Ich habe eine Barrikade gebaut – Poesie lesen von: Anna Świrszczyńska

In the organizer's words:

The poet Anna Świrszczyńska (born 1909 in Warsaw, died 1984 in Kraków) is one of Poland's best-known poets of the 20th century.
among the most famous poets of the 20th century in Poland; Czesław Miłosz even counted her among the "greatest
poetic personalities in the history of Polish literature as a whole". In Germany, she is familiar to insiders at best. Since the 1970s, her reception abroad has been limited primarily to the English-speaking world. Świrszczyńska's case is special in that she only found her laconic tone late, in 1970, with the volume Wiatr (Wind), which remained characteristic of her subsequent work. Perhaps her most important book, Budowałam barykadę(I Built a Barricade), was published four years later and is now available in a German translation by Peter Oliver Loew from Secession Verlag. The 100 poems collected in the volume relate to the Warsaw Uprising, which celebrated its 80th anniversary on August 1 this year. Świrszczyńska experienced the time of the occupation and the uprising as a medic. In simple, condensed language (none of the poems is longer than one page), she tells of a "universe of fear", a "heaven of fear". Świrszczyńska reports on everyday life in a state of emergency, she writes: "I have seen heroes / and I have to tell about them". Each text highlights a small scene. It is about standing guard together, listening to the hearts of enemies beating in the darkness. Descriptions are given of the girls who carry the stretchers, a dispatcher who flees from machine gun volleys, the son who cleans the gun lock and counts the cartridges while his mother is dying, the shot janitor whose eyes do not yet know that she is already dead, the streetcar driver from Wola who hides his carbine under a barrel of sauerkraut, or the dying girl scout who has never been to a party and asks to be laid out in a lace dress. A humane poetic voice of world renown is waiting to be discovered.

A joint event of the House of Poetry with the German-Polish Institute and the German-Polish House/Foundation Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe. Supported by the Berlin Lotto Foundation

In reading and discussion: Dagmara Kraus | Peter Oliver Loew | ariel rosé
Moderation: Karolina Golimowska