»There is a war that we don’t know. I want to write down the story of that war. The women’s story.« Nobel Prize for Literature laureate Swetlana Alexievich gives a voice to those caught in the no man’s land between war and peace. In her haunting interviews, she portrays contemporary witnesses in their (post-)Soviet environment and paints a picture of a kind of (dis)order that knows only violence. What is life like in this no man’s land? What are the stories told by those who experience continuing violence and repression in spite of ostensible peace?
»The past is yet to come« – this Russian saying is at the heart of her her discussion with former member of the Bundestag and expert for foreign affairs Ruprecht Polenz in part 1 of the new Berliner Correspondence series.
The images created by Esra Rotthoff for the Berlin Correspondence: Between War and Peace lecture series deliberate on the upheavals and tectonic shifts in a crisis-laden world between war and peace. She takes the portraits as emblems of conflicting claims to power and places them inquiringly opposite various peace symbols.
Berlin Correspondence is a Matinée-Series of the Gorki Forum and the Humboldt University Berlin in cooperation with the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.
