Writer Dogan Akhanli (archive image from 2017)
Photo: Peter Zschunke / dpa
Dogan Akhanli is dead. The writer died after a short, serious illness on Sunday in Berlin, a spokesman for the German PEN center confirmed.
Akhanli had lived in Cologne for a long time and last lived in Berlin.
He is to be buried in Cologne.
"As President I mourn the member of the German PEN, as a reader I mourn a great writer, as a companion I mourn a campaigner for human rights, peace and coming to terms with the crimes against the Armenians," wrote the German PEN President, who had only been in office last week Journalist and writer Deniz Yücel.
Akhanli was born in Turkey in 1957, his exact date of birth is unknown.
Since 1992 he has lived as an author in Cologne.
He had previously been arrested several times in Turkey and had been in the Istanbul military prison for two and a half years from 1985.
In 2017 he was arrested while on vacation in Spain because the Turkish state had searched him with an international arrest warrant.
Akhanli was able to return to Germany after two months.
He had been a German citizen since 2001.
In his books Akhanli dealt intensively with the trauma of the 20th century, the persecution of the Jews and, again and again, with the genocide of the Armenians.
One of his main works is the trilogy of novels "Kayıp Denizler" ("The Disappeared Seas"), which he wrote in the late 1990s.
Submerged after the military coup
The son of a teacher grew up in Istanbul from the age of 12.
Akhanli once said that his mother read classics to him and his siblings early on, from Thomas Mann to Dostoevsky, and that influenced his later path to writing.
He studied history and education in Trabzon until he had to go into hiding after the 1980 military coup.
Allegedly because he had bought a left-wing newspaper at a kiosk in 1975, Akhanli had to endure five months in custody for the first time in Istanbul.
Since then, his "confidence in the Turkish state has been completely shaken," he said in 2007. He joined the Maoist group Halkin Kurtukusu ("Liberation of the People"), organized demonstrations from underground and printed leaflets.
In his first two novels "Denizi Beklerken" ("Waiting for the Sea") and "Gelincik Tarlası" ("The Poppy Field") he dealt with his eventful years and political events in Turkey in the 1970s and 1980s.
Commitment to international understanding
In 2018 he was awarded the European Tolerance Prize for Democracy and Human Rights. In 2019 he received the Goethe Medal from the Goethe Institute. This honors the courage of the laureate to "assert himself with artistic and journalistic work against political, religious or social resistance," it said in the laudatory speech.
In addition to his literary work, Akhanli also campaigned for understanding in his personal everyday life. Since 2002 he has been organizing German-Turkish tours through a former Gestapo prison in Cologne and giving lectures on anti-Semitism in the immigrant society. Akhanli was also involved in the Turkish human rights association Tüday, the Allerweltshaus and the Jewish Raphael Lemkin Library in Cologne, and as an employee of the "Recherche International" association.
He felt that the Germans' way of dealing with their past was exemplary, also for Turkey.
Since 2010 Akhanli has been active in a dialogue project on German, Kurdish and Turkish history and understanding.
"He was a courageous fighter for human rights in Turkey and around the world," said Cologne's Mayor Henriette Reker on Sunday.
"His voice was often low, but his message was loud and heard."
bor / dpa
