Abbas Khider

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Abbas Khider, City Clerk of Mainz 2017

Abbas Khider (born March 3, 1973 in Baghdad ) is a German-Iraqi writer living in Germany .

Life

After graduating from high school, he studied finance for two semesters in Baghdad. Abbas Khider has been arrested eleven times since he was 19 for political activities against Saddam Hussein's regime and while on the run. He was tortured in an Iraqi prison from 1993 to 1995, was released in 1996 and then went to various countries such as Jordan and Libya on his escape . In 2000, Khider found asylum in Germany. At the preparatory college in Potsdam he made the German Abitur. He studied literature and philosophy in Munich and Potsdam. In 2007 he received German citizenship .

His works are literature, with which he tries to reproduce the mood of his time, his generation, and not autobiography, Khider clarified in an interview in 2013 and added with a laugh that everything in them was autobiographical, even what was invented. Due to the certain distance of the German language as a new home, he managed to avoid "literature of concern" and to repackage the horror in serenity. Khider names "flight, exile, the destruction of the person" as his literary program. The German language allows him a certain distance to the content of his novels. In 2014 Khider headed a writing workshop in Cairo , where young Arab authors chose Franz Kafka's claustrophobic scenes as a topic in which they “found their own situation again. Obviously, what is one's own must first become foreign in order to be able to tell about it, ”suggested Christopher Schmidt in the Süddeutsche Zeitung on this occasion .

Khider sees himself as part of German society. The problems of this society are his problems. In the meantime he is criticizing because self-criticism is allowed after all. His latest novel Ohrfeige (2016) is no longer about dictatorships, but about the downside of democracy in Germany as it shows itself in situations that are expected of refugees who live in fear of deportation.

Abbas Khider lives in Berlin . He has been a member of the PEN writers' association since 2010

plant

Khider started out as a poet and essayist.

The False Indian (2008)

In 2008 his debut The False Inder was published , a novel in the form of a frame narrative in which a manuscript with an Arabic title page on a train ride from Berlin to Munich, which does not seem to belong to anyone, captures the attention of someone whose years of flight were in German is told. In 2013, The False Indian was translated into English under the title The Village Indian .

The President's Oranges (2011)

Abbas Khider reads at the Erlanger Poetenfest 2011

Khider's second novel, a “prison and pigeon fancier epic”, addresses, among other things, laughter as a form of resistance and a means of survival in the face of torture. A short opening credits lead over to a "true story" written in the present, the motto of which is a poem by Hilde Domin and at the end of which is the 15th chapter entitled "Escape". Pigeons play a special role that is poetically worked out in a variety of ways. Reading it left Andreas Pflitsch with a strange mixture of trepidation and consolation.

Letter to the Eggplant Republic (2013)

With his letter to the aubergine republic , Khider attempts to portray the complexity and diversity of what is happening in the midst of the violent culture of a dictatorship like in the Nazi era or Saddam Hussein's Iraq, a "rainbow of horror" in which everyone overnight in Incarceration no matter what one may or may not have thought or done beforehand.

Slap In The Face (2016)

In his fourth novel, Abbas Khider deals with social conditions in Germany at the beginning of the millennium. From the perspective of his first-person narrator Karim, the author describes the needs, waiting and fears of Iraqi refugees in Bavaria who seek asylum in Germany. It is a framework narrative with a series of internal narratives that are located on three different linguistic levels of style.

effect

Ines Wilke's review of Die Orangen des Presidents saw it as a humane gesture of the author that Abbas Khider uses the laughter to protect his German-speaking readers from what he is actually telling. That is a gift.

Works

Awards

About Abbas Khider and his work

Web links

Commons : Abbas Khider  - collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ abbaskhider.com
  2. ↑ German for everyone. The definitive textbook. Munich 2019. p. 48.
  3. ↑ a b Katharina Kretzschmar: Interview with Iraqi author Abbas Khider. »Literature can give people a voice who have none« , Interview In: Zenith - Zeitschrift für den Orient . 16th September 2013.
  4. ^ Johanna Adorján : Like a new birth. Interview. In: Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung . March 13, 2011, p. 28.
  5. ↑ German for everyone. The definitive textbook. Munich 2019. p. 50.
  6. ↑ Berkan Cakir: The horror in cheerfulness rewrite , stuttgarter-zeitung.de , January 29, 2015, accessed on June 3, 2015.
  7. ↑ Sebastian Hammelehle: Victims and perpetrators. Dedr Spiegel, January 30, 2016, pp. 130-131, here p. 130.
  8. ↑ Information brochure ( Memento of the original dated December 2, 2013 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. (PDF; 389 kB) of the Edition Nautilus on Abbas Khider, accessed on November 22, 2013. @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.edition-nautilus.de
  9. ↑ Christopher Schmidt: Guest room. About writing white bread and Uncle Tom literature. In: Süddeutsche Zeitung. Bavaria edition, January 24, 2015, p. 15.
  10. ↑ Carsten Hueck: Abbas Khider: Ohrfeige (Link to mp3 download), in: SWR2 Literatur, January 31, 2016 (available until: January 25, 2017, May 17)
  11. ↑ The German List. Abbas Khider: “The Village Indian” in the translation by Donal McLaughlin , goethe.de
  12. ^ The Village Indian on the Seagull Books website , accessed November 22, 2013.
  13. ↑ Hilde Domin Prize 2013 goes to Abbas Khider , Cultural Office of the City of Heidelberg, heidelberg.de
  14. ↑ Andreas Pflitsch: Khider, Abbas. The President's oranges. Kindler's Literature Lexicon , May 2015.
  15. ↑ Katharina Kretzschmar: Interview with Iraqi author Abbas Khider. »Literature can give people a voice who have none« , Interview In: Zenith - Zeitschrift für den Orient . 16th September 2013.
  16. ↑ Ines Wilke: Time does not bury the truth. In: Süddeutsche Zeitung . November 6, 2014, p. 14.
  17. ↑ Waiting makes you more and more stupid. In: Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung . January 24, 2016, p. 43.
  18. ↑ Poetics lectureship winter 2012/13. on uni-koblenz-landau.de
  19. ↑ City of Heidelberg press service of April 30, 2013: “Hilde Domin Prize for Literature in Exile 2013” ​​of the city of Heidelberg goes to Abbas Khider. at heidelberg.de, accessed April 30, 2013.
  20. ↑ edition-nautilus.de ( Memento of the original from March 31, 2014 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.edition-nautilus.de
  21. ↑ Mainzer Klause in FAZ of September 23, 2016, page 11
  22. ↑ Publisher's information ( Memento of the original from May 10, 2015 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.chbeck.de
personal data
SURNAME Khider, Abbas
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German writer of Iraqi origin
DATE OF BIRTH March 3, 1973
PLACE OF BIRTH Baghdad