My Armenian father

The author – son of an Armenian father and a German mother – tries to find out where exactly he belongs: Who am I? Am I an Armenian who can’t speak Armenian? Am I a German who is (all too) often treated as a foreigner? These doubts sent the author on a journey into the past – to retrace the life of his father who had survived both the genocide of 1915 in Turkey and the Second World War, and who had lived through the conflict between East and West Germany and its many consequences. Based on his father’s anecdotes and family documents, the author describes the everyday life of the Dolabdjian family in Turkey until 1915 and his father’s experiences leading to his arrival in Germany in 1922. Here was a stateless man who could not speak a word of German when he arrived in Germany in 1922. How was he able to go to school for the first time, pass his higher leaving certificate exams, study medicine in Berlin, qualify as a consultant, all against the backdrop of a worldwide economic crisis and the rise of National Socialism? Today we can smile about his later experiences during the tension-ridden relationship between the Federal Republic and the GDR which even led to the temporary loss of his hard-won German citizenship. But in those days it was a deadly serious situation.