Like Joschka Fischer, who later became Foreign Minister, he drove a taxi in Frankfurt in the 1980s, and even if Aydın Engin never became a diplomat, he was still a kind of informal ambassador. The Turkish journalist and playwright was a tireless explainer and mediator. For decades he tried to make everyone who came to see him in Istanbul understand his difficult fatherland, which he often didn’t understand himself. After all, he had been imprisoned several times and driven into exile for his journalistic work, and yet he remained true to him with unwavering affection.
When “Cumhuriyet” fell silent as an opposition voice, he preferred to write columns for an Internet portal
Engin spent almost twelve years in Germany after accidentally being released from prison in 1980 and being able to escape. Only after an amnesty did he venture back to Istanbul. Engin has written screenplays for the legendary director Yılmaz Güney, who also spent many years in prison. He wrote comedies for the theater about the relationship between Germans and Turks, and in 53 years as a journalist he was the founder of political magazines, author and editor-in-chief of the Cumhuriyet, Turkey’s oldest newspaper. When this opposition voice swung to a nationalist line in 2018, he left the paper and from then on wrote columns for the Internet portal T24, clairvoyant and with a thirst for mockery. Prominent journalists who are critical of the government and have been expelled from the major newspapers have been gathering at T24 for some time. “Free media are a thorn in the side of the Turkish government,” Engin said in a 2021 SZ interview.
After the attempted coup in 2016, he was, at that time still with Cumhuriyet, once again arrested and accused, like so many others, of “terrorist propaganda” together with several employees of the newspaper, including former editor-in-chief Can Dündar – who now lives in Germany. Because of his advanced age – Engin was born near Izmir in February 1941 – he was only briefly imprisoned, but was placed under police control. He was not allowed to leave Turkey until the end. On March 8, Engin went to the hospital for a routine operation, there were complications. His son Ekim has now announced that his father died at the age of 81. Engin had been married to writer Oya Baydar since the 1970s. He was buried on Friday in the cemetery of Istanbul’s Çengelköy bohemian district.