Erkin

“You keep on learning, it’s ongoing!”

Erkin Akal is an expert at starting over – in both art and life. He hails from an artistic family: his grandfather Rasim Haşmet is considered to be the first socialist poet in Turkey; his father Haşmet Akal was a painter who lived in Paris, among other places, and died young. Erkin continued and kept on learning.

After completing secondary school in Ankara, he first studied acting at the Istanbul Conservatory. In 1971, he moved to Germany for political reasons and has since worked in many different professions. Erkin gave up acting for his family but he passed on the courage of daring to do something political and artistic to his sons and, in the productions of his son Emre Akal, he appears on stage as an actor to this day. In Emre’s most recent play Göttersimulation (God Simulation, premiering on 5 November 2022 at the Schauspielhaus), Erkin Akal and Walter Hess play the last two analogue people in a virtual world and meet eight digital natives aged between 11 and 17 who have long since migrated to digital worlds.