Cologne – The writer Dogan Akhanli (64) is dead. He died after a short, serious illness on Sunday in Berlin, as the spokesman for the German PEN center confirmed. Akhanli had lived in Cologne for a long time and recently 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 an advocate for human rights, peace and coming to terms with the crimes against the Armenians,” wrote the incumbent German PEN President, journalist and writer Deniz Yücel.
Akhanli was born in Turkey in 1957 and has lived as a writer in Cologne since 1992. 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. But Spain refused to extradite him to Turkey as an alleged terrorist. Akhanli was able to return to Germany after two months.
In his work with numerous novels and plays, Akhanli takes up the genocide in Armenia. 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 laudation.
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”, as the Goethe-Institut emphasized.
The Lord Mayor of Cologne Henriette Reker in a statement: “It was with great dismay that I learned of the death of our Cologne writer and human rights activist Doğan Akhanlı. On behalf of all Cologne residents, I extend my condolences to his family. He was a courageous fighter for human rights in Turkey and around the world. His voice was often low, but his message was loud and heard. We will all carry this message on. The city of Cologne and I personally will honor him in honor. “