Reading and conversation

The unforgettable journey of a grieving son to his father's grave

"Son Without a Father" tells the story of a grieving son, the cohesion of a family, the deceptive memory and a journey to a foreign country - to his mother and his dead father.

It is early in the morning when his mother calls to tell him that his father has died. The narrator doesn't know what to do. He is alone in his pain. Who can help him, who can comfort him? Little by little, he realizes that he has to go to Turkey. He has to see his mother, support her - and stand at his father's grave to say goodbye to him.

The narrator, a writer from Kiel, suffers from a fear of flying. He asks two friends to take him with them in their camper van. Together they plan the journey: via Linz, Szeged and Edirne to Edremit and back. Over five thousand kilometers. It is the beginning of an adventurous, feverish road trip across Europe, characterized by the shimmering memories of the father and his many lives: of the husband, the pieceworker, the storyteller or the septuagenarian whose dyed sideburns could throw an entire vacation settlement into turmoil.

In his new novel, Feridun Zaimoglu poses the question of how we remember those who are closest to us and yet sometimes seem strangely alien to us, who love and shape us, who we care about - and who, despite everything, we have to let go at some point.

Feridun Zaimoglu was awarded the Walter Kempowski Prize for Biographical Literature in 2025 for this text, among others. Since 2019, the state of Lower Saxony has awarded this prize to authors whose literary works succeed in depicting the influences and effects of contemporary historical events on individual biographies. The jury explained its decision as follows "Feridun Zaimoglu has brought a new tone to contemporary literature with his powerful language. His debut "Kanak Sprak" has long been part of the canon of German-language literature. Since then, Feridun Zaimoglu has produced an extensive body of narrative, dramatic and poetological work - most recently the moving novel "Sohn ohne Vater", which tells the story of a writer's road trip from Kiel to Turkey to attend his father's funeral. In the tradition of Walter Kempowski, Feridun Zaimoglu repeatedly illuminates the self within society, links the biographical with the historical and often directs the gaze from the edge of events to the center."

Kai Bremer, Professor of Modern German Literature at the Free University of Berlin, will moderate the reading and discuss the special opportunities and challenges of biographical writing with Feridun Zaimoglu on the basis of the novel.

Organizer: Literaturbüro Westniedersachsen
Location: Renaissancesaal Ledenhof, Am Ledenhof 3-5
Ticket reservation: Literaturbüro Westniedersachsen, Tel. 0541/202-7908 or by email at LitOs-info@osnabrueck.de

Eligibility