"Traumaland" - Reading and talk with Asal Dardan

"In order not to lose our present, it is not enough just to remember the past. We must also recognize the threads from there to here. And this is exactly what Asal Dardan does with a painfully clear view." Gabriele von Arnim





Not being able to wipe away the blood, not being able to erase the fact that it flowed. Making the crime and thus the guilt visible, even if the perpetrators never raised their own hands and the victims remained invisible: There is blood on your hands. This is how Asal Dardan justifies the necessity of remembering, the responsibility of those born after. In "Traumaland", she creates a new topography of Germany, goes in search of traces, shows parallel and contradictory experiences in the immigration society. The past painfully protrudes into our present, the Nazi crimes find a cruel echo today in racist acts of violence, but also in the traumatic experiences of minorities.





Who makes German history? Who bears responsibility for past guilt? Which memories are told, which remain unheard? Asal Dardan confronts entrenched memory discourses with her search for connections in the hope of a shared memory in which different realities find a place.





Asal Dardan, born in Tehran in 1978, grew up in Cologne, Bonn and Aberdeen. She studied Cultural Studies in Hildesheim and Middle Eastern Studies in Lund and now lives in Berlin. She was awarded the Caroline Schlegel Prize for Essay Writing for her text New Years. Her essay collection Betrachtungen einer Barbarin (2021) was nominated for the German Non-Fiction Prize and the Clemens Brentano Prize. In May 2023, she gave the first Erika Mann Lecture at the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich.





Source: Rowohlt publishing information