Essays
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The great hunger and the long silence
“Secrets” is the name of a Ukrainian game where children dig a hole into the ground, throw anything brightly colored into it that they can find – blooming flowers, shiny stones, dazzling scrunchies, shiny doll clothes – and then lay a piece of glass over the pit, cover it with dirt and run away. Not…
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There’s no poetry about war
There’s no poetry about war. There’s just decomposition, Lyuba Yakimchuk writes in a poem. And so she carves up words: ‘Lu-hansk’, ‘Do-netsk’—even, at the end of the poem, her own name: all that’s left of Lyuba in the last line is ‘ba!’ It is wrong, though, to say that she carves up the words; like…
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No Jews for the AFD
My friend A. once said to me, ‘My parents can’t help being terrible people.’ Her words come back to me now as I look at the September 2018 ‘integration barometer’, a nationwide survey conducted every two years to gauge the ‘integration climate’ in Germany. A quick glance at this year’s survey reveals who is most…
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What would Jimmy do?
Waiting for the Next Storm—Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, 1 March 2018 ‘I was working on my first novel—I thought I would never be able to finish it—and I finally realised that one of the reasons I couldn’t finish this novel was that I was ashamed of where I came from and where I had been.…
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Where I come from
Ten Years Hanover Youth Theatre Dear Barbara, When people ask me where I’m from—and they do ask; they’re still asking—I always know what to say: I come from the theatre. This is something quite recent. I haven’t always had the confidence to give such a straight answer to the question. But it’s the truth.…
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Feeling spoken to
Laudatory speech for Jens Hilje and Shermin Lanhoff, winners of the Foundation for Prussian Sea Trade Award 2016 In his short story ‘Vibration Background’ Selim Özdogan writes with enthusiasm about the neologisms that are born when children mishear words. As a little boy, he always heard ‘civil courage’ as ‘civil garage’ and imagined a garage…
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What we stand for, what we dance for
‘If I can’t dance, I don’t want to be part of your revolution,’ Emma Goldman said, when a man told her that it wasn’t proper for a revolutionary to throw her legs about. Celebration is an important unifying force. Where would resistance be without it? When we celebrate, we give ourselves strength and encouragement. It’s…