Berlin is not a beautiful European city in the way of Paris or Edinburgh, but what it lacks in the picturesque it makes up for in possibility; not only can you encounter people from all over the world, but Berlin allows you to meet them on their own terms, in the sense that the city's cultural identity it isn't one that requires you to sublimate your own language and nationality into a larger cultural notion of 'German-ness' in order to participate in the life of the city (even if a limited ability to speak German most certainly does hinder a fuller sense of integration in Berlin, especially when it comes to bureaucratic doings).
It is this sense of simultaneity that makes the city endlessly compelling and unsettling (as when stumbling upon the Stolpersteine, an ongoing project by the artist Gunter Demnig enacted across Europe, in which he places small brass plaques mounted on concrete blocks amid the cobblestones in front of buildings whose former inhabitants were persecuted by the Nazis).
“It's terrible to watch history unfold,” the Ukrainian poet, translator, and activist Serhiy Zhadan has said; he found himself traveling through the war zone in Eastern Ukraine in 2014, and much of his writing is a document of these events. A few weeks ago, I went with a friend to the Haus für Poesie in the Kulturbrauerei to see him read together with his German translator Claudia Dathe, from Warum ich nicht im Netz bin [Why I'm not online] (Berlin: Suhrkamp Verlag, 2016). He also read from a new novel, Internat (which has yet to be translated from the Ukrainian into German or English).
Like Zhadan, the friend who invited me to attend the reading comes from Eastern Ukraine, and lived and worked in Donetsk during the height of the conflict. His story is not mine to tell, but I've sometimes thought about what he's told me about events he witnessed there, and unsuccessfully tried to score it with the seemingly genteel reality of democratic, late-capitalist Berlin, with its techie startups and after-hours parties, and—oh yes, the recent elections, in which the AfD (Alternative for Deutschland), Germany's far-right party, took thirteen percent of the votes: the first time a far-right party has held a significant majority in the Bundestag in sixty years, which, depending on whom you ask, is nothing to be frightened of, as it's far less alarming than the surge of populism in democratic countries elsewhere; or, it's the sign of what's to come, a looming portent.
In any case, there was a palpable buzz to the room, a sense of fraternity among the largely Ukrainian audience in attendance. I couldn't understand the Ukrainian, but could more or less follow Claudia Dathe's German translations. Many persons, based on their questions in the Q and A afterward, seemed to view Zhadan as spokesman for the resistance to Putin's Russia, a role he appeared to both relish and resist; he showed us an absurd page of his passport, in which a Belorussian stamp banning him from entering Russia had been nullified by a countervailing edict in the form of a large X, but also emphasized that his work as a writer and poet should be the focus, rather than his political opinions.
In lieu of trying to describe what it meant to be an outsider to such an experience allowed a small glimpse in, all I can say is that, from where I was seated, the logo of the Haus für Poesie refracted through glass on the podium next to Dathe inverted a perfect mirror image of the word 'Poesie'; so: that; it felt like that.
Yours, Kathleen
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