Navid Kermani

Helga Druxes is Professor of German and Comparative Literature at Williams College. Her books include Resisting Bodies: The Negotiation of Female Agency in Twentieth- Century Women Writers (1996), The Feminization of Dr. Faustus: Female Identity Quests from Stendhal to Morgner (1993) and, with Patricia Simpson, Far Right Digital Media Strategies Across Europe and North America (2015). Karolin Machtans is Assistant Professor of German Studies at Connecticut College. She is the author of Zwischen Wissenschaft und autobiographischem Projekt: Saul Friedländer und Ruth Klüger (2009) and co-editor, with Martin Ruehl, of Hitler – Films from Germany: History, Cinema, and Politics since 1945 (2012). Alexandar Mihailovic is Professor Emeritus of Russian and Comparative Literature at Hofstra University and a Visiting Professor of Literature at Bennington College. He is the author of Corporeal Words: Mikhail Bakhtin’s Theology of Discourse (1997) and the edited volume Tchaikovsky and His Contemporaries (1999). He has published on on religious studies, nineteenth- and twentieth-century Russian and Ukrainian literature, cultural relations during the Cold War, and LGBTQ and gender.

• Contents: Navid Kermani: Biographical/Bibliographical Chronology – Helga Druxes/Karolin Machtans: Introduction: The Intercultural Project of Navid Kermani – Navid Kermani: «Was zählt, ist das gesprochene Wort» [What Counts is the Spoken Word], Bundestagsrede Celebrating the 65th Anniversary of the Basic Law, 23 May 2014, Berlin – Helga Druxes/Karolin Machtans: Interview with Navid Kermani – David N. Coury: Kafka and the Quran: Patriotism, Culture, and Post-national Identity – Klaus von Stosch: Kermani’s Writing on Islamic Religion – Karolin Machtans: The Beauty and Terror of Love: Große Liebe and Du sollst – Jens Hobus: Down by the River: Music, Love, and Memory in Navid Kermani’s Work – Torsten Hoffmann: Literary Cemeteries: Recalling the Dead in Kurzmitteilung and Dein Name – Esther Schießer: Kermani’s Reception of Jean Paul: Reconsidering his Frankfurt Lectures Über den Zufall and his Novel Dein Name – Helga Druxes: The Crisis of (Re)Productivity in Dein Name – Elke Segelcke: The Political Anthropology of Navid Kermani’s Travelogues.

"This volume on the work of Navid Kermani, Iranian-German writer, Islamic scholar and the first German Muslim awarded the prestigious German Book Trade Peace Prize in 2015, could not have come at a more opportune moment. Few writers have written as compellingly and thoughtfully about the urgency for peaceful assimilation into the European fabric as Kermani. This is an important contribution to the literature on questions of immigration, cultural identity and integration, tolerance, and resistance to extremism, not only in Germany but the world over." (Professor Azade Seyhan, Bryn Mawr College)