Osman Kavala awarded one of Germany's most prestigious state honors

The award is presented annually on the birthday of German writer and poet Johann Wolfgang von Goethe at a ceremony held in his honor.

--Shermin Langoff, Mani Pournaghi Azar, Ayşe Buğra, Gesche Joost--

At the ceremony held on August 28, 2025, in Weimar, Goethe's birthplace, the award was accepted on behalf of Osman Kavala by his wife, Prof. Dr. Ayşe Buğra.

---David Van Reybrouck, Ayşe Buğra and Li Yuan (Award recipients)---

Following the introduction by Maxim Gorki Theater director Shermin Langoff, Ayşe Buğra read Osman Kavala's acceptance speech.

Kavala's acceptance speech and Langoff's laudatory speech are as follows:

Osman Kavala's Goethe Medal Acceptance Speech

It is a great honor for me to be awarded the Goethe Medal alongside two such esteemed individuals as Li Yuan and David Van Reybrouck. I thank the jury for their selection.

The long-standing and productive cooperation between Anadolu Kültür, of which I served as Chairman of the Board, and the Goethe-Institut must have been influential in the decision regarding me. Therefore, I would like to share this honor with my colleagues who have made significant contributions to our joint projects, especially Asena Günal, who has successfully managed Anadolu Kültür in my absence.

In the face of today's burning issues—wars, aggression, migration, and oppressive policies—I believe that defending a truly universal humanism and working for its establishment is more important than ever. For those who believe that intellectual and emotional bridges built through art and literature are necessary for the realization of this ideal, Goethe's writings are highly relevant and meaningful to today's reality. As you know, Maestro Barenboim and Edward Said, who received the Goethe Medal in 2007, were inspired by Goethe's West-Eastern Divan—a literary and intellectual bridge reflecting shared human values and sensibilities between Eastern and Western poetry—in their orchestral initiatives that brought together young Jewish and Arab musicians. This meaningful initiative by Barenboim and Said served as an example for Anadolu Kültür's project with the Armenian Youth Orchestra, which performed at the Young Euro Classic festival in Berlin.

While in prison, I had the opportunity to read more of Goethe's works and an eye-opening article by Professor Jeremy Adler titled "The Origins of the Concept of Human Dignity." In this article, Adler describes Goethe's contribution to the development of the concept of human dignity, which has a crucial place in the evolution of norms and values at the foundation of human rights.

Adler states that Goethe, like Kant, gave this concept a universal character by grounding dignity in human autonomy and the capacity for free action. Dignity is described for the first time in Goethe's works as "a human characteristic that grows, changes, and develops organically in the direction of realizing all the potential contained within the body and mind." In "Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship," we understand that Goethe considered a vibrant cultural environment, participation in cultural activities, and access to works of art and literature created in other societies as essential for this organic self-development.

After the Second World War, under the impact of the Holocaust and other crimes against humanity, respect for human dignity became a universal norm. This concept formed a solid foundation for human rights. Understanding human rights as the provision of the social, economic, and cultural conditions necessary for an individual to develop their full existential potential in harmony with their social environment contributed to the process of expanding the scope of these rights. As Adler points out, in this new normative conceptualization, one can see the reflection of the individual developing themselves within an organic process, as described by Goethe, and its close relationship with dignity. With this new content, dignity also enabled the individual to become stronger against the state by adding a moral value to their citizenship status.

However, despite the universal character the concept of dignity has gained and the inclusion of provisions regarding the inviolability of dignity in domestic legal texts and international conventions, human dignity is being gravely violated on battlefields and in anti-democratic regimes where political trials and punishments take place. Nevertheless, it is not inevitable that these external attacks will lead to the destruction of an individual's inner dignity. Even under such harsh conditions, a person's feelings about their own dignity continue to give them strength, providing the power to resist oppression and persecution.

I would also like to say this: Literature does not only contribute to the development of concepts; more importantly, perhaps, it also enables the sharing of emotions and sensibilities that make the internalization of these concepts possible. This has been my experience in prison. For me, the Goethe Medal will be a symbol that brings to mind and strengthens all the meanings of human dignity.

LAUDATORY SPEECH BY MAXIM GORKI THEATER DIRECTOR SHERMIN LANGOFF ON THE AWARDING OF THE GOETHE MEDAL TO OSMAN KAVALA

Dear Osman, who as of today has been held in the Silivri Closed Penal Institution for 2,858 days, or as everyone uses when speaking of you with respect, Osman Bey,

esteemed Professor Ayşe Buğra, our dear Ayşe Hoca, who has traveled from Istanbul to Weimar to represent your husband, about whom you published a book regarding the Kafkaesque trial he has been subjected to for seven years,

esteemed Institute President Gesche Joost and

esteemed Institute Secretary General Johannes Ebert,

and of course, you, our dear guests,

our valued jury members and all the guests present here:

I would like to greet you in Weimar, the city of poets, thinkers, and those of past ages who were devoted to democracy—including the forgotten female representatives!

Having just arrived here, I ran into Ahmet İnsel on one of the Dodecanese islands in the Aegean Sea; İnsel, along with Osman Kavala and other friends, founded İletişim Publishing in 1982, shortly after the September 12 coup.

Osman Kavala was only 25 years old in those days. İletişim, which would later become one of Turkey's most respected publishing houses, would publish works that would contribute to democracy and critical thinking during this ongoing period of oppression.

The Dodecanese was a geography where communists, anarchists, and other dissidents were exiled during the military junta period that lasted from 1967 to 1974. Indeed, the poet Yannis Ritsos, born in 1909, was one of those sent into exile here in 1967, exactly ten years after Osman Kavala's birth in Paris.

“…my brother

my blue-eyed friend,

with your blue heart

and your even bluer dreams

you who, when you look

deeply into the darkness

without feeling the slightest bit of malice

you even turn the darkness blue

…”

These lines were written for the poet Nazım Hikmet, who opened his eyes to the world in 1902 in Thessaloniki, 150 kilometers west of the city of Kavala, from which Osman Kavala both takes his surname and his ancestors originated. Nazım Hikmet, who was born 55 years before Osman Kavala and spent a significant part of his life as a political prisoner in Turkish prisons, also passed away when Kavala was only four years old. Turning even the darkness blue, dear Osman Bey, is a task you know well.

Osman Kavala has been imprisoned since the age of 60. In a month, on October 2, he will turn 68. He was arrested at the airport in Istanbul on October 18, 2017, while returning from a meeting with Goethe-Institut representatives at the Gaziantep Municipality.

"A man must be noble, helpful, and good!" says Goethe in 1783. The poet, who was given a title of nobility a year earlier by his friend Duke Carl August of Saxe-Weimar-Eisenach, was appointed director of road construction and mines in the same year, in addition to his role as director of the war commission. At the same time, he was also responsible for the duchy's financial management.

I cannot know whether Goethe would see Osman Kavala as "noble, helpful, and good"; however, I am of the opinion that it would be difficult to find words that would better describe the Osman Kavala I know.

I first heard Osman Kavala's name in 2003 and 2004, when I came to Istanbul as an advisor to Fatih Akın for the filming of "Head-On" and "Crossing the Bridge: The Sound of Istanbul." Kavala had founded the non-profit Anadolu Kültür in 2002. Indeed, I had the opportunity to meet him in person at his office in 2005. At that time, I was preparing for the "Beyond Belonging" festival that I would organize within the scope of Hebbel am Ufer, and I was helping German filmmaker Thomas Arslan plan the research trip for his documentary "From Far Away." Osman Kavala directed us to Anadolu Kültür's art center in Diyarbakır; here, we also had the opportunity to meet young and enthusiastic filmmakers. The works these filmmakers shot in Kurdish and Turkish are as fresh in my memory as if I had watched them just yesterday.

I know that he has supported hundreds of other people like us and brought people together. He always had wonderful ideas and was busy with many projects of which he knew even the smallest detail. While he had a fascinating eloquence, he also always knew how to create the impression that he preferred to listen to you. As an intelligent person, he made it a principle to become even smarter. From the moment we met, he earned my endless admiration.

In the decade following our meeting, our paths crossed many times, and I always followed his work closely—whether it was his increased efforts for dialogue and peace following the murder of his friend Hrant Dink in 2007, his collaborations with Armenian artists, or the great support he provided to the Croatian Women's Artist Collective WHW, who curated the Istanbul Biennial—amidst all this work, he also managed to gain this city an elite exhibition space with Depo Istanbul, which would host countless important exhibitions.

I realized how many people he touched, just like me, during the video campaign titled "What Did Osman Kavala Do?" that we filmed with Fatih Akın in 2020, in which hundreds of respected artists and cultural workers spoke about the projects and works that Osman Kavala had initiated, supported, or encouraged to that day.

In 2018, his first year in prison, he organized a series of memorial concerts for the composer and musicologist Vardapet Gomidas, one of which was held at the Maxim Gorki Theater.

His commitment to democracy, the rule of law, and justice persists insistently today. He regularly expresses his views on developments he is closely interested in within Turkey and events occurring in the international arena.

Osman Kavala is an intelligent and empathetic observer. But perhaps his greatest talent is his ability to bring what he deems essential to life. Even though he is always with us in spirit and gives us hope from the deepest darkness, this is why we feel the longing for his physical absence so painfully.

Osman Kavala takes as his example the wisdom of Antonio Gramsci, who spent his years between 1926 and 1937 in prison by order of Mussolini as a political prisoner of another fascist regime in another era, and who spoke of "pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will" in his famous "Prison Notebooks."

He has been one of the most important patrons of initiatives defending culture, civil society, and civil rights in Turkey. He is one of the tireless advocates of exchange and dialogue with Europe.

He is a role model for everyone, wherever they are in the world, who works for the mutual exchange of ideas, education, cultural heritage, diversity, reconciliation, and inter-communal agreement.

Honoring Osman Kavala is a great honor for the Goethe-Institut!