Lesung und Gespräch mit Friedrich Ani

In the organizer's words:

In his memoirs of his childhood and youth in Kochel, Friedrich Ani tries to understand himself and his parents.

As the son of a Syrian medical student and a Silesian 'displaced person', he grows up in the mutual alienation of his parents. They are both homeless and cannot find a common language. In an atmosphere of lifelong silence, he found his hiding place in literature at an early age.

"Writing is my way of being present in the world."

Friedrich Ani's great mastery lies in brushing all words against the grain and daring to use completely unusual combinations. This makes his text an incomparable pleasure to read. (NDR Kultur Annette Stoltenberg)

Ani wrote the volume of poetry Im Zimmer meines Vaters 12 years after the death of his father. A cycle of 19 poems is dedicated to his father, the "son of the sand" and "child of Mesopotamia". It is "a remarkable volume of poetry. From the interplay of content, sound and rhythm, closeness develops in verse order." (Thorsten Schulte, literaturkritik.de)

Writing as close as perhaps ever in his life, Ani also tells his father about the oppressive politics of the day: "Citizens with/borrowed brains" rant about "the unwashed with the wrong skin". His conviction sees his father at his side: "we don't chase anyone back/ to death in the bazaar of corpses/ the world means asylum/ birth means asylum."