German-Turkish authors' meeting 1980
The German-Turkish authors' meeting in 1980 is regarded as an intercultural event that received early attention and was intended to give the Turkish minority in Germany a voice vis-à-vis the German majority society. The meeting was carried out by the Berlin Literary Colloquium in West Berlin . It turned out to be a disappointment for everyone involved.
preparation
The meeting was initiated in 1979 by the writer Michael Krüger during an event organized by the Goethe Institute in Istanbul . The then director of the institute, Eckart Plinke, took up the idea and was able to implement the project with the Turkish state despite the political situation in Turkey, which made the project more difficult. In addition, a serious accident by Walter Höllerer , who was head of the Literary Colloquium at the time, severely hampered the preparation of the project in Germany in Switzerland .
Invitations
Invitations to the four-day event scheduled for December 1980 in Berlin were sent out to all German and Turkish writers.
course
Despite the far-reaching invitation, only the writer Richard Anders appeared on the German side for the meeting on the first day , and Peter Hamm and Joachim Uhlmann on the following days . The introduction of the German authors by the director of the Goethe Institute thus became embarrassing, especially since more than a dozen well-known authors had traveled to Berlin from Turkey, including Aziz Nesin , İlhan Berk , Demir Özlü , Tezer Kiral , Çetin Altan , Ferit Edgü , Zehra İpşiroğlu and Tomris Uyar . Other Turkish writers came from Germany, where they lived or were in exile at the time, such as Fakir Baykurt , Aysel Özakin , Yağmur Atsız , Güney Dal , Vasif Öngören and Ahmet Doğan . In addition, a number of Turkulogists and literary translators drew as participants, for example Gisela Kraft , Petra Kappert and Ingrid Mönch .
Responsible capital city representatives from politics as well as the numerous Berlin authors did not even pay a short visit to the event. In addition, a requested simultaneous interpreter could "not be paid" by the city of Berlin, so that the Turkish author Tezer Kiral, who is powerful in German, had to take over the continuously necessary translations "up to psychological and physical exhaustion" (Die Zeit) for four days.
In 1980 Karin Kersten wrote in Die Zeit that the published Turkish authors "would have been exposed to unreasonableness - like all Turks in this country":
- It is a small miracle that this important event could be brought to an end with brave thanks from all sides and that it did not burst into a scandal on the first day, which is probably due to the desperate goodwill of all those involved, but above all to the downright shameful generosity of the Turkish guests who held back their bitter feelings until the end and devoted themselves in an admirable manner to the constructive aspect of their stay in Berlin.
Aziz Nesin saved a number of other very unpleasant details in connection with the visit until the final words of the guests on the fourth day of the event: "except for the underpants" he had already had to be examined by Germans in Turkey in order to to be allowed to enter at all. In addition, all of the writers who came specially had to worry about their residence permit until the very end. “Don't translate for us, I don't want that!” He summed up his knowledge gained at the end of the meeting.
Reactions
The German press strongly criticized the course of the meeting, according to Karin Kersten in Die Zeit and Petra Kappert in the FAZ
Despite some “bitterness on the Turkish side”, the Turkish author Fakir Baykurt , who had been living in Germany for a long time, saw the meeting as “a first step towards bringing the two cultures closer”. Dorothea Fohrbeck from the Center for Cultural Research in Bonn saw the course of the meeting in 1983 as symptomatic of the lack of interest in German society in Turkish literature, but also in Turkish intellectuals living in Germany.
See also
Individual evidence
- ↑ Ref. Coll. Berlin: authors in the house, anniversary publication 1982
- ↑ a b Karin Kersten: A Scandal , Die Zeit No. 52/1980 of December 19, 1980
- ^ A b Dorothea Fohrbeck: Turkish cultural work in the Federal Republic of Germany ; Kulturpolitische Gesellschaft eV, 1983, p. 16
- ^ Petra Kappert in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, December 30, 1980 edition