Parole Text:Buch | Rückkehr nach Syrien. Reise in ein ungewisses Land

A Journey Through an Uncertain Land.

“For the past few days, I have been back on my phone. I wake up, eat, work with little focus, read the news. I call my father. My father wakes up, reads the news, goes to work, sits in front of the TV. Assad is gone. The regime has fallen. The regime my father – a stateless Yazidi Kurd – fled from in 1980. I know the country from visits to my grandparents in my childhood. A country where portraits of the dictator and his father hung on every corner, a country ruled by a family like a mafia clan. For 54 years.”

A few weeks after Assad’s fall, Ronya Othmann travelled to Syria with her father: tracing the recent events in a country that seems foreign to itself. Everywhere, she spoke to people of all backgrounds – people torn between anxiety and hope, who want to believe in a future.

Ronya Othmann, born in Munich in 1993 to a German mother and a Kurdish-Yazidi father, writes poetry, prose, and essays, and works as a journalist. She has received several awards, including the Open Mike Poetry Prize, the MDR Literature Prize, and the Mara-Cassens Prize for her debut. Her second novel, Vierundsiebzig, was nominated for the German Book Prize and won the Düsseldorf Literature Prize and the 2025 Erich Loest Prize.