The German Interest in the Revolution

GMF’s Senior Program Officer Maryna Rakhlei spoke to Deutschlandfunk Kultur to discuss books by Belarusian authors that have been published recently and the rising interest in Belarusian literature and protest movement in Germany. One year after the presidential election in Belarus and the protest movement against the government that followed, interest in the country has increased in Germany, explains Maryna Rakhlei. German readers want to know what is going on in Belarus and how to understand it. Rakhlei herself published the essay "A Staircase in Minsk" in which she draws sketches of a contradictory country. Before mass protests against the Lukashenko regime began, literature from Belarus appeared only sporadically in Germany. This has changed with a wide range of new books being published in Germany. Rakhlei associates these books with the hope that interest in the country and its books will develop on the German side in the longer-term as well. "But a lasting interest has to be earned," Rakhlei says. She believes that the intellectual awakening in Belarus will continue to shape writers and hopefully be exciting for non-Belarusians as well.