We're not here for fun

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Deniz Yücel (2014)

We're not here for fun. Reports, satires and other utility texts is an anthology with newspaper articles and short stories by Deniz Yücel . It was published in February 2018 when the German-Turkish journalist was held in custody in Turkey for a year without charge; he was released two days later.

The book contains reports , glosses , satires , interviews and comments that appeared before his arrest, as well as texts about his experiences in the Silivri prison . The book title quotes Yücel's response to a request from fellow inmates during the initial police detention at Istanbul Police Headquarters to write down his experiences: “I said: 'Logically, I'll do it. We're not here for fun. '"

In the week after its publication, the anthology entered the non-fiction charts at number 3 and went into its fifth print run .

Creation and publication

Deniz Yücel was imprisoned in the Silivri prison when the book was being prepared and published (entrance area, 2014)

The editor Doris Akrap , who has known Yücel since their school days in Rüsselsheim, worked with him at the daily newspaper (taz) and, like Yücel, participated in the reading show Hate Poetry , compiled the texts after Yücel was arrested on February 14, 2017 was. She had no direct contact with him, he went through his lawyers.

At the beginning of his imprisonment, Yücel had neither writing paper nor writing implements. At first he tried to capture notes in Oğuz Atay's novel Tutunamayanlar (German title: Die Haltlosen) by dipping a broken plastic fork into leftover sauce. During a visit to the doctor days later, he managed to take a ballpoint pen with him and smuggle it into his cell, avoiding the body search. He wrote his detention protocol on the white space of book pages of the Turkish edition of Antoine de Saint-Exupéry's The Little Prince , the second book he had received through his lawyers from his later wife Dilek Mayaturk Yücel , whom he married in prison in April 2017. He put it in a bag of worn socks that a lawyer took from prison without knowing what was inside. Dilek Mayaturk Yücel and the world editor Daniel-Dylan Böhmer typed the manuscript. The detention protocol appeared in the article We're not here for fun , which was published for the first time on February 26, 2017 in Welt am Sonntag . He was later able to buy paper and pens from the prison shop.

The anthology We are not for fun here appeared in the series “Nautilus Flugschrift” by the Hamburg publisher Edition Nautilus on February 14, 2018, when Yücel was imprisoned for exactly one year. It was presented on the same day in Berlin in the Festsaal Kreuzberg. Texts from it read among others Anne Will , Herbert Grönemeyer , Mark Waschke , Hanna Schygulla and İmran Ayata . At the end of his improvisation, the pianist Igor Levit intoned the resistance song El pueblo unido from Chile.

The Turkish public prosecutor's office presented the indictment on February 16, 2018, demanding 18 years in prison. Yücel was then released - two days after the book was published and after 367 days in prison. He left the country on the same day.

content

The texts by Deniz Yücel are preceded by Doris Akrap, the editor, with a foreword written in January 2018 , in which she explains the genesis of the book. Jörg Sundermeier had the idea after readings had been held all over Germany after Yücel's arrest, including in the Schauspiel Frankfurt , in the Münchner Kammerspiele , in the Hamburg music club Uebel & Dangerous , at the WDR Cologne , and also in bookshops ; Readings were also organized by authors in Augsburg and citizens in Bielefeld . Among the readers, she names more than 40 names of personalities from Johanna Adorján to Ingo Zamperoni , Yücel's sister Ilkay Yücel and Yücel's graduate class.

The anthology with Yücel's texts is divided into five chapters .

  • Finding shit and knowing better contains three articles about journalism , first of all take care , taz! With which he said goodbye to the readers of the daily newspaper on March 30, 2015 in the Besser column before his move to the world .
  • Math for foreigners contains the article, written in Kanak Sprak by the fictional character Bayram Karamollaoğlu , but we nix human rights , first published on May 11, 2005 in Jungle World , as well as among other articles the satire Super, Germany abolishes itself ( taz , August 4, 2011).
  • In Biokoks and Vowel Lack from taz and Jungle World publications, once is Fair Trade Biokoks, please a report that appeared in the ten thousandth issue of taz . Even Hitler had a better idea and concluded his column Vuvuzuela on the 2010 Soccer World Cup ( taz , July 12, 2010). Yücel received the Kurt Tucholsky Prize for the 2011 column .
  • Two articles, Yes, there were internal executions from Welt am Sonntag (August 23, 2015, reprinted in BirGün , August 24, 2015) and Der Putschist , also in the Welt am Sonntag (November 6, 2016), in the chapter Ein insane Land , are one of the eight articles by Yücel that the Turkish judiciary accuses him of “sedition” and “propaganda for a terrorist organization”. The world article Islamism and Road Construction (November 2, 2015) is printed in a revised and supplemented version .
  • In the chapter you should be a correspondent now , Yücel goes into a foreword on the history of the creation of the article We are not here for fun ( Welt am Sonntag , February 26, 2017), which was written during his imprisonment . A page from The Little Prince with the handwritten notes on the detention report is printed in the book (p. 188). The number with the parakeet , like the other articles in the chapter, was created during the imprisonment. In the beginning, Yücel describes a conversation with his father during his visit to the prison in Silivri about Kemal Tahir's novel The Women's Wing and his encounters with fellow inmates in the Metris prison in Istanbul before he was transferred to Silivri. The conclusion is the text Our Heaven , a declaration of love from Dilek Mayaturk Yücel to her imprisoned husband.

reception

Günter Wallraff writes in his review for Der Spiegel that he would love to bring Yücel's book to the public in Turkey in a Turkish translation: “I still believe in the power of the word. His word. And this book. "

At Spiegel Online , Maximilian Popp describes Yücel's anthology as “illuminating, entertaining - and sometimes deadly sad”. The collection illustrates his strengths as a journalist: "His precision, his humor, his curiosity."

The MDR culture - literary critic Holger Heimann quotes like Yücel from a poem Nâzım Hikmets wrote in prison: "It's not about being trapped / It's about not surrendering." Heimann attests to Yücel the same basic conviction according to which he lived in custody: "In his reports from prison, this courageous attitude is expressed in every sentence."

In his review for the Bayerischer Rundfunk website, Stefan Berkholz states that Yücel is “anything but a harassment” . This also shows its new text volume. On the contrary, he always tries to “weigh things up and let different sides have their say. Apparently too much of the balance for the fanatical, nationalist-religious regime under Erdogan. "

The book makes it more than clear “how much his voice is missing,” said Martin Steinhagen in the Frankfurter Rundschau , before Yücel's release was foreseeable. His reports from imprisonment are "as one would have expected from him if he had sat smoking while writing in the café: uncompromising, clear, impressive, analytical, precisely polemical".

Leander F. Badura, editor of the weekly newspaper Der Freitag , goes into Yücel's articles as well as the text of his wife Dilek Mayaturk Yücel. He calls it "a brief, poetic reminder of the inseparability of heaven".

literature

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Mesale Tolu : The everyday state of emergency. In: Spiegel Online. February 14, 2018, accessed February 18, 2018 .
  2. ↑ Deniz Yücel is free. In: The time. February 16, 2018, accessed February 18, 2018 .
  3. Jump up ↑ Stories from Prison. In: The world. February 17, 2018, accessed February 19, 2018 . ' We're not here for fun . Edition Nautilus, Hamburg 2018, p. 194.
  4. ↑ Laura Franz: Buchcharts - the current bestseller lists. In: Börsenblatt . February 21, 2018, accessed February 22, 2018 .
  5. ↑ Deniz Yücel: We are not here for fun. Hamburg 2018, pp. 185–194, here pp. 185–187.
  6. ↑ Matthias Gebauer, Maximilian Popp, Christoph Schult: "You can't forbid Deniz anything". In: Der Spiegel . 09/2018, February 24, 2018, pp. 24–29, here p. 27.
  7. ↑ Dieter Kassel: "The worst thing for him is when you see him as a victim". In: Deutschlandfunk Kultur. February 14, 2018, accessed on February 19, 2018 (with interview).
  8. ↑ Luise Checchin: Laugh to see him free. In: Süddeutsche Zeitung. February 15, 2018, accessed February 19, 2018 .
  9. ↑ Deniz Yücel on the way to Germany. In: Spiegel Online. February 16, 2018, accessed February 19, 2018 .
  10. ↑ Doris Akrap: Foreword by the editor. In: We're not here for fun , Hamburg 2018, pp. 5–8.
  11. ↑ Text references. In: We're not here for fun. Hamburg 2018, pp. 217–221.
  12. ^ Günter Wallraff: He hopes and scoffs. In: Der Spiegel 08/2018 of February 17, 2018, pp. 128–129.
  13. ↑ Maximilian Popp: Journalism is not a crime. In: Spiegel Online. February 14, 2018, accessed February 18, 2018 .
  14. ↑ Holger Heimann: “We're not here for fun” - texts by Deniz Yücel. In: MDR culture. Retrieved February 19, 2018 .
  15. ^ Stefan Berkholz: Deniz Yücel: passionate journalist and educator. In: BR culture. February 11, 2018, archived from the original on February 20, 2018 (updated February 16, 2018).;
  16. ^ Martin Steinhagen: Precise polemics. In: Frankfurter Rundschau. February 13, 2018, accessed February 22, 2018 .
  17. ↑ Leander F. Badura: Let write. In: Friday. February 14, 2018, accessed February 22, 2018 .