelings of guilt towards his family have not left him without a trace. Akhanlı himself, on behalf of many others, does not stand out as a hero, but as a vulnerable person in the book. This is precisely why this book also shows that he is not a “quiet”, not a “modest” writer. He is consistent in the choice of his fabrics and their formal implementation. He is brave in the way in which he literarily poses his life questions that are relevant for all his readers, whether German or Turkish, whether old or young, how and wherever in life.
Akhanlı’s writing is characterized by a social and political foresight that few can express in such clear, simple sentences. Very early on, based on his own life experience, he recognized the need to think of the memory of the stories of violence in the 20th century in more than just national terms. In literature he was someone who already practiced what authors like Sasha Marianna Salzmann and Sharon Dodua Otoo still do not take for granted today, but still demand more unchallenged: to open up the spaces of memory and to bring them into connection with each other.
Anyone who experienced Doğan Akhanlı was touched by his kindness, his mischief and his deep sensitivity, and also by his keen analytical mind and this persistence with which he “breadcrumbs”, perhaps but steadily, changed society and enabled it to act without it noticed it myself. Because Doğan Akhanlı is one of those unique, indispensable personalities who ensure noticeable atmospheric shifts for the better.
It would be very much to be hoped that German publishers would also rediscover it
His novels and plays, which are available in German translation, have not yet been recorded in terms of their literary significance. Awards like the Goethe Medal were more related to Akhanlı’s cultural commitment. Even in the translation it can be seen that books like “The Judges of the Last Judgment” (the third part of his trilogy “The Disappeared Sea”, which unfortunately is not completely available in German), the novel “Madonna’s Last Dream” or even his Play “Anne’s Silence” is not just relevant because its author committed the genocide of the Armenians, the sinking of the ship Goiter, which was sunk in 1942 with hundreds of Jewish refugees on board, or the tragedy of transgenerational trauma as its theme.
His works are literarily significant because he aesthetically implements the intervention of violence in the time structures that affect us all. Because he finds a form for an experience and thus conceals it in his language. He writes about one of his time-traveling characters: “Perhaps he was a breath that was always breathed into the world when memory gaps arose.”
Doğan Akhanlı was and is such a breath. It is urgently to be hoped that one of the German publishers will recognize this and, for example, publish his novel “Fasıl”, in which he engages a torturer in a conversation with his victim about his devotion to classical Turkish music. Such books, like their authors, are what make a difference.
Doğan Akhanlı died on Sunday morning after a short, serious illness at the age of only 64.