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Famous refugees

Seven well-known men and women who once had to leave their home countries.

06.10.2015
© dpa/Carmen Jaspersen - prominent refugees, Fatmire Alushi

Gerhard Richter
Germany’s most important and most successful contemporary artist fled from the East Germany to West Berlin in 1961 – just a few months before the Berlin Wall was built. He had to leave all his paintings behind.

Herta Müller
The family of the Nobel Prize laureate for Literature belonged to the German-speaking minority in the Romanian Banat. Ms Müller refused to cooperate with the intelligence service during the communist dictatorship and was persecuted. She moved to West Germany in 1987.

Neven Subotić
The Bundesliga star was born in 1988 in Banja Luka, in today’s Bosnia and Herzegovina. He came to Baden-Württemberg with his parents and sister in 1990. In 1999 the family emigrated to the USA. Subotić later began his career as a professional footballer in Germany and has been playing for Borussia Dortmund since 2008.

Yared Dibaba,
television presenter, was born in 1969 and left civil-war-torn Ethiopia as a child. In his new home in northern Germany, Dibaba also learned the local “plattdeutsch” dialect.

Saša Stanišić
won the Leipzig Book Fair Prize in 2014 with his novel “Vor dem Fest” (“Before the Festival”). Yet German is not his mother tongue. He fled from the war in Bosnia with his parents in 1992 at the age of 13.

Fatmire Alushi,
woman footballer, European champion (twice) and world champion for Germany and Champions League winner, left Kosovo with her family in 1992.

Ilija Trojanow
In 1971, shortly before he was due to start school, his family fled from Bulgaria to Germany. A year later they moved on to Kenya, where Trojanow’s father worked as an engineer. He lived as an author in Nairobi from 1972 to 1984, interrupted by a three-year stay in Germany.

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