Ukraine in Weimar: resilience from the book cube

He comes uninvited and can hardly be beaten down: the German-Ukrainian “bridge made of paper” is gripped by a moment of collective emotion towards the end of their meeting in the book cube of the Duchess Anna Amalia Library in Weimar.

Emeritus historian of Eastern Europe Karl Schlögel is one of the intellectual mentors of these binational writers' encounters that Verena Nolte initiated after the illegal Russian annexation of Crimea in 2014.

Schlögel quickly puts his manuscript on the subject “Lit by a bolt of lightning – German scene after February 24, 2022” aside.

He asks himself and those present how one can find words for something for which one “thank God” lacks the experience: the direct experience of war.

The night before, the author Oksana Stomina, who had escaped the hell of Mariupol, read harrowing verses about her hometown, while the face of her husband Dima shone in front of the phalanx of book spines in two photos - smiling in peace and next to it frighteningly exhausted in a photo from the Russian prison camp.

Since May, Stomina has had no contact with her husband, who fought at the Azov Steelworks.

It's about "attempts at rationalization, while we can't cope with the disorder and what's coming our way," says Schlögel pessimistically.

"For most Germans, even the educated classes, the Ukraine didn't exist," he admits, quite self-critically.

It was treated as a periphery, as a huge transit country on the way to Moscow: "And it's horrible that the war and the destruction it brings are necessary to change the map in our heads." In particular, the intellectual "high plateau" throws he presented their imperial fixation on Russia, arrogance coupled with ignorance.

This attitude stands in contrast to the spontaneous helpfulness of the German population, which reveals a sense of justice and gives hope.

The literary scholar and translator Chrystyna Nazarkewytsch thanked Schlögel on behalf of her compatriots.

We know each other not least from the meeting in Mariupol in August 2018, when the woman from Lviv presented her translation of Natascha Wodin's novel "She came from Mariupol" in a live broadcast with the author - and everyone stood together on the beach, in the background the huge, the atmosphere polluting and now iconic steelworks.

At that time, Serhij Zhadan organized trips to the front, which was still unofficial but already threateningly close.

And the gifted satirist Oleksandr Irvanets addressed a homage to “the city of dignity: the incredible Mariupol” in the now destroyed cultural institute.

When a dictator becomes a mockery

In Weimar, Irwanez is now presenting Sottisen against “the Putin” that has taken root everywhere in Russian culture, unnoticed by the West: “In the wheelchair in the famous staircase scene in Odessa / And the howling Putin baby whines / As a heron, the winged Putin draws its circles / With a palm branch from Cannes in its beak.” The biting verses were translated by Alexander Kratochvil.

In his lecture "Translating in times of war" he emphasizes that empathy with Ukraine is not enough if there is a lack of knowledge.

This can convey a literature that has traditionally been dismissed as “Little Russian”, part of the so-called multinational Soviet literature.

The war has dug into their faces and hardened their features.

Natalya Kulabucha, one of the proven interpreters, has worked as a paramedic for several months.

The Lviv

and psychoanalyst Jurko Prochasko once inspired Verena Nolte when naming her project, which did not receive much media attention before the war.

The name comes from Manès Sperber: “Suddenly there will be a second bridge, not made of iron, not of stone, not even of wood.

No, made of paper, yes: made of cigarette paper.” Prochasko, who does not want to leave his country during the war, talks via video link about human imagination as a prerequisite for a horror that only humans can cause.

In war, writing fiction is no longer possible

One consensus is that war makes fictional writing impossible.

Since February 24, the translator Yuri Durkot from Lviv and the Russian-language literary scholar Andrei Krasnyashchich from the University of Kharkiv have resorted to laconic notes such as "carpet-beating during the cease-fire".

His old self shed his skin with the evacuation from Kharkiv, according to Krasnjaschtschich, the books by Beckett and Canetti remained there with his old life.

In 2017 he proudly led the participants of the “Paper Bridge” through the architecturally bold capital of the former Soviet Ukraine, whose intellectual elite was wiped out under Stalinism.

Apparently, Putin sees Russian-speaking Ukrainians as "traitors" and wants to punish them, was heard several times in Weimar.

And the German participants?

Above all, they listen quietly and with emotion.

Kerstin Preiwuß explores traces of the fear that was an integral part of children's books from the GDR.

The observation virtuoso Marcel Beyer ("I don't want to invent anything") analyzes a photo from Irpin from March 13, which shows a man covering his Labrador's eyes.

A bridge made of paper belongs right here, says the host director Reinhard Laube on a tour of the house: the library as a haven of humanity.

The guests were particularly touched by the ash books, some of which could be restored after the great fire of 2004.

Such knowledge will be necessary in Ukraine, a cultural nation threatened with destruction.