Portraits of War: Anastasiya

This is the seventh in a series of portraits from our home city, of Berliners affected by the war in Ukraine. You can see all the portraits as we publish them here.

By Jacob Sweetman:

As Anastasiya Volokita and I walk back towards Friedrichshagen station from the Müggelsee, we are talking about her Mum, her sister and her young niece, all of whom have managed to settle in a small Polish town, having escaped Ukraine. Her Mum, she says, used to be a bank teller but now cleans posh apartments for a living. It's okay, says Anastasiya, she likes it there and it's better than nothing. 

It's better than war, she says.

But then a cat crosses our path. The cat is a mess, its mangy fur is patchy at best, its ribs poking through. It limps sadly, like a drunken old man trying to get back to his empty home, far too late.

Anastasiya's got a cat, named Mushka Mukhich, that a friend brought out of Ukraine via Czechia to  to Poland. Anastasiya picked her up from there. Mushka Mukhich is a well travelled cat. She loves cats, and the state of this one floors her. We stop, she asks about where to find an animal shelter at this time of the evening; I've no idea, it's Friedrichshagen, it's May and the sun is already starting to set. She worries, asking two teenage girls passing if they can help. 

They can't.

A woman with a zimmer-frame comes slowly past, but she stops only to say how she loves Anastasiya's hair, intricate long plaits tightly, precisely woven with Ukrainian blue and yellow thread. 

And I too have to go. Anastasiya says it's fine. She'll take care of it, somehow.

She is wearing a black hoodie that she has zipped up, and pulls over her hands when the wind gets up as it does over the Müggelsee at this time of year – at any time of year. She has a pair of blue jeans that a friend gave her, and simple white toed trainers that were bought for her by a guy she met when she realised that she would be stuck in Berlin for a long time yet.

Because she'd never meant to stay. Anastasiya Volokita had just come to Berlin on the 22nd of February to celebrate her birthday three days later. But the most recent incarnation of the war in Ukraine broke out on the 24th, and she's not been back to Kyiv since.

“I just came for five days, for a change of mood, to have some fun, to take some time, to clear my head to prepare for the next festival season of work,” she says.

And though it might not seem much, it's the little things that have started to chip away at her confidence, at her sense of self. Anastasiya used to be, as she describes herself, “a fashionista”. Her wardrobe in Kyiv was full, she shimmered her way through the scene, but she says she doesn't really know who she is any more. Her brother will send some clothes from Kyiv soon, but she's already donated many of them to people there, people who have lost everything. 

She pulls at the sleeves of her hoodie again. At one point she giggles with a charming lack of self-consciousness when she says that she thought “it was always important to be important”, realising that maybe it wasn't.

She's a busy woman, Anastasiya. Or at least she used to be. From her first days at the design institute she moved to Kyiv to study at, her and her friends had made money by embroidering, decorating clothes for fashion designers and pop stars. She says they could do anything by hand and my eyes are drawn again to the eternal plaits in her hair. She went on to work for a designer, travelling to exhibitions, that sort of thing. But then, around 2014, she realised that she didn't need a boss who, as she says, didn't listen to her, and nor did she want one. So she struck out, alone.

“I just jumped onto the water and started to swim,” she says.

Her boyfriend was a producer, so she started managing, doing PR, helping spread the word and putting out fires, she became a promoter, a spokeswoman, the public face and internal engine of Comic Con Ukraine and the White Nights and the street food festivals. 

She misses the constant whirr of action because she's always been able to get things done, to use her contacts, to find solutions to problems. If there was a crisis then she would work it out, it was her job.

Her skills are well honed, for in Kyiv in 2014 there was a fundamental crisis. 

Kyiv's Maidan square - at the heart of the city both geographically, and spiritually, she says, as the point where the big concerts and the parties, and the fayres and events would take place - was occupied, ultimately, by tens of thousands of people, protesting against the pro-Russian president, Viktor Yanukovych, and the corruption and abuses inherent in his regime. 

It was a movement that divided the country in many ways, but also brought much of Anastasiya's generation together. In the protest's earlier days she was a regular visitor. She says there was something about the atmosphere, what she calls the revolutionary mood of the time, that couldn't help but draw her in. 

She felt she could do something important.

So she started doing what she did best, organising. She was letting volunteers stay on her floor or on her sofa. She and her friends set up flea market stalls to raise money to help. She sold off band merchandise at hers, anything she could, plectrums and drum skins and records autographed by big Ukrainian acts because she knew them all. 

And when Russian troops invaded Crimea she and her friends – and every tailor she knew - used the skills they had again. They made bulletproof vests and sent them to the volunteers going to the front. Anastasiya sourced the fabric and the materials for free, she arranged a studio to manufacture them in someone to pack them and someone to deliver them. 

But she can't do much here, in Berlin. She can't even speak the language, it's frustrating as hell. She's staying in the guest-house of a man who works in TV. She knows she's lucky, she's got enough space that friends can come to visit, but still.

“Now after three months... I don't understand who I am,” she says. “In general, I feel like like there's a big wall up, and I can't go back home, I don't know how to go back home.”

But, while at other times she is defiant, bullish almost, she says this plaintively. She says the word 'home' like it's a tennis ball being tossed in the air, her tone goes up and down. She almost howls it.

Kyiv is a cool city, she says, and she'd dreamed of it from the first time she went as a kid. Even when she was at the heart of a scene around a club in her home town of Dnipropetrovsk called Torba - which means either an old bag or to get pissed, depending on who you ask - where she knew all the musicians and the DJ's, she focussed on leaving. 

There's clubs that rival Berghain easily, there's districts that look more like Dubai than Berlin, she says. The effect of Comic Con Ukraine, for example, has been international, and she talks proudly of 'geek culture' and its importance to a generation who might never have connected in person without it. She talks of YouTubers and bloggers and of people being drawn there, when before they'd have otherwise ended up here.

She's in full flow. I ask if everyone in Ukraine is like this, talking and talking and talking, openly and honestly and endlessly, flitting between subjects the way a hummingbird does blooms, her sentences drawing themselves out, stretching over clauses and parentheses like the blue and yellow cotton spun through her plaits, but she says not. She says that in fact she's quite shy, but I don't believe her. 

At least not at that point.

The Müggelsee behind us is choppy. I drink a beer, Anastasiya a lemonade, and we are sitting down at a cafe table. The wind blows across us, whisking the ash out of the superfluous ashtray, and I worry about it blowing across the microphone on my recorder. 

So I push it closer to her at one point, only to withdraw it, unconsciously, a little as she talks of Bucha, where many of her friends had bought apartments because they were cheaper than in Kyiv, and where she had had an office before. Where she'd worked on a project setting up children's playgrounds. 

She says she knows that soldiers had ransacked those very offices, but that was the least of things, because she also knows of rapes and of murders. She says people she knows, colleagues and friends, died in the horrors that engorged the district in April, but she doesn't want to ask who. Her eyes are red, I ask her if she's okay, and she says she is. 

And then she tells me she can give me an “exclusive.” She says this with a nervous giggle that isn't entirely convincing, and one that makes more sense when I think of the way she pulls her sleeves over her hands, and the way her eyes are reddened, and how she seems so determined to convince me that she is okay with all of this - that she'll find a solution, because that's what she always does, despite the fact she's been stuck in the city she came to for a five day holiday four months ago, because her home country has been invaded and is currently at war.  

Anastasiya tells me then that she is also pregnant.

“Yeah,” she says, realising how weird it sounds to say out loud to a stranger.

She says that this is how men and women are in times of war. Men are drawn to fight and women to motherhood.

“I really think that when the war started, and I was like naked nerves, I needed a man who can relax me. It was a surprise, it's just happened, and we didn't talk a lot, we didn't know each other a lot, and we have just started to communicate. He has a lot of his own problems - I am in shock, I don't know what to do,” she says. 

“Life is changing so fast” she says, smiling again.

I tell her this is great news. “Congratulations” I say, and I mean it. I tell her having a baby is easier than you imagine, that the joy outweighs the struggle, which is true, but here and now as I say all this out loud the only thing really clear is that I don't know what the fuck I'm talking about. For at  least my kids were born in a country of my choosing. 

She carries on though. She always has.

“But, no, I will find a solution. What I need to do - I have free time right now, and not so much work to do - I have time to learn German.”

She also says she wants to train to be a psychologist, she says she knows that it'll help, that it'll be needed in the aftermath of all of this. She's making plans already. She wants to go home desperately, but it's not just her any more. She also says the baby's father is serious, he wants to be there, he's talking of them buying a house in Ukraine when this is all over. He's the one who bought her trainers. But she's being pushed and pulled at from all sides. 

“Space”, she implores. “What's space doing with me?”

But then space had one extra little hurdle to throw in our way in the form of that battered old cat, sloping off to curl up somewhere for eternity. Later she tells me that the cat had limped away while she was asking in a restaurant for help, and I know she went back to the guest-house of the man who works in TV that she is currently living in to worry all about it.

***

Jacob Sweetman is a writer and sports journalist, at home in Berlin. His work has appeared in 11Freunde, The Guardian, The Berliner Zeitung, Wisden amongst others. His writing about 1.FC Union Berlin can be mostly found here and he has a website here

Emily Sweetman is an illustrator, at home in Berlin. She is a genius, and her work can be seen here

Portraits of War: Yuriy Seredin

Illustration by Emily Sweetman

This is the sixth in a series of portraits from our home city, of Berliners affected by the war in Ukraine. You can see all the portraits as we publish them here.

By Jacob Sweetman:

Though in exile in Berlin since the start of the war, Yuriy Seredin is still in his position as a professor at the Lviv Conservatory. He's teaching remotely. The building itself - with its warm, storied rooms, flanked by pictures of, and played in by disparate figures such as Chopin's disciple Karol Mikuli and the pop star Rulana – sits empty, waiting to be filled with music again.

The carved figures of two muscled, loin-clothed men flank its name on the faded sky blue and pale mustard yellow coloured facade. A stone bandura, the 36 string instrument that stands as a potent symbol of Ukrainian musical nationalism, is below. 

It was Seredin's dad who introduced him to music, who showed him his first chords on a piano, and who realised the young man's perfect pitch when his age was still only just in double figures. He could pick out a melody without trying, there was something natural, an intrinsic musical sense about him. 

But that sense was honed by Eugen Filin, a teacher, pianist and prodigious composer, who'd previously studied and taught at the fabled Moscow Conservatory. Later, Seredin would go to boarding school for young musicians, but it was Filin who was the formative musical influence.

He talks about him with a certain awe, its as if he's in the park with us, off in the trees, listening in to the conversation, somehow. He taught the young man about Orlando Di Lasso and the Flemish school, about the history of polyphonic composition, and he gave him the courage to trust his own instincts. 

Seredin says that Filin changed his life. Though one is in Lviv and the other in Berlin, they're still in touch.

“He basically taught me how to improvise, not like in jazz, but how to play in different styles of classical music. And also he showed me how to play expressively on piano, like when you choose any two sounds and you can play them endless amounts of times, every time differently, emotionally. It's like psychokinesis... the human brain can do amazing things with that.”

It is as a jazz musician that Seredin is best known. His father had bought him a Louis Armstrong tape; it had the hits on it, 'Hello Dolly', that sort of thing, but then came another one, the greats of jazz piano with Fats Waller and Chick Corea and Dave Brubeck. Seredin then discovered Oscar Peterson and Erroll Garner, and, despite a time when he focussed purely on classical music, his fate was largely sealed. 

The first track on Yuriy Seredin's breakout, award winning 2018 album, 'Asylum Search', is called 'Krasne', after the village his Grandmother lived in. A little way east of Lviv, it's tiny and rural, nowadays dominated by the silos of the grain production plant, and cleaved in two by a railway. She was, he says, like a second mother to him, though he remembers the poverty that lead to him spending much of his childhood there. 

His memories drench the composition, and he describes the way they permeate his work.

"I live through this euphoric state when improvising; and at the same moment I am in real time, living through visions. It's like I'm fantasising, and playing that into the instrument... you know, living life through music"

The opening stabs of tenor and alto saxophone are rooted in the traditions of American hard bop – tonally it sounds like 'Eventually', the opening of Ornette Coleman's 1959 masterpiece 'The shape of Jazz to come' – but they are soon underpinned by Seredin's vast, swelling piano parts.

I had thought the record's underlying message was of unavoidable exile. It is called 'Asylum Search', after all – and it was recorded in Berlin, not Lviv or Kyiv - but he says not. He says it's more about the search for solace, for internal peace, a place to be.

"When I was recording this my father was about to die, and what I was playing in the studio was all about this. Thoughts and memories... it was a really personal record. Asylum Search is about looking for a place where you can feel an asylum for your soul, your home in the highest meaning, you know?"

But his search for asylum is no longer metaphorical, internal. He's sat in Berlin watching the war at home. It took a while to adjust, to train his focus, and he says that his relationship with his music has changed. He pours his energy into his piano when he's on stage, he calls it his thirst to express. 

But Berlin's not his home, no matter how he says he does like it. Even if the jazz scene is better than Kyiv's. Even if, as he says, the players are better and more numerous here. 

And he doesn't know how long he'll stay now. He says it depends, depends on the war, and on what's left when it's over. He'll still need to be able to play. He's resigned to being away for a while. 

“Time will tell”, he says.

Yuriy Seredin thinks a lot abut the composition process, and it dominates our conversation. Especially, I think, because it's so much harder to come up with much new material since the war began. 

“I'm still in this position where it's really hard to get into this euphoric state to compose, because all this background stuff is fucking it up”, he says. 

He's polite, and answers all my questions, no matter how stupid they may be. It's the first real day of sunshine Berlin has seen for months, and we are sat in the Tiergarten as birds around us regain their voices and schoolkids give continued exercise to theirs. Police in short sleeves drive lazily around the gravel paths looking for something to do, someone's day to interrupt. 

But there's a sullenness to Seredin, something looming over him, a weight bowing his back. We sit in the shade. He has a thin puffer jacket which he zips up halfway through our conversation. His skin is pale, his hair dark and thick. Though he's probably two metres tall, he reminds me a little of Andrea I Appiani's painting of Napoleon, somehow. His nose is inquisitive, it pokes out of his face, but he points it at the ground between his feet a lot.

His voice is low, and he talks of mental health issues he's faced before the war in his home country began. 

Seredin is happy about the path he now treads (though he's careful to say he's not proud, because pride stunts development), the one that winds between playing and composing and teaching a new generation of Ukrainian musicians at the conservatory. He felt let down by at least one of his professors when he studied there, who barely seemed to care about his charges and their musical development at all. It was as if he was just killing time, dining off his reputation.

He takes music seriously. This is more than being just about melody and arrangement. Shit, he says, he's hardly in it to get rich, and in this he probably has a point. 

But he also knows of music's inherent political power, as embodied by the contemporary recognition of the blind peasants who played the bandura, that strung instrument embossed in stone on the conservatory's front, wiped out under Stalin in the '30s. 

Or by the ideas of its founder, Mykola Lysenko, himself.

Lysenko, who died in 1912, was a composer whose life's work was dedicated to the pursuit of creating a purely Ukrainian canon. He wrote the music for the hymn, “Prayer for Ukraine” still played across the country today, and described as Ukraine's 'spiritual anthem'. There is a story about how Tchaikovsky wanted to stage one of his works in Moscow but the state wouldn't allow it to be sung in Ukrainian, and Lysenko refused to have it translated into Russian. 

So when Yuriy Seredin talks to me of a nascent new project, adding orchestral music to traditional Ukrainian folk songs, he is again following in Lysenko's footsteps. Lysenko published seven volumes of them in the 1800s. 

But there is something unsettling in the darkness Yuriy feels, at the destination his desperation has lead him towards as we talk. He is embittered by the war, and when we speak he is clearly being dragged through the mires of his emotions. It has made him, as he says, “at different moments, disappointed, desperate, sad, bitter and depressed” – justifiably so, of course - but he's closing himself off. 

"After last April I realised I needed to get rid of the influence of any Russian info-space. Because I was a big fan of Russian literature, of Russian music. Of course I speak Russian to some Russians here because they don't speak Ukrainian, and these are people who I know, that I'm quite sure about their okay position regarding the war. I understand from human point of view Russians, who are against war and suffer from hate. For that I pity them. But the thing with collective responsibility, I guess, also remains. But I'm trying to avoid... I stopped reading Russian books for sure, listening to their music. I just want to distance myself from that.”

We moved on after he said this. We talked about composition, about jazz and about Berlin, but I couldn't shift it from my mind. It drew me back again and again.

“I decided that I will never play with any Russians 'til the end of my life, it's just my civil position after what Russia did. It's like... I'm not... I know many people are against the Putin regime and I have friends there, but... like... at least what I'm thinking now, its my - how do you say - not to say my tribute to the victims - that's the wrong word - but in memory of the victims I don't ever want to play in any Russian band or one that contains Russian musicians. I think that's not right.”

Aside from the obvious tragedies of this war it strikes me that this is one of its most pernicious and devastating, and long-ranging effects. The closing off of cultural exchanges, doors slamming shut on other worlds. And I suppose I really just hope at some point he will be able to change his mind.

***

Jacob Sweetman is a writer and sports journalist, at home in Berlin. His work has appeared in 11Freunde, The Guardian, The Berliner Zeitung, Wisden amongst others. His writing about 1.FC Union Berlin can be mostly found here and he has a website here

Emily Sweetman is an illustrator, at home in Berlin. She is a genius, and her work can be seen here

Portraits of War: Emmanuelle

Illustration by Emily Sweetman

This is the fifth in a series of portraits from our home city, of Berliners affected by the war in Ukraine. You can see all the portraits as we publish them here.

By Jacob Sweetman:

Emmanuelle Chaze says she'll never forget the night of the 24th of February when she got the call from French national radio.

'Be ready,' they said. 'It has happened'. 

She'd been at the Munich security conference the week before, she'd heard both the platitudes and the pleas for help. Chaze already knew the invasion of Ukraine was a fait accompli, but still.

“My immediate thought,” she tells me, “was about the people that would be displaced.”

People say to her all the time that because of her years of study into the lives of the Huguenots - persecuted and driven out of Catholic France to scatter themselves across Europe, putting down roots that persist to this day – it makes sense that Chaze spends her professional career reporting on migration, on refugees, on the human stories of degradation and fear that take place at international borders during all too unexceptional times. 

Chaze catalogues those spaces where war spreads out its wings, the hinterlands of our most invidious, inhuman actions. Though she says any link to her academic past is coincidental.

She grew up in France, but close to Germany. She speaks several languages and is learning more. They come easily to her, as if disregarding the lines drawn on maps supposed to keep us all apart. And maybe it is just another coincidence, but she does go on to say that, actually, 

“I don't really think anything happens just by chance.”

She says all this in the cafe in the swollen, gilded belly of Dussmann's Kulturhaus, as officious waiters fuss around inadequately sized tables and the goldfish swim placidly in the blue tiled pond behind us. We are at the heart of the Friedrichstadt, part of Berlin founded by the Huguenots. 

We are also only a stone's throw from the Tränenpalast, the former crossing point between what were once called East and West Berlin.

Coincidence or not, there is at least a certain synchronicity here. 

Last year, Emmanuelle Chaze stepped on board a boat for the first time in her life to set sail into the Mediterranean for seven weeks to report on the crew's desperate efforts at rescuing refugees cast out to sea. She faced tragedy on that boat, as she also saw occasional moments of the best of humanity. She got to know kids, eight, nine year olds, pulled from the sea; they played with her camera, they smiled into its lens.

So she was ready, mentally, to go to the Polish / Ukrainian border when the call came on the 24th.

But she took a few days to prepare before heading for Hrebenne. She needed time to find out what was really going on. She needed to make sure she had security, sorting out the practicalities, like a hotel far enough away so she didn't use up nearer rooms necessary for refugees or volunteers. But she was still one of the first there, early enough to witness everything falling into place, seeing the evolution of the border town as the crisis developed

The first report she made was before she'd even reached the checkpoint. Her fixer (though she says she hates the term) thought she was mad.

She had five minutes until she was live, the feed already running in her ears. She simply put up her tripod and started narrating the scene; a usually busy motorway almost empty; a few parked buses in the distance at the Ukrainian border; the bitter cold, it was minus 15; the people who had made it this far with bowed backs, sunken faces and lowered heads, looking, as she said on live TV, completely exhausted.

She says that she's not seen anything like it before, it was like a film. It was eerie, frightening.

“People were coming one after the other, and they were looking at their phones for directions, like you would in a city when you're a tourist. But they all looked like they hadn't slept for days. And I know those people, because I've been on other borders...”

She's told the stories of people in Calais and Lesbos, too, places at the very edges of other conflicts.

“...And seeing them there in that otherwise fairytale like scenery is strange. Western Poland is really pretty,” she says, trying her best to describe images so discordant that they only really made sense as she slowly talked us through them.

She didn't do any interviews with refugees to camera at all that day. She couldn't do it to the people coming across. There's a time and a place, she says, even if it would have made better news. So she worked, she tried to keep warm. She tried to keep her equipment functioning. 

Talking about the seven weeks on the boat - an experience that she says changed her life forever - she mentions the camaraderie of the crew. They were professionals, honest and blunt, as they have to be, because they have to trust each other, their lives depend on it, even if they can't always get along. And she talks similarly of bonds between fellow journalists whose silent understanding is forged through a common experience most of us could never comprehend.

That of a border during wartime.

After coming back from Hrebenne she spent a few days back at home in Berlin, before heading back, this time to Medyca. She wasn't alone. All sorts of people are drawn to these weird, tragic places.

There are, at first, local, then national then international TV channels, elbows out, vying for position. Different newsrooms wanting different stories for different audiences. There are volunteers, well wishers, fixers, locals too. 

There are thrill seekers and amateurs trying to make their names with footage who the serious journalists won't mix with because they are unprofessional and take risks that no-one should, and who the serious newsrooms won't touch any more, not with a bargepole. 

Then there are the profusion of well-meaning incompetents, bogged down in the mires of their own bureaucracy. NGOs like the UNHCR who had to apologise for being late to Medyca, but whose gazebos sprung up like mushrooms after the last frost, that will stay there for months now, years maybe, as the border situation becomes normalised like so many others around the world.

Then there are the refugees themselves, different movements of different people, arriving in stages, sometimes according to status, sometimes to chance, and at others to the realities of the war itself. 

She talks about the first groups often to arrive. In some ways they are the lucky ones. 

“So at first there is the relief, 'we are safe'. But then as soon as they get some rest and a shower, proper clothes, they realise that now with that comes the deep humiliation that you depend on someone else... Nobody wants to be a refugee.” 

This is why, she says, people are already returning to Ukraine in ever greater numbers.

She also met young men in their early 20's who'd been living in Poland, on their way back into Ukraine to fight the Russians, noting that this was one of the toughest, most moving encounters she had out there. They were at least well prepared, which cheered her slightly, but not entirely.

For they also knew they were probably going back to die.

She says the people who are drawn towards the borders are also not always altruistic. Some will always see opportunities to exploit other people's misery, like the human traffickers, vultures, circling. She fails to hide her disgust. 

Chaze works all the time, and it’s only afterwards, when she goes home, that she can begin to try and sort out things in her head. She says she'll have to 'try to tie herself down', only half jokingly, because the clashing of images, of feelings, of emotions, and of helplessness come up against her impossible drive to work, work, work. 

After she got off the boat, people thought that she'd go mad during the two week quarantine in Sicily, but they'd missed the point that this was necessary, just as her conversations with other journalists on her return from the Ukrainian / Polish border with other journalists were. She needed to decompress, to process everything she had seen, to put things in some kind of an order. 

The first thing I asked when I got in touch originally, was how she deals with what she's seen, how it doesn't make her tear her hair out, how she doesn't end up punching the walls or crying in the streets.

She answered that she was actually asking herself the same question at the time, but she still didn't know, really. 

“I just do what I do,” she says as if it's the easiest thing in the world. 

“You know everybody was so shocked by the pictures [of Mariupol] over the weekend - and they are absolutely shocking - but if people are surprised, I wonder what they imagine happens during wars. Because the sufferings of the Ukrainians are the sufferings of the Syrians that we could see happening for years if we opened our eyes. So now, just because it happens on the continent more people are touched and are receptive. 

“But a war is a war,” she continues. “It's atrocious. Innocents die. A few days ago there was a bombing in Idlib in Syria, and the father could only recognise his child from the shoes he was wearing. This is happening right now, and its always happened and unfortunately always will because we aren't changing.”

I say that this is where she comes in. This is where she makes a difference, where she is important, because no-one else is telling these stories. She disagrees, though.

“None of us is irreplaceable,” she says.

***

Jacob Sweetman is a writer and sports journalist, at home in Berlin. His work has appeared in 11Freunde, The Guardian, The Berliner Zeitung, Wisden amongst others. His writing about 1.FC Union Berlin can be mostly found here and he has a website here

Emily Sweetman is an illustrator, at home in Berlin. She is a genius, and her work can be seen here

Portraits of War: Tahir

Illustration by Emily Sweetman

This is the fourth in a series of portraits from our home city, of Berliners affected by the war in Ukraine. You can see all the portraits as we publish them here.

By Jacob Sweetman:

When we speak, a few days after Filippo Grandi, the head of the UNHCR, released a statement,  confirming that “the ugly reality, that some Black and Brown people fleeing Ukraine – and other wars and conflicts around the world – have not received the same treatment as Ukrainian refugees”, Tahir Della is just off the phone to the Polish / Ukrainian border. 

And though he is in good spirits, and flashes a brilliant, American toothed smile, his frustration still shines through. 

Della says from his office in Kreuzberg that people on the ground are just “sick and tired of it now”. He says that there's no support, nor the political will to help people of colour in their time of need, as they try to flee from the Russian invasion. Or for the sleepless volunteers trying to help them. 

They are sick and tired of still having to fight for something so basic, so fundamental. Sick and tired that a moment of solidarity across Europe in support of a people enduring the most terrifying and barbaric of situations, is still mired in the same old bullshit of different classifications being made for different people of different skin colours. 

Such as the free train tickets offered to refugees. As long as they are European.

He knows all too well that, with grim inevitability, racism will always rear its malignant head in the worst of times, too. 

Della and I talk about the Humboldt Forum, the grotesque reimagining of the Prussian Stadtschloss, filled with the fruits of colonialism. In there is a new exhibition, dedicated to Berlin, patting itself on the back for being modern and cool, daubed with “urban art”, which greets its visitors with a statement about how change in the world could be brought about 'holistically', when it ignores the fact that the system itself is at fault. 

The system that put the exhibition together, that rebuilt the palace, the system that put a tiny piece in the corner about the German genocide in Namibia. 

Though we can't call it that at all. 

“It was horrible, everybody accepts that. It was wrong, against humanity...” he says. “But it wasn't a genocide. Because if it's a genocide you have to take care, responsibility. At least, you apologise for it, and you say, okay, what do the people or the country who have been impacted want from us?”

It's like he's in Catch 22.

“We have accepted for a long time that this happened, but we don't want to be responsible for it. We can do things, make announcements, we can sign petitions, just so we don't have to look at ourselves.”

But we come back to Ukraine again and again. It's an extension of the same fight he's been fighting for years. 

Della says that he understands the closer proximity of Ukraine to Germany is a factor. He is German, he was born in Munich, of course he understands. So he's sick and tired, too, that the capacity of Europe to help refugees can be so malleable all of a sudden, when it was previously too stretched to help pluck children out of the Mediterranean to save them from drowning. 

It goes on and on. He doesn't want less help for Ukrainians, it's not a game, he knows how many have died, how many are terrified for their lives there. He just wants the same amount of help for everyone. He's just had two Senegalese staying in his small flat, having come to Berlin before they can to France. Della speaks no French, and they no German, but it worked out okay, he says. They understood each other pretty well.

When Tahir Della was young his American Grandfather told him a story about his own uncle in Louisiana. 

“He was a carpenter for a white company and he was waiting for almost two months to get paid. And when the money still didn't come he went to Baton Rouge to find out what was happening... and he never came back.”

He repeats himself, for even now the story is so tragic, its conclusion so callous, it doesn't make sense.

“He never came back.”

“Nobody knows still today what happened to him...  and the thing that was really moving... or...” He pauses again, for there are really no words fitting to the feelings this brought up in the young Della, in either the English or German languages that he flits between with such a lightness of tongue.

“...there was no structure back then where black people could go and say 'we are missing somebody from our family'. There was no legal body who could go and investigate when somebody is just gone. And that's not even a  hundred years ago, that was in the 40's of the last century.”

It wasn't the only story like that his Grandfather had. But that's why the older man was so proud when Della took his somehow inevitable place - with a spit-bucket and a gumshield and a towel in his hand, and a courageous streak a mile wide within him - in the corner of all the people of colour in his country. 

Now, in his 60's, Della is still there in that corner. 

He was on the board of the Initiative for Black People in Germany (ISD) til 2019 and is their spokesman. He's fought against the continuing riches reaped from colonialism, against double standards and hypocrisy, and against the racism inherent within the system itself, for more than half his life. 

He joined the ISD in the eighties, a group of advocates and activists founded by the likes of the poet, writer and academic, May Ayim, of whose 'daily deflowahin a di spirit,' and
'evryday erowshan a di soul' the great dub poet Linton Kwesi Johnson wrote in his paean, 'Reggae Fi May Ayim'.

And now if you walk along the southern bank of the Spree - once the industrial heart of Berlin, crammed with warehouses and factories until it was bombed to the ground, which would then become transformed as clubs like Dimitri Hegemann's UFO sprung up just around the corner, playing techno, black music from Detroit - Underground Resistance, lest we forget! – you will now see Ayim's name, having replaced that of the original Gröbenufer. 

Della says he knew Ayim for years. They were about the same age, they fought the same battles, but drifted apart as she withdrew into herself before her tragic death in 1996. But her role in the organisation was  never forgotten, her soul never completely eroded even if her spirit grew deflowered. Della played a large role in the renaming of the river bank in her honour and he remembers fondly the day they could finally celebrate her immortalisation. 

There were speeches and there was music and the sun was bright in the sky.

“It was a beautiful event,” he says, his sentence dripping with understatement.

He's not one to talk himself or his own efforts up. But the following lines from 'Reggae Fi May Ayim' - 'Tru all di learnin, Di teachin, Rizistin, An assistin, Di lovin, Di givin, Organizin, An difyin' - could have been written about him, too.

He's been doing all of these things since this war began, too. In the face of what he sees as mainstream apathy at best, of ignorance and intentional silence at worst. It's pretty simple, really. 

Ever since his Grandfather told him that story about his murdered uncle, he felt he had little other choice.

Della has worked in theatres, he's driven a cab. Anything, really, he says, to pay the  bills while he concentrates on the bigger things. But mostly he worked as a photographer. It was commercial stuff, he'd shoot for adverts, and he's quick to say  that he has never considered himself an artist, that his view of the world is that of a political activist. But the two  things almost certainly inform each other. He has to be able to view things with a certain detachment. 

He has to be able to let neither his righteous anger nor his natural romanticism get in the way of his vision. He has to be able to explain soberly what he sees, so we can understand it better.

“We have a very small, narrowed narrow view on what racism is,” he says. “For many, racism is skinheads, Nazis, you know...” 

He says that we think it is only about intent, but that this is an act of self-delusion. 

“This is the same for the institutions. The police, they say they cant be racist because they are working according to the Grundgesetz. As many people say 'okay, you know, I have black friends though, how can I be racist?' Or, 'I  live in Neukölln, you know...'

“This is really a problem, because as long as you can't identify or accept that there is a problem with racism, you are not coming to a point where you can deal with it. We have to listen to those who complain, who say they are afflicted by it on a daily basis.”

And now he is facing this new fight, a continuation of all the others that came before, certainly, but complicated by the fact that, though there are organisations similar to ISD in Poland and Ukraine, they are far less established, less significant, less well funded.

And let's be frank; Tahir Della is far from optimistic when it comes to the chances of Olaf Scholz's new government addressing the institutional racism that is affecting tens of thousands of people of colour fleeing the horrors of the war in Ukraine.

He laughs when I ask, spontaneous, loud and true. He makes it seem like such a stupid question. 

It won't stop him trying to do what he can though.

“From the first day on after the beginning of the war it became clear that there was a big problem. I never had thought - honestly, I really didn't expect this. Because we didn't know. We are speaking of 70,000 people. 70,000 people of colour who don't dare to think 'what will happen with us?' 

But even now, knowing everything he knows, everything he's learned in the face of this brutality and of the innocent people caught up in it, he still seems shocked.

“That,” he says, “I didn't expect that on such a scale.”

***
Jacob Sweetman is a writer and sports journalist, at home in Berlin. His work has appeared in 11Freunde, The Guardian, The Berliner Zeitung, Wisden amongst others. His writing about 1.FC Union Berlin can be mostly found here and he has a website here

Emily Sweetman is an illustrator, at home in Berlin. She is a genius, and her work can be seen here

Portraits of War: Yuriy Gurzhy

Illustration by Emily Sweetman

This is the third in a series of portraits from our home city, of Berliners affected by the war in Ukraine. You can see all the portraits as we publish them here.

By Jacob Sweetman:

You can tell Yuriy Gurzhy's a singer. It's there in the way his voice rises when he's excited; talking about the success of his seminal Berlin parties, Russendisko, that spawned a phenomenon he'd never expected; or about hearing Lou Reed's 'New York' album for the first time as a teenager in Kharkiv. That was on a tape, recorded itself off another tape, taped in turn off a tape belonging to a guy who'd brought a bagful of these black plastic gemstones back from a trip to the States. 

“17 is an exciting age, anyway,” he says, noting that he is now getting to experience it again vicariously through the eyes of his son. But his late teens were spent watching the fall of the Soviet Union from within, and he was compiling his own soundtrack to it.

There was rarely much decent information about the music he listened to. Sometimes the name would be written on the sticker or on the case. Sometimes a year, but often not. He heard the Velvet Underground's 'White Light White Heat' a while later, realising slowly it was the same guy singing.

It was like he was collecting together all the pieces of a jigsaw, and only years later did they start fitting together to form a bigger picture. He was listening to bands like Dead Can Dance, to Throbbing Gristle, but also Grazhdanskaya Oborona, Egor Letov's seminal band from the Omsk underground.

“I don't know if these guys ever intended to sound like punk rock, but they had no chance. They couldn't play, the instruments were shit, the recording machines were shit, too. Probably just a tape recorder. But they were big, and they were banned in the late Soviet years so they really gained popularity in the early 90s as martyrs, suddenly able to play huge venues.”

This was a logical process, the natural emerging of a post-Soviet culture, but one that had begun a long time before, even from the Ukrainian folk songs his father knew, collected by people passing through villages, listening to whatever they could and learning it to preserve them, like Alan Lomax did in the Tennessee mountains a world away but at a similar time.

Gurzhy's dad would sing at family parties, playing on a seven string gypsy guitar, or on an old piano with his right hand much stronger than his left. They'd all join in.

His Dad was not very good on guitar, he says, but they didn't have an accordion at home, at which he was much better. 

But it was his dad's secrets that comprised his greatest loves. He was married to a Jewish woman, had banned, home-printed samizdat texts at home, and spoke fluent Ukrainian, none of which were fully apparent to the young Yuriy. He wanted to protect his family, he didn't want to attract attention to them. Yuriy's maternal grandfather and grandmother were dentists who also saw patients at home, illegally.

Yuriy's father liked the Russian songwriters of the sixties, but while far from pop, he wasn't into the “heavier stuff” Yuriy would discover later, with cryptic meanings hidden behind obscure metaphors.

“I remember hearing bands from Lviv in the early 90s and... 'woah'. You understand the language perfectly, you understand every word, but sometimes it's like, '...who's this partisan fighting again?' There weren't too many possibilities to find out more. So you have a song, and you listen to the song, and then one day maybe you get to meet the guy who sings it.”

It was the passing on of musical traditions. He calls it a folkloric process, and is also what he has spent the last couple of decades contributing to with his band, Rotfront; making pan-European music, rooted in ska and klezmer, with in-jokes about Berlin and Barcelona, dotted with hip-hop flourishes and proto-dancehall toasts, and horns that brighten corners otherwise occupied by rumbling bass lines. 

He jokes that they are thought of as German when abroad, but as a migrant band in Germany, though he later says that he wasn't really joking.

It's because he ties together all these loose ends. It's the way he is wired, curating the contents of what he calls his “internal hard drive.”

So his efforts to help his home city in its time of terrible need is centred around these connections, his ability to string together the different parts of his world into a cohesive whole, organising, communicating. 

And it's largely the same thing, anyway.

Yuriy is good company, we drink strong coffee, we talk about music, mostly. Even though he's exhausted.

But the city he and his forebears called home looms over the conversation.  

“Kharkiv was home to the new Ukrainian literature, until most of these writers and poets were killed in the '30s. So I remember wondering, when studying, where is all the good stuff? But there wasn't anything else, because they were all fucking killed.”

Kharkiv is as far from the Russian border as Potsdam is from Berlin. It's only 20 miles or so, nothing. Kharkiv is under attack as we speak, as we talk of old bands and mutual interests. Rockets rain down upon the city every day. A third of its residents are thought to have fled including most of his family, but he's still got many friends there.  

He's been writing a diary for the Tagesspiegel since February. The latest post when we meet is about a trove of old photographs taken by his father, comparing them with ones from today, with holes in buildings that were once whole, with dust and rubble lying like a shroud across previously clean, friendly looking streets, all shot in sharp, Kodachrome colours. 

It is, he says, an attempt to give some context to German readers. He says all we really need is some empathy.

Then he echoes what so many people have said to me recently. 

“I know how it works sometimes, you just turn numb. At some point you just can't react to these images any more, the numbers are just so abstract.”

It's then his voice drops half an octave into a rich baritone; like when he talks of his cousin's nine month pregnant wife sheltering 24 hours a day, seven days a week, in a cellar with 200 others, hiding from the Russian bombardment. And the tone continues, though he speaks more wryly of gigs that will likely never happen, but that were already being planned, in Mariupol and Kyiv and in Donbas for this Spring.

You can tell Yuriy Gurzhy's a guitarist, though he's better than his dad ever was. It's there in the times he doesn't know what to do with his hands; he rubs the drying skin on his forehead; he fusses around his neat Prenzlauerberg kitchen; he plays with the pastry sat in front of him. 

He gets up and sits down, he gets up and sits down. He's being pulled in a lot of directions at once.

Yuriy grew up speaking Russian. He's spoken more and more Ukrainian for years now, but remembers when it was still an alien concept.

“One of my classmates switched to Ukrainian in the fourth year, I think. It was really weird, until I realised that he actually comes from a Ukrainian speaking village... so in a way he closed the circle. But I remember what a shock it was, because it was after the holidays he'd spent back in the village of his grandmother and he came back and spoke Ukrainian to all of us. And people were like 'are you fucking kidding?' But we learned to respect that pretty soon. He was the first one.”

He says he sometimes feels ashamed for having Russian as his native tongue. That's another thing. But he also says he feels guilty all the time anyway, even though he's been living through a whirlwind for the last fifty days.

“I've not done that much. I still feel like it's not enough. I hate myself...” It's not self-pity, though, just a rumination. “But also on good days I feel like I'm doing more than ever. So there's strength, and there's an energy coming from out of... I don't know where, but probably just of necessity. And as long as it keeps me going and going.”

He bristles when I ask him about hearing the news of February 24th. 

“The war has been going on for eight years”, he says.

“I played Donbas a couple of times, I saw the places affected by the war, the people affected by the war. It's not 'coming', it was already there, we are just in the escalation phase.”

I try to say I meant this, but I too still think of this war as being a sudden development. He cuts me off. It's something he has to say in every interview he does, and he's doing a lot of interviews now we are all suddenly interested in Eastern Europe again.

We talk of the importance of music to all this, of how in the modern world it can cause tangible change in terms of instant distribution, of exchanging information, and the fundraising capabilities unheard of a decade ago. 

We always come back to music. 

“I think the real music freak was my grandpa, my mothers dad,” he says. “He hated all this songwriter shit, he was into pop. And when I was growing up we lived in the same apartment, six of us, grandparents, parents, my sister and me. I was sick a lot as a kid and I'd stay home and my grandparents stayed at home too.”

Yuriy still has his grandfather's tape deck at home in Berlin.

He then tells me of a friend who arrived in Leipzig with her son, a 14 year old, who'd had to leave his guitar behind. Yuriy managed to sort one out for him in four minutes. 

“It was a personal best” he says, allowing himself the small consolation that he's helped, because he knows of an instrument's inherent importance. 

His grandfather wanted to pursue a career in music as a young man, but then after the 2nd World War he became a dentist. His violin had been stolen, and he probably thought he needed to do focus on survival, to do something less fun, more solid instead.

So I ask Yuriy if he thought his path to becoming a musician was, in a way, making up for the dreams he missed out on.

“Absolutely,” he says. “Both him and my dad, I had it from both sides. I had no choice.”

His inheritance is in the knowledge passed down that those strings, however loosely strung and amateurishly struck, that that neck, however wide or well attached to that body, however battered and chipped - and that the voices, singing in whatever language is at hand, holding a simple melody for a fleeting moment - are as important, sometimes, as anything else.

***

Jacob Sweetman is a writer and sports journalist, at home in Berlin. His work has appeared in 11Freunde, The Guardian, The Berliner Zeitung, Wisden amongst others. His writing about 1.FC Union Berlin can be mostly found here and he has a website here

Emily Sweetman is an illustrator, at home in Berlin. She is a genius, and her work can be seen here

Portraits of War: "Anna"

Illustration by Emily Sweetman

This is the second in a series of portraits from our home city, of Berliners affected by the war in Ukraine. You can see all the portraits as we publish them here.

By Jacob Sweetman:

After we spoke in early March she sent me a message about what to call her. She wrote, “In Max Frisch style: let my name be... Anna” 

Anna smiles guiltily when she says she's started smoking, knowing how ridiculous it is after all these years. But I don't blame her, and God knows it's understandable. For smoking may well be the last thing she has any agency over at the moment, seeing as she has no idea when she'll be able to return to Russia,  if ever. 

But she also senses that much of Germany - the country she lives in, and has done for more than a decade, and in which her daughter was born - regards her with ill-concealed suspicion. Though Anna faces neither daily shelling nor tanks, and her home city remains intact, at least physically, still, she feels helpless and lost, and she doesn't know what to do. 

Still, she feels a crushing pressure, from without and within. 

Anna was born in Chelyabinsk, “in the Soviet Union”, she says as if to emphasise that it is a different country to the one currently waging a war inside of Ukraine. It's a city of about a million people, flanked by the Ural Mountains, equidistant between Yekaterinburg and Magnitogorsk (where the first of the triptych of huge sword featuring sculptures, that includes the Soviet memorial in Treptower Park, stands. The other is in Stalingrad). 

It is an industrial city, an isolated city on the edge of Siberia, famous mostly, not for its production of tanks during WWII or even its tea packing factory, but for the meteorite that exploded above its skies and onto the screens of our phones a few years ago.

She was still in single figures when communism collapsed, though the old textbooks hung around in school a while longer. I ask first if she remembers a sense of optimism around the time, but she says not. 

“Other people saw a chance to make business, maybe, but we were just worried about what to eat the next day. There were no hopes. Just survival, from one day to another. We were in a one room apartment, my mum and I." 

She says it was humiliating watching the flashes of sudden wealth on the backs of others while she was wearing worn out clothes. Later on, of course, Vladimir Putin would weaponise this feeling across much of the populace.

She laughs as she toys nervously with the small golden crucifix around her neck, sunflower yellow painted fingernails flashing in the Spring sunshine. It's not entirely convincing, her laughter. She's come so far geographically, 2,000 miles. But it's as if she's gone backwards, too. 

She sits near the window in a two bedroom Berlin apartment she shares with her daughter and her mum, who came over before the war started to help Anna out after her marriage collapsed. Her mum speaks no German or English apart from a flawlessly annunciated, polite and practised 'hello'. Anna says she wants to return - to what, she's not sure - but she's trying to keep her here as long as she can. It's ironic, she says. They tried originally to move to Germany in the 90's, Anna ultimately making it in 2004.

"And now she's here, she doesn't want to stay." 

Anna says that her mum still harbours plans of a Crimean holiday in the Summer, despite her daughters' protestations. Her mum's memories of state TV news reporting that all is well in the annexed region linger somehow. 

"I remember visiting my family and watching TV. They always started with 'the President did this today... He visited...' and the next part was 'The Crimea is going very well, they are very happy with being part of Russia'."

Anna says she already understood that the prospect of Putin resetting what she calls the "embarrassment" of Boris Yeltsin's drunken, corrupt presidency was impossible a long time ago.

The gaps in her sentences grow longer, partly because her English isn't as good as her German. But mostly because for a lot of the time she just doesn't know what to say.

"I started to understand it when he exchanged the presidency with the Prime Minister. I was very scared back then, it was just so obvious. I went to demonstrations and I voted, but there was always this sense of being observed. It was a touch screen and I was thinking maybe they were also saving my fingerprints." She will need to renew her passport at some point in the next year, but the idea of entering the Embassy again fills her with dread. 

"It's Russian soil," she says. “I never feel safe there.”

She knows that someone in a building opposite the Kremlin has been looking at her website, that they know she's been critical of them, and that her breaking of new laws could mean her imprisonment. 

"As a linguist, I am scared by the use of language, and how they have started to tell you what to say, what to call things.  I know it's a war, they shouldn't tell me not to call it a war if its a war, you know. But if I call a war a war, I go to prison."

Though she's been in Germany for a decade and a half she's never felt at home here. She lived in Leipzig for a few years at first where she learned to speak German as flawlessly as if it was a mother tongue to avoid the stares of people on the trains, on the trams. 

“They just wanted me to leave,” she says. 

Berlin was better, at least through the comparative anonymity offered by the city – and she is keen to point out her neighbours have offered meals if she ever finds herself stuck, though a lack of food is not the problem - but the staring on the trains and on the trams, and the fear of speaking her language has started to return.

She fears the wave of rage against any Russians, and mentions the recent firebombing of a Russian school in Marzahn, one of hundreds of attacks on buildings and on people since the invasion. She says it doesn't feel safe here. She's glad her daughter doesn't go to a Russian school.

Her daughter is about the age Anna was when the Soviet Union collapsed, but she has access to the outside world in a way Anna never did. She watches kid's news. She asks Anna every day how it could be that Russia have invaded Ukraine, that they have started a war?

Anna says she doesn't know how to answer any more. She doesn't know how it happened, herself. Even until the invasion, like so many of us, she was convinced it wouldn't come, that this was all just a game, the timeless noises of little men in far away places, puffing out their chests. 

But it was an act of self-delusion, a bit like her Mum wanting to go to Crimea. 

And in turn Anna has friends and family who now call her a traitor.

"Yeah, they were very angry at me. They said now that I'm a 'foreigner, I'm different now', that I don't see the truth. And, 'look at the Crimea,' they say. 'It's so good and it's ours it has always been ours... My aunt is very much pro-war, and she screams at my mum on the phone, saying 'how dare you say Putin is a shit, because if we didn't go in, the next day they would attack us...' It scares me because just a few weeks ago I could visit them without talking about politics, but now that's over. I cannot go there any more. It just wouldn't be... it wouldn't be me."

Her father is "patriotic" (when she says this, she thinks first long and hard about the correct word to use) and works in education. “He studies means of measuring patriotism in children.” 

She says he has a list of qualities each girl should have and each boy should have. 

"It's so Soviet," she says with a smile.

She says contemptuously how people are still making jokes about the war, how there's one doing the rounds about the men of Russia being happy that Apple pulled out before International Women's day, so they didn't have to spend money on expensive gifts for their wives and mistresses and girlfriends.  

"They say, 'oh we don't care about McDonald's', and the Prime Minister says 'we can produce cutlets and rolls ourselves.' Well I don't care about McDonald's and it's not about cutlets and rolls."

She estimates that 70 percent of Russia supports the war, and that there'll be no getting through to them.

"I spoke to a  theatre director, a Russian, who lives here, and he says the only thing for us to do -  for the 30 percent - is to leave, we cannot deal with the rest of them... We need to establish a Russian life here."

She sees beauty in so much Russian culture, classical and contemporary, but she talks sadly of her favourite actors, musicians, poets, being scattered around the globe. They have no choice, she says.

"I'm afraid to lose the connection, and I'm afraid the day we try again we'll have nothing in common any more... I'm losing my people," she says. 

"Yet at the same time," I say, "you're here and you don't feel you have these people behind you either."

"I never had them."

"But you're not thinking of leaving Germany?" I ask.

"No, not yet. Because of my daughter, and, as well, where to live? Europe is united. So South America or what? China? Turkey? But even if I leave I'll carry it with me. Even if they stop tomorrow the damage is done."

I'm reminded of Kurt Tucholsky, a man who knew what it was to have to leave his country, who died by his own hand in exile, who wrote in 1929:

"We have the right to hate Germany, because we love it... Germany is a divided land. But one part of it is us." 

Well Anna isn't talking about Germany. But through the pregnant pauses in her sentences and the way she  plays with her necklace, and stares at the pot of yellowing Russian tea that sits in front of her, untouched, I know she feels a similar divide.

"There's no Russia - my Russia - any more. It’s gone."

***

Jacob Sweetman is a writer and sports journalist, at home in Berlin. His work has appeared in 11Freunde, The Guardian, The Berliner Zeitung, Wisden amongst others. His writing about 1.FC Union Berlin can be mostly found here and he has a website here

Emily Sweetman is an illustrator, at home in Berlin. She is a genius, and her work can be seen here

Portraits of War: Ingo

Illustration by Emily Sweetman

By Jacob Sweetman:

Not long after Russia's invasion of Ukraine on February 24th I started writing a series of portraits of Berliners, affected by the war. It was out of my own feelings of inadequacy, largely, realising the only tangible help I could be would be to try to tell some stories otherwise unsaid. 

But the first thing I learned is how little I knew. Whether it was the look on Ingo's face when I asked if Belarusian was a distinct language from Russian, or on Yuriy Gurzhy's face when I suggested that the war had started on February 24th. It had been going for eight years already, he told me, trying to hide his annoyance. Not to mention the influence of the Omsk rock underground from the 1970's, but that's a story for another day.

I have spoken to a terrified Russian mother, a French journalist working on the borders, a Ukrainian musician, and two Germans, one about people of colour trying to flee, and this one, Ingo, a man who fell in love with Belarus a long time ago.As Ingo says in this  piece, we could all do with learning about the cultural complexities of Eastern Europe, and he's right. It's only now we seem to care, to have noticed at all. I hope it's not too late to try.

– Jacob Sweetman, Berlin. 30 / 4 / 2022

Ingo Petz is tired. Friends ask after him, but he doesn't know how to answer them, he's not sure how he's doing any more; he hasn't really stopped for long enough to think about it. He and his Belarusian wife, Alesja, are living in a “kind of in-between world”. 

But for Petz - a journalist with long standing expertise on Belarus, a past working in Ukraine and studying in Russia, and a humbling knack of being unable to turn his back on a part of the world most of us still fail to understand with any kind of clarity - this war started long ago. 

As it did for so many others, too.

The flood of people leaving Belarus since Aleksander Lukashenko's stolen 2020 election has been unending, the need to keep Ukraine and Russia's neighbour in the spotlight, somehow, never more urgent.

He's been working 10 hour days “curating” independent Belarusian press for the Grimme Online Award winning website, Dekoder, since then. And now an amendment to the constitution means that Belarus could become a base for Nuclear weapons, while its mortuaries are reported to be full to bursting with the bodies of Russian soldiers killed in the war.

He's also trying to help get 45 people out of a town 100km west of Kyiv.

“We know so many people in Ukraine. And of course you have no resources and you need to make sure you don't go mad, crazy, freak out, or get too tired. But you try to help,” he says.

He's had friends withdraw away from him, and he understands why. They don't want to face the tragedy of it all. “It's human,” he says. Others have become closer, too, but it's hard. “Sometimes in weak moments I think I want to get rid of all this, it's so problematic.... we are in a kind of... a... never stopping machine.”

Petz grew up in a small town. The son of 'typical working class west Germans', he was largely unaware of politics. But he is stubborn, you can't tell him not to do something, or that it is pointless trying. Like when his teachers said he was no good at writing, or when the university said he'd never be able to learn Russian in six months so as to be able to study it. 

He also likes to tell stories, about people, about places, about underdogs. 

This is what lead him to clamber onto a bus that took him the thousand miles to Minsk for the first time in the 90's. No-one knew about Belarus, and fewer cared. It was just seen as a backwater with few natural resources, dour faces, and this strange throwback of a moustachioed man in charge.

His mum worried, of course; it sounded like the end of the world. But he says he felt like an eighteenth century explorer. 

It was music that helped draw Ingo into a love affair with the country, as it also gave him a reason to learn the language, distinct from Russian. A rock scene was already building up momentum back then. Clever, brave, young punks, singing in their own tongue at last, pissed off at a lifetime's unfulfilled promises, were daring the authorities to try and stop them. 

He fell in love with N.R.M., the Independent Republic of Dreams, at a festival full of Belarusian speaking bands. There was something about the fervour they inspired, something about the fire in their bellies. He says you could feel the energy. That this actually meant something.

But it was also there he saw the first signs of the brutality inherent in the regime when someone shouted 'Fuck Lukashenko' from the stage. 

The police arrested the singer. They then pulled the plugs and waded into the crowd. One of Ingo's friends was one of them, so he joined the group of people heading to the police station.

“We were waiting outside, demanding to know what was going to happen, there were other people gathering there, and the local police chief came out. He was a small fat guy, a typical post-soviet character, you see them sometimes in films. He was a bit drunk, and he was shouting in Russian that he was going to arrest everybody.”

He called them all Satanists.

He laughs at the memory, and it is funny. But at the time - maybe it was because of his youth, or his lack of political understanding, or maybe because he seems to fear nothing - Ingo says he wasn't scared, not really. 

But not long ago Ingo sent me a link to Aliaksei Paluyan's award winning Arte documentary “Courage”, in which a similar scene develops following the 2020 crackdowns. It shows a crowd built up outside a larger prison, this time in Minsk. They are mostly women, smoking and crying, pacing up and down, waiting as the names of the recently incarcerated are read out, erupting into applause when the gates finally open and people with blackened eyes and clenched fists pour out.

But the fleeting joy is delivered with a punch to the throat.

And as the film focuses on Minsk's most influential independent theatre company, we are left with no doubt about the significance of art to all this, of its ability to reach the people and to hold the powerful to account. As it was music that gave him a way into Eastern Europe, Ingo speaks powerfully of the need for it to bridge the gaps between us, to shine a light into lands we consider alien, but that are more like our own than we'd ever imagine.

On Dekoder there is an interview with Svyatoslav Vakarchuk, the Ukrainian lead singer of the band Okean Elzy, a star also in Belarus, but he hasn't been able to appear there since 2020. He has been playing impromptu shows around Ukraine (“like Batman”, as Yuriy Gurzhy says to me later, “he's everywhere at once”) sitting at any piano, playing on any guitar. 

Vakarchuk talks of orphans and of amputees, of war crimes and, darkly, of revenge. And he urges his Belarusian friends and fans to keep going, to oust Lukashenko, to not  allow them to be used in Putin's war. To continue what they've been doing in what Petz calls the “flying universities”, a cross between parties and wakes and public meetings, where the courtyards of the high rises have been transformed by musicians and academics and poets to discuss the future of the country, trying to cure themselves of what Belarusian philosopher and writer Ihar Babkou calls their “post-colonial sickness”. 

Petz calls it a “revolution in progress”. Because a revolution can't be called a revolution until it is successful. 

Then I ask where he was the morning Russia invaded Ukraine.

“At home. In bed. It was four o'clock.”

“Did you expect it?”

“Yeah.” he says. “Not this large ground scale invasion, but still... A lot of people said it was just hysteria, but I thought when looking and listening to Putin's speeches, and how they took troops from far in the east, you don't do that just for manoeuvres.”

A military base had been established in south east Belarus, the shortest route to Kyiv. 

“So I had a very bad feeling, from the beginning of the new year... Then when it happened Alesja woke me up, we couldn't go back to sleep.” 

They both cried, he says.

But that's when he started moving again, from day to day. Trying to help us understand what we wilfully ignored for so long about the cultural complexities of eastern Europe.

He says that he and Alesya had plans to move to Minsk at some point, and failing that to Kyiv, but neither will happen for a while now. He then says that Alesja fears she will never see her parents again. 

A friend of theirs and her daughter have been staying in Ingo and Alesja's flat in Oberschöneweide since they managed to escape Kyiv (he likes it there because it always had a broader mix of people than he found in the Friedrichshain he lived in a decade ago. There's better stories there.) The daughter comes into the room and offers us soft, freshly made apple pancakes. 

She needs to practice her English, she says, because they'll be moving on to Ireland next week, though she's never been there before. 

Her Mum and Alesja  follow her in, bringing a bottle of champagne, a smile on their faces despite everything. Alesja says that the worst of times is the perfect time to drink champagne and Ingo nods.

It's hard to disagree.

***

Editor’s Note: Jacob is currently looking for an outlet for the entire series of portraits he has collected. We feel extremely privileged to have been given the opportunity to publish the first, and we hope that someone reading this can help bring the entire collection out into the world. If you are such a person, please let us know and we’ll put you in contact.

Jacob Sweetman is a writer and sports journalist, at home in Berlin. His work has appeared in 11Freunde, The Guardian, The Berliner Zeitung, Wisden amongst others. His writing about 1.FC Union Berlin can be mostly found here and he has a website here

Emily Sweetman is an illustrator, at home in Berlin. She is a genius, and her work can be seen here

The Borders of Winter – Reading Ukraine

Photo by Maksym Diachenko on Unsplash

By Marcel Krueger: 

Despair and sadness, this is what I first felt when waking up to the outbreak of war in Ukraine. The thing that I had made dark jokes about just the day before with a Polish acquaintance with relatives in Ukraine, a thing that felt like abstract posturing with words and guns, had become bitter reality, a war in the middle of Europe. As our editor-in-chief Paul wrote in the latest Letter from Elsewhere, “in a time like this our small journal of place doesn't seem to really matter all that much.” 

As the Books Editor of Elsewhere, I do think that reading continuously and widely can help us prepare – up to a point – for violent change, and help understand where it is coming from and why. The more we inhabit positions and points of view of others, the more we understand some of the multitude of currents at play in Europe today – and in the case of Ukraine, the fierce independence of its people. I have compiled a list of Ukrainian authors past and present for everyone interested in learning more about the country, but this is purely based on personal reading experience and by no means an exhaustive list. 

As writer and editor Kate Tsurkan writes in her review of Andriy Lyubka’s “Carbide” and Oleg Sentsov’s “Life Went on Anyway: Stories” in the LA Review of Books:

This has always been the beauty of Ukraine — its diversity. If you walk through the downtown area of any major Ukrainian city, you can hear conversations in more than one language at the same time. Each region possesses its own unique character, its linguistic blends; what brings Ukrainians together, despite these so-called differences, is a greater sense of Ukrainian identity, which has triumphed over years of conflict.

When you look at Ukraine today and the complex history of the region, you will also find that many crucial European literary voices come from here: Joseph Roth was born in Brody, Paul Celan in Chernivtsi, Bruno Schulz in Drohobych. Because of this diversity I have also included Polish voices in this list, due to the special and not always easy relationship between these two neighbouring countries. 

Ukrainian as a literary language first emerged into a wider European awareness in the 19th century, but this was not a language spoken in all areas of society of an area of Jewish, Polish and Ukrainian people, all ruled over by Imperial Russia. As Anne Applebaum puts it in her essay “Calamity Again”:

The Ukrainian language, as well as Ukrainian art and music, were all preserved in the countryside, even though the cities spoke Polish or Russian. To say “I am Ukrainian” was, once upon a time, a statement about status and social position as well as ethnicity. “I am Ukrainian” meant you were deliberately defining yourself against the nobility, against the ruling class, against the merchant class, against the urbanites.  

The two key figures from that time are Taras Hryhorovych Shevchenko (1814 – 1861) and Lesya Ukrainka (Larysa Petrivna Kosach, 1871 – 1913). Taras was born into poverty but as a gifted and self-taught painter and poet (and later attendant of the St. Petersburg Academy of the Arts) laid the groundwork for Ukrainian as a literary language. Lesya, who published her first poem at 13, became the first female literary voice writing in Ukrainian and has become, after a lifetime of prolific publishing poems, prose, essays and dramas, a symbol of national pride: hence her honorific last name Ukrainka, “The Ukrainian”. One of her best-known poems is “Contra Spem Spero” from 1890:

On this poor, indigent ground
I shall sow flowers of flowing colors;
I shall sow flowers even amidst the frost,
And water them with my bitter tears.

Chyhyryn from the Subotove road, 1845 by Taras Shevchenko

The Russian Revolution and the end of World War I also brought an end to the empires that had ruled what is Ukraine today, and with it, on the one hand, chaos and revolution, and on the other an explosion of Ukrainian culture. The Ukrainian War of Independence, in which Ukrainian forces fought Poles, Germans, White Russian Forces, Rumanians and French, lasted from 1917 to 1921 and saw the creation of first the Free Territory of Ukraine, the Ukrainian People's Republic and the West Ukrainian People's Republic, and later the whole of the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic as part of the Soviet Union. Ukrainian writing and self-expression was at first supported by the Soviets, and so a whole generation of fresh Ukrainian voices emerged in that time, including writer, playwright and musician Hnat Khotkevych (1877 – 1938), writer Valerian Pidmohylny (1901 – 1937), poet and translator Mykola Zerov (1890 - 1937), and writer and critic Liudmyla Starytska-Cherniakhivska (1868 – 1941). 

This first modern generation of Ukrainian writers however only published and flourished for a few years. At the end of the 1920s, when Stalin had replaced Lenin as the head of state of the USSR, a new cultural policy was enacted and Ukrainian publishing increasingly suppressed. All of the members of the new Ukrainian avantgarde were arrested and executed or, in case of female artists like Liudmyla Starytska-Cherniakhivska, sent to the GULAG where they also perished. Named after an anthology published in 1959 by Polish writer and activist Jerzy Giedroyc (1906 – 2000), these writers became known as the “Executed Renaissance”. The result of this purge was also that there were hardly any Ukrainian literary voices documenting the Holodomor, the catastrophic famine of 1932/33 induced by Stalinist policies that killed an estimated 3.5 million people.

Another writer that perished in the Stalinist terror was Odessa-born Isaac Babel (1894 — 1940), Jewish-Russian writer, journalist, playwright and revolutionary best known for his “Red Cavalry”, a fictionalised account of his time with the 1st Cavalry Army of the Red Army during the Polish-Soviet war. In 2016 the Pushkin Press first published his stories about his sea port hometown in the early 20th century in all its shabbiness and glory, translated by Boris Dralyuk:

Odessa has sweet and wearying evening in springtime, the spicy aroma of acacia trees, and a moon overflowing with even, irresistible light above a dark sea.

The beginning of World War II saw even more calamity heaped upon Ukraine. In September 1939, the Soviet Union invaded Poland and occupied the eastern parts of the 2nd Polish Republic, adding it to the territory of the Ukrainian SSR. In 1941, Nazi Germany in turn invaded and occupied what they called “Reichskommissariat Ukraine”, and in the years that followed the region saw increased fighting not only between occupying forces, the Red Army and partisans, but also many horrendous crimes of the Holocaust being carried out on the territory of Ukraine, including the infamous Babyn Yar massacre in Kyiv. There was also a policy of ethnic cleansing enacted against the Polish inhabitants of Volhyina by the nationalist Ukrainian Insurgent Army, which killed thousands of Poles between 1943 and 1945. One of the victims was Polish-Ukrainian poet Zygmunt Rumel (1915 – 1943) who grew up in Kremenets, and two years before his death had published the poem “Dwie matki” (Two Mothers):

Two Mother-Fatherlands have taught me speech -
In the bloody braid of a berry-blossomed dew -
So that I could break my heart into two halves with pain -
To make my split heart cry like a voice...  

After the end of the war the suppression of Ukrainian expression and literature continued, and dissident writers like Vasyl Stus (1938 - 1985) and Yuriy Lytvyn (1934 – 1984) died in Soviet labour camps. Only after the Fall of the Berlin Wall, the end of the Cold War and Ukrainian independence in 1991 did – like the literature of neighbouring Poland – modern Ukrainian emerge again. Ukrainian writers started experimenting with form and styles, a reflection of the changes and challenges of a newly independent nation, and at the same time addressed themes of memory and identity within the context of the violent history of the region – even more so after the momentous changes brought in by the 2014 Euromaidan protests and subsequent invasion and occupation of Crimea and the wars in Donbas and Luhansk. Ukrainian writers today address the ravages of war and the landscapes of history and memory, often with the help of comedy and dark humour.

Vladimir Rafeenko (born 1969) is a Russian-language writer from the city of Donetsk in the Donbas who now lives near Kyiv. His novel “Mondegreen”, the story of a refugee from Donbas, translated by Mark Andryczyk, was published by the Harvard University Press in February of this year, and his short story  “7 Dillweeds” translated by Marci Shore can be read on Eurozine. 

Lyuba Yakimchuk is a poet, playwright, and screenwriter also from the Donbas region, and her long poem “Apricots of Donbas”, translated by Oksana Maksymchuk and Max Rosochinsky, was published by the University of Washington Press in 2021.

stitch the wounds on your building
with white bandages cover up
black burns on its pelt

with a hand — just don’t twitch —
shield the gaping mouths of windows
so marauders won’t get in

Serhiy Zhadan (born 1974) is one best-known contemporary Ukrainian poets and writers who has published widely in the English-Speaking world, and also the frontman of ska band Zhadan and the Dogs. In his 2017 novel “The Orphanage”, translated by Reilly Costigan-Humes and Isaac Wheeler, the narrator tries to retrieve his nephew from a children’s home on the front lines.

Żanna Słoniowska (born 1978) is a Polish writer and journalist originally from Lviv in western Ukraine, and her 2017 novel “The House with the Stained Glass Window”, translated by Olivia Lloyd-Jones, tells the story of her hometown through the eyes of four generations of women living under the same roof in a house noted for the enormous stained glass window of the title. 

Andrey Kurkov (born 1961) is originally from St Petersburg and after a stint as prison warden and journalist has become a full-time writer of novels and screenplays. His tragicomic 2002 novel “Death and the Penguin” about a writer, his pet penguin and the mafia, became a bestseller, and in 2014 he published a diary about the Euromaidan and the Russian invasion. His 2020 novel “Grey Bees”, translated by Boris Dralyuk, tells the story of the conflict that has engulfed Ukraine in the last years through the eyes of a mild-mannered beekeeper, and has just been nominated for the Dublin Literary Award. An excerpt can be read on the Calvert Journal.   

That was the first spring of the war. And now they were in its third winter. For almost three years he and Pashka had been keeping the village alive. They couldn’t very well leave it lifeless. If every last person took off, no one would return. This way, folks were sure to come back – either when all that nonsense stopped in Kyiv, or when the landmines were gone and the shells stopped falling.

Again, this list is only a spotlight on Ukrainian writing past and present and I hope it serves a segue into more fascinating writing (and reading) from a country under siege that deserves all the support we can give. Many thanks to Kate Tsurkan, editor-in-chief of Apofenie, who instigated this piece and who is currently holding out in Chernivtsi in Ukraine. You can read her wonderful portrait of her hometown on the Calvert Journal, and Apofenie is a great place to start discovering more writers from Ukraine. Many thanks also to Jesse Lee Kercheval who started a wonderful thread on Ukrainian writers on Twitter. Slava Ukraini.