Spaces of freedom and retreat

In the 1970s, circles of critical artists and intellectuals formed in the GDR and the Soviet Union, creating a vibrant counterculture in private apartments and studios in defiance of state restrictions. At Wolf Biermann’s apartment in Berlin, people made music, partied, and read. At “Mischka’s” kitchen table in Moscow, poets and dissidents gathered to type up and distribute banned literature. They countered state propaganda with remembrance and open exchange. Barbara Honigmann recounts these stories in her book *Mischka*. She reconstructs the lives and survival of her parents’ Jewish-Communist friends, as well as her own political and cultural development.

The reading will feature excerpts from the book as well as other texts by Jewish authors from the GDR. Covering the hopes and disappointments of Jewish returnees after the Shoah and their children’s search for their own critical path, the texts follow a common thread: private space as a place of retreat and resistance.

Afterward, Sandra Anusiewicz-Baer and Marko Martin will discuss their own experiences in the GDR, possibilities for spaces of freedom within an authoritarian system, and connections to the present, drawing on themes from the reading.