At an event at the end of January, the Berlin Student Union appointed HU student Ayşe Kara as its new city writer. Starting in February, she will publish her poems and drawings on the Student Union's Berlin Stories blog for three months. The jury praised "her flowing, artfully interwoven sentences" that transport readers to places in Berlin while playing with the sound of their names.
Ayşe Kara is a Berliner who grew up in Kreuzberg in a family of Turkish origin and has been studying philosophy and German literature at HU since the 2023/24 winter semester. As city writer, she wants to process stories about her life in Berlin into poetry. The first three have already been published on the blog's website, together with drawings by her. In two of these poems, Ayşe Kara takes a district library and the corner of Engelbecken/Leuschnerdamm in Berlin-Kreuzberg as her starting point and recounts her upbringing, her family history and thus also the history of Berlin in melodious words and rhythmic lines. "For me, urban writing means reconstruction work," says Kara. Her poems and her view of Berlin are intended to unite different perspectives: the proletarian, the migrant and the student. Perhaps one of her next poems will lead to the Grimm Centre at the HU? Quite possibly, because she spends a lot of time there, says the current city writer.
"Safe spaces" for reciting texts
Ayşe Kara became aware of the City Writers programme during a lecture by Prof. Dr. Charlotte Kurbjuhn on "Weimar Classicism". In one of the events, Kara reports, the professor of modern German literature spoke about writing and art as commissioned work and mentioned the programme for students with literary ambitions at the end of her lecture – a perfect combination of theory and practice.
The Student Services Association's City Writers programme has been in existence since 2018. In the course of 2026, a total of three city writers are to be selected for the first time. In the c.t. coffee bar in the HU main building, the Student Services Association regularly offers student authors a "safe space" in which they can recite their texts as part of the "Lies los!" (Start reading!) event series.