What does it mean to not be able to fully trust your own memories?

What does it mean for someone who had to flee his homeland years ago and can only easily enter it again in his memory?

What kind of writer who draws on what he has experienced in his writing, who must at least be able to consciously dispose of what he himself has experienced and what he has heard from others or imagined?

These questions pervade Abbas Khider's new novel, and they also give it the title: “The Forger of Memories”.

Fridtjof Küchemann

Editor in the Feuilleton.

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Said Al-Wahid lives in Berlin.

When his father was arrested and executed under Saddam Hussein's dictatorship, he was still a child.

When his sister and her entire family fell victim to an Islamist bomb attack on a large shopping street in Baghdad, he was already in Germany.

"Don't ever come back," his mother whispered to him before he left Baghdad.

In the meantime he has German citizenship, a German wife, a small son – and the feeling that he has a hidden self alongside his visible self, “veiled, hidden, backwards”, locked up alone and voluntarily.

Three times already he has disobeyed his mother's incantation and returned to his homeland. Now Said Al-Wahid hears from his brother that his mother is coming to an end. He takes the next plane to Baghdad. Abbas Khider tells of Said's journey in the hope of being able to say goodbye to his mother. In flashbacks he tells of his childhood, the escape, the arduous journey in Germany, and previous trips to Baghdad. He tells all this subject to the reservation of memory uncertainty.

when all life is a single trauma?

Should you send your life to a 'treatment center for torture victims'?”

Said Al-Wahid is certain: no one should dig into their past.

“Who knows what would come of it.” He also considers his own attempt to remember exactly to be a mistake.

The way out: He has to fill in what he is missing, has to think up connections, logical actions, coherent stories: "He has to invent memories." For him, the stories and the novel project on which he works in the following year are "attempts, to write one true story, which is his, which can never be true".