War - Peace - Literature

Introduction: Dr. Tessa Hofmann

Reading: Bea Ehlers Kerbekian

Presented by Ulrich Rosenau

The critical analysis of conflicts and their causes is one of the most important prerequisites for peace-building. In the (post) Soviet space, it was not by chance authors who performed this challenging task.

The Armenian-Azerbaijani conflict in and around Nagorno-Karabakh was accompanied by serious human rights violations and war crimes, which were generally only perceived from the perspective of victims on both sides. However, blocking out empathy and the perception of suffering leads to the loss of one's own humanity.

As early as 2006/07, the Azerbaijani writer Akram Aylisli addressed the indiscriminate hatred of the respective neighboring people with his novel Requiem” Steinträume”. The Armenian Howik Afjan places war itself at the center of his novel “Red” in 2012.

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With the reading by Bea Ehlers Kerbekian From works by Aylisli and Afjan, the difficulties and opportunities of dealing with the causes of conflict in literature will be illustrated and then discussed.

The literary scholar and armenologist Dr. Tessa Hof-man Introduces the evening with a review of the Karabakh conflict.

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