In the organizer's words:

Die Tiefe tells the story of several generations of a family whose fate is deeply interwoven with the former East Prussia, a region where Polish, Masurian, German and Lithuanian identities have been intertwined for centuries: the story of grandmother Janka, aristocrat Gudrun, her lover Max, a German surgeon, aunt Gertraud, that of Janka's son, Wolf, and Alicja, the youngest member of the family and an anthropologist who is struggling to come to terms with selling her parents' house on the Guber - a building shrouded in mystery and full of memories. We follow the fates of the protagonists, starting with the time of war - the fall of Königsberg and Rastenburg and the inexorable advance of the Red Army - through the era of communist Poland, in which the past is not spoken about at all or only in whispers, to the present, in which a new conflict is developing.

Ishbel Szatrawska, born in 1981 in Olsztyn (formerly Allenstein, Poland), studied Polish literature and theater studies at the Jagiellonian University in Krakow, where she now lives and writes. She is the author of six plays, including "The Life and Death of Mr.Hersh Libkin from Sacramento, CA" (Eurodram 2022 Selections). Her debut novel Toń ( The Depths) was number one on the bestseller list for Polish literature and was voted one of the "10 best books of the year".

Translated from Polish by Andreas Volk.

The event will be moderated by Emily Grunert (Literaturbüro NRW) and translated by Bernhard Hartmann.

A series of events in cooperation with the Polish Institute Düsseldorf.