Baghdad. Memories of a cosmopolitan city

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Baghdad. Memories of a Cosmopolitan City is a book by Najem Wali that he wrote between October 16, 2012 and November 4, 2013. It was translated from Arabic into German by Hartmut Fähndrich and was published by Carl Hanser Verlag in 2015 . The original Arabic title of the book isبغداد ، سيرة مدينة / Baġdād, sīrat madīna  / 'Baghdad, biography of a city'.

content

After 23 years in exile, Najem Wali, who refused to join the Ba'ath Party as a student, returned to Baghdad for the first time. Until 2003, his books were banned in Iraq. In 34 chapters, Najem Wali tells how he imagined Baghdad as a child, when his parents lived in Amâra in southern Iraq, how he studied German literature in Baghdad in the early 1970s , fell in love and was inventive in the search for suitable love nests, like him was drafted into the military, then flew to Paris for two months in 1976 with 200 dollars and a few addresses of Iraqi exiles in his pocket to study film directing, but soon returned to Baghdad on their advice, in February 1980 behind the walls of the Asbak Mosque was tortured, and at the beginning of the Iran-Iraq war, as a 24-year-old, finally fled the country with false papers in the direction of Istanbul and West Germany.

Before he actually went to Baghdad with his father as a six-year-old boy in May 1962 (Chapter 9), he had initially pictured the city on the basis of postcards that his father sent him and his mother from Baghdad, 350 km away, where he would occasionally as a long-distance taxi driver and enjoyed the record shops and cafes in the early 1960s. Internationally renowned architects have been working in Baghdad since the mid-1950s: the opera designed by Frank Lloyd Wright was built, the buildings of the University of Baghdad were designed by Walter Gropius , Alvar Aalto created the main post office, the sports city was laid out according to designs by Le Corbusier and Gio Ponti had been commissioned to build the palace for the planning council on the banks of the Tigris next to the Bridge of Liberation. Since the 1963 coup by the Ba'ath Party, Najem Wali has been forced to use his imagination to save Baghdad, which was gradually losing its soul, from doom.

During his literary studies in Baghdad, Wali encountered sinister characters among philologists: "East German secret service agents, Latin American torturers who visited a growing Spanish department to discuss the crackdown on the opposition," Sonja Zerki sums up this thematic aspect of the book .

style

Wali itself describes Baghdad. Memories of a cosmopolitan city as a non-fiction book, but here, as in all of his texts, literary fiction has its firm place: "Where my biography and that of the city intersect, it becomes very literary," quotes Judith Hoffmann in her review for Austrian Broadcasting Corporation the author.

The description of the postcards and their connection with the history of the country or with one's own biography is used as a vivid narrative thread "to describe places and episodes from the history of Baghdad, but also the experiences of a young, life-hungry family in a rapidly modernizing country: American cars, records, cinema, television, fashion, that was what preoccupied his parents in the 1960s - not unlike in Europe, ”states Christian H. Meier in his review in the Neue Zürcher Zeitung . Linguistically, the book translated from Arabic sometimes seems wooden, if on the one hand it is told in a lengthy manner, on the other hand only places or people are listed. A tension of future expectations and nostalgia pervades the book.

Chronologies are not Welsh's business, says Sonja Zerki in the Süddeutsche Zeitung , and sometimes he “ gets the reader mad with the wild leaps between centuries and continents, with a waterfall of names from Arab scholars, all important and significant, but in this number hardly manageable. But then he turns back into an elegant narrative stream that reads political developments in the specifics of the city. ”Sometimes Wali gets lost too much in his descriptions, meanders through the events and gets lost in the descriptions, just as one would in the maze of alleys an oriental city, writes Katrin Krämer in her review for Radio Bremen .

Sigrid Brinkmann, on the other hand, comes to the conclusion on Deutschlandfunk that Wali weaves brilliant cultural-historical chapters and eulogies on poets from the early Islamic period as well as on contemporary writers into the flow of his narrative. In this way, a narrative non-fiction book is created that can just as easily be read as an autobiographical artist novel. He mixes "the cheerful reminiscences of bookshops, clubs, writers' cafes and secret places of love with political reflections and recourse to the rich intellectual history of the Mesopotamian."

reception

Wali succeeds in merging topography and biography. At one point he asks whether it is we who create the places or whether it is the places that create us, reports Christian H. Meier. However, it does not work consistently to combine left-wing protest chronicles, Baghdad local history and personal memories, also because, according to Meier, some things remain unclear to the German-speaking reader. In this country there is no reverberation room to which many of the historical, political or literary references in the Arab culture are found. Meier suspects that Wali, on the other hand, wants to familiarize the Arab readership with some Western authors and for this reason postulates a love of Baghdad with regard to John Dos Passos, Annemarie Schwarzenbach or Max Frisch, but that it seems too constructed, according to Meier.

Anyone who perceives Baghdad merely as a hotspot of terror and war will receive with this book an invitation to a voyage of discovery to a city “that no longer exists and will never exist again,” thinks Katrin Krämer. At Deutschlandradio Kultur , Ingo Arend says that Wali is doing nostalgic work like many exiles who had to leave a city they never wanted to leave. The author also reminds of the forgotten modernity of a country that is today associated with violence, fanaticism and destruction. So it is no wonder that Najem Wali dedicated his life to the "invention of Baghdad".

Najem Wali's “memories of a cosmopolitan city” are most beautiful, “always where both coincide, the growing up of a talented young Iraqi, his ambition, his ignorance and the many Iraqi peculiarities. Then you can feel the magic of those days when European culture met an Arab tradition that is thousands of years old, when something could have started. And then it ended, ”says Sonja Zerki.

expenditure

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Najem Wali: Baghdad. Memories of a cosmopolitan city , Munich: Carl Hanser Verlag, 2015, p. 411.
  2. a b c d Sigrid Brinkmann: Najem Wali: Bagdad. Memories of a cosmopolitan city . The two-part writer , Deutschlandfunk , October 23, 2015
  3. ^ A b Judith Hoffmann: New book by Najem Wali: Bagdad , Österreichischer Rundfunk , November 2, 2015
  4. a b c d e Sonja Zerki: “A first love. Najem Wali is reminiscent of the cosmopolitan city of Baghdad, of which pathetic little is left, ” Süddeutsche Zeitung , October 13, 2015
  5. a b c d Christian H. Meier: Najem Wali tells about his hometown Baghdad. “Desired by lovers from all over the world” , Neue Zürcher Zeitung , November 24, 2015
  6. a b c Katrin Krämer: Book tip Najem Wali: Baghdad ( Memento of the original dated December 8, 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. , Radio Bremen , August 26, 2015 @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.radiobremen.de
  7. ^ A b Ingo Arend: Najem Wali: Baghdad memories of a cosmopolitan city . Between nostalgia and utopia , Deutschlandradio Kultur , 21 August 2015