Photo © Kerstin Heinrich

Diakonie Koblenz

29.09.2022 • 18:00 • Hoffnungskirche | Evangelische Kirchengemeinde Koblenz-Pfaffendorf

Koblenz has been celebrating an Intercultural Week since the end of September. There is international cooking, dancing, breakfasting: and this year, even international poetry recitation - by two of our poets! Robina Karimi and Rojin Namer üerformed on Thursday in the Hoffnungskirche (Church of Hope) in Koblenz. 

“I found a roof over my head, but inside an empty house. / I found books and education and schoolmates, but no friends. / My new home gifted me a nest and a future. / But no fulfillment.” Robina Karimi recited this new text (“Schuldig”) for the first time this week. In it, she describes where she feels at home several years after her arrival in Germany. 

We haven’t had a discussion of this intensity in quite a while. The audience debated processes of integration, unequal treatment between origin countries and the reasons behind it, and what role children take on when then translate for their parents at the foreign office. The audience included people who work in integration, as well as people who themselves had fled their home countries. This created an especially multifaceted debate – we could have continued talking for a long time. 

A big thank you to the Diakonie Koblenz as well as the Landesbibliothekszentrum Rheinland-Pfalz who made this reading possible.