Lesung: Von Dortunten und Dortoben

In the organizer's words:

An evening for Albania with reading, music & photography with Florian Kienzle and an introduction by Ingrid Scherf

The Albanian hype can be felt everywhere - the economy is flourishing, the tourism industry has named the republic on the Balkan peninsula "Europe's best-known insider tip". Florian Kienzle knows a different Albania - the one of his youth around the turn of the millennium.
With this evening, which bears the multi-layered title Von Dortunten und Dortoben, Florian Kienzle wants to present the novel Verbrannte Sonne (Burnt Sun) by the Albanian exile author Elvira Dones, which he has translated - a book that deals with forced prostitution and human trafficking and is a testimony to the protracted period of transformation in Albania, explicitly in the 1990s. On the other hand, he wants to tell of the tense Albania of his youth - with Albanian music, which influenced him at the time, as well as with photographs by his father Helmut Kienzle, which bear witness to chaos and poverty, but also to untouchedness, openness and hope and are unique contemporary documents of a country that has changed rapidly since then.

ABOUT THE BOOK "SCORCHED SUN"
Many stories intersect in this book. There is the voice of Leila, which opens and closes the novel. The young woman was forced into prostitution and an existence without any dignity as a result of the murder of her twelve-year-old sister. Her words are spoken from the coffin that her father has to take back to his home country, which has been shaken by civil war. In her diary, his daughter had found a final means of expressing herself in some way and preserving a last part of her self. Elvira Dones describes life in "Dortunten", where the victims of violence against women come from. It is a placeholder for many countries from which human traffickers recruit their victims. They end up in "Dortoben", the latitudes where prosperity, safety and freedom seem to be within reach, the promised land to which many hopeful people yearn.
A book characterized by harshness, but also by great poetry. Instead of a lurid novel, Dones succeeds in writing a revealing novel about the violent and tragic world of prostitution. Unlike many other works on this subject, it becomes clear here that there is nothing to romanticize about the oldest trade in the world, as it is trivialized. The abundance of changes of register and perspective and the novel's broad format mean that there is no danger of voyeurism. Dones explores the question of how all this can come about. The book tells of a society overwhelmed by change, of fates that are traced down to the smallest detail, of a globalized world in which everything is connected to everything else, of dreams that crumble on the sidewalks of Europe, of people's lives after the collapse of the dictatorship, of the opening that nurtured great hopes that are gradually dissolving, of the unscrupulous struggle for money, of the cruel exploitation of women, of the extinction of all ethical action and of small islands of love and self-empowerment.