“Tunc Erit Lux – then there will be light” – under this biblical motto, the highest discussion of democracies in Eastern Europe, took place on Friday evening at the Maxim Gorka Theater in Berlin. The author took part in it: Inside Schzzepan Twardoch, Marco Martin, Nino Khartishvili, Maya Pilevich and Andrey Kurkov – and the longtime leader of Tomas Kruger. Since he resigned in the fall, the evening, during which the Suhrkamp lecturer Katarina Raaba also headed the farewell ceremony for him. The musician Gann Greenwa accompanied the event with Ukrainian folk songs that were processed in the style of ethnohazza.
Raaba began with the prerequisite that Eastern Europe was characterized by a “great tradition of resistance”, which passed the evening like a thread. There were two voices with Martin and Kruger on the stage. The BPB president answered the first question to Raaba regarding whether he was all over the German or “part of the eastern European sphere”, so that the Charter of 77 movements for civil rights in Czechoslovakia and Solorovna were completely formed in Polva.
In this regard, his joke in Armenia in the eighties was also universal: there the artist asked if he came from Germany or Germany of the Soviet Republic. Nevertheless, in the experience of the Eastern European discussion, however, there were eleven years, writer and publicist Martin, after they left the GDR in 1989 shortly before the line.
In the middle of the resistance, from the streets of Belgrade, the playwright Polevich went to Berlin. She brought video compilation from Serbian student protests, which lasted last fall, against corrupt political leadership. Most of the people present do not know what is happening in Serbia, she said noticeably. That evening, this should not be completely correct with an interested audience, but events in Serbia participate in many wars and crises in the world. Pilevich was disappointed with the West. Instead of maintaining mass protests, it prefers to conclude a profitable deal with Lithuania with President Vucic.
Democracy as a state of nature
The Ukrainian writer of Russian descent Andrei Kurkov brought the audience to laugh with his statement about what was “tragic” to have Russia as a neighbor. According to him, for Ukraine, democracy is a natural state, and it always goes hand in hand with anarchy. Freedom is more important for people than order, civil society is stronger than the political elite. The latter do not respect, but they need them to be responsible for this, when something will go wrong – there was a laughter in the hall again. Kurkov sees a danger to Ukrainian democracy, primarily in the loss of civil society in the war. Because their representatives were the first to voluntarily use at the front.
The Polish writer Twardoch, whose novel “Die Nullinie” about a soldier in Ukraine recently appeared in the German version, doubted the premise of Raaba about the intimate connection between the East and Resistance. Currently, he does not see such a tradition in Poland. The Solidarnoć movement has long been that today’s world is completely different. He recalled that the national conservative individual entrepreneurs, which he, unlike many, does not consider the danger to democracy, had their roots in a solid napkin. Because together with democracy, capitalism moved, which some of the movement perceived as fraud in their ideals.
Khartishenvili answered Raaba’s question about how to determine the West is very powerful. The West is currently that the East protects “with its own bones and blood.” You must give yourself a moron in Europe, because European “ideas and valuable communities” cannot be agreed with the “man-frame”. One could hear more about the author and theater director born in Georgia.
But two and a half hours were too short for many moving positions on the stage. In the end, the “East” is extremely heterogeneous. But you went home with inspiring impulses – and with a view of the less dark times.
