Kleine Festungen - Small Fortresses

This is a collection of stories about Arab children and young people, compiled and translated from Arabic by Hartmut Fähndrich. With contributions by 50 authors from 12 Arab countries, it provides a special insight into the Arab world.

A child can be born in a fine Beirut private clinic, in a room in the old cemetery in Cairo that has been converted into a residential area, or on a Syrian field. What happens afterwards "so that every child may have a happy childhood" is manifold and often not in line with the 1959 Declaration of the Rights of the Child.

The "little fortresses" that come into the world will be shaped, opened, closed or demolished in childhood and adolescence. Fifty stories taken from modern and contemporary Arabic literature – from a dozen different Arab countries – show how this can be done, i.e. how the "coined form" "develops alive" under the many and diverse conditions of Arab countries, traditions and structures.

With contributions from: Sahar Mandur (Lebanon), Gamil Atiya Ibrahim (Egypt), Muhammad Zafzaf (Morocco), Mikhail Naima (Lebanon), Samiha Khrais (Jordan), Salwa Bakr (Egypt), M. Salah al-Azab (Egypt) , Najwa Ben Shatwan (Libya), Anwar Sha'ul (Iraq), Wagdi al-Komi (Egypt), Ibrahim Samuel (Syria), Ahmad al-Khamissi (Egypt), Raja Alem (Saudi Arabia), Ahlam Bisharat (Palestine) , Badriya al-Bishr (Saudi Arabia), Buthaina al-Nassiri (Iraq), Edwar al-Kharrat (Egypt), Muhammad al-Bissati (Egypt), this is a collection of texts for adults showing how children and young people in the Arab world (from Iraq to Morocco, from Syria to Yemen) grow up, what they experience and feel, what they are happy about and what they suffer from,  how their adolescence is broken down then reproduced in literary form.