Sankofa

Like the mythical bird Sankofa, who looks to the past to learn for the future, this epic novel soars through decades and across continents. It masterfully combines personal biographies with broad political themes. From the military coup in Turkey to the National Socialist Underground (NSU) terror in Germany to the Black Lives Matter movement in the US, Doğan Akhanlı traces resistance against human rights violations. In doing so, he manages to do justice to his characters and their stories in all their complexity and expands the concept of memory culture to include transnational dimensions that have an impact on our present and future. Akhanlı finds a warm and humorous tone for all of this. For political reasons, Sankofa has not yet been published in its original Turkish version, but only in Recai Hallaç’s German translation, which is so light and organic that you forget it is a translation while reading it.
—Paula Fürstenberg

Doğan Akhanlı, who was born in Şavşat in 1957 and died in Berlin in October 2021, wrote numerous novels and a play. He came to Germany as a political refugee in 1991. He lived in Cologne from 1992 and later in Berlin. His core theme was confrontation with the genocides of the twentieth century. Because of his political views, he was imprisoned several times in Turkey and most recently in Spain in 2017 on a Turkish arrest warrant, about which he wrote the book Arrest in Granada. The days without a father (2016) and Madonna’s Last Dream (2019) were voted the most important novel publications in Turkey. In 2013, he received the Pfarrer-Georg-Fritze-Preis in Cologne, the European Tolerance Award in Austria in 2018, and the Goethe Medal in 2019.

Recai Hallaç, born in 1962 and raised in Istanbul, is an actor and simultaneous interpreter who has translated several novels and short stories from Turkish, in addition to screenplays and plays. He has also worked as an editor, speaker, and actor at WDR Funkhaus Europa and the Turkish editorial office of Deutsche Welle, and has performed in theatre. He has lived in Berlin since 1990.