2nd international literature festival graal‑müritz

An encouraging start to the literature festival in Graal‑Müritz

Graal‑Müritz, a seaside health resort on the Baltic with a population today of just over 4,000, has always drawn writers. Among them were Franz Kafka (1883–1924), Erich Kästner (1899–1974), Walter Kempowski (1929–2007) and Uwe Johnson (1934–1984), who also worked their impressions into their writing. From 29 August to 2 September 2025, Graal‑Müritz was the setting for the first international literature festival, in which around 30 writers took part.

They came at the invitation of Ulrich Schreiber, one of the most enterprising literary organisers of our time. He is also the founder of the renowned international literature festival berlin, which was first staged in 2001.

Literature was not something he was born into: a native of Solingen, he was expected to take over his parents’ building firm. “At 14 I began an apprenticeship as a bricklayer and then studied civil engineering for six semesters in Wuppertal,” says the 74-year-old. Then came the turning point. He decided against taking over the business after all and instead enrolled at the Freie Universität Berlin to study philosophy and politics, later adding Russian. Together with figures such as the professor of theology Helmut Gollwitzer and the philosopher and publisher Wolfgang Fritz Haug, he founded the Berliner Volks-Uni in 1980.

Later he moved into cultural work and began engaging with the international literary scene. “At some point the question came up of why there was no literature festival in Berlin,” Schreiber recounts. After several years of preparation, and once the Stiftung Deutsche Klassenlotterie Berlin had agreed to fund the festival from 2001, Schreiber’s successful tenure began. It ended only in 2023, when he stepped down as director. “More than 3,600 guests from 123 countries came to Berlin,” he says with pride. Alongside this he found time to establish a literature festival in Mumbai in 2007 and the International Literature Festival Odessa in Ukraine in 2015, and in 2005 he helped Salman Rushdie set up the “World Voices” festival in New York.

And now Graal‑Müritz. On a visit a few years ago he asked himself the same question he had asked in Berlin in the 1990s: “Why is there no literature festival in this seaside health resort?” Graal‑Müritz offers, after all, much of what most writers need. “It is the slower pace, the forest, the good air, the beach, the sea, the quiet,” says Schreiber with conviction. The response from the authors proves him right. “It is a great success that these writers come here. That is not to be taken for granted, because Graal‑Müritz lies far from the big cities.”

Equally encouraging is the response of the visitors, who have turned out in large numbers for the literary programme. “The events, and the meetings between everyone involved outside the official programme, provide the inspiration and the basis for the writers’ lasting work.” Schreiber therefore looks forward with optimism to future editions of the international literature festival graal‑müritz.

Further information: www.bebelplatz.org

A debt of gratitude to literature

Azouz Begag – sociologist, economist, writer and former minister of the French Republic – first met Mamadou Sow, then aged 20, around five years ago at a school in Lyon, where he was seeking to teach children the art of writing. The project with young people took as its motto “Raconte-moi ta vie!” (Tell me about your life).

At 15, Mamadou had set out from his native Guinea for Lyon, where a cousin lived, to obtain medicine for his father, who was ill with cancer. His flight took him some 10,000 kilometres across the African continent and through Italy to France. He had torn up his passport, because without a passport one cannot be deported. What followed was an unbelievable, unreal odyssey with countless life-threatening situations on overcrowded lorries or unseaworthy boats on the Mediterranean.

As a teacher of literature, Begag had the task of getting his pupils to write down what was weighing on them. After such a flight through unimaginable hardship, one would think it would all come pouring out. But Sow says: “It is not our way, as Africans, to explain ourselves.” Begag recalls: “And yet it should be a liberation. The heart is overfull. But it is not easy. People are ashamed of being victims.”

After a few weeks, however, Begag recounts, Mamadou Sow came to him and said: “Monsieur, I have many things to tell you.” And he began to speak of his homeland and his flight. The result was the book “Né pour partir” (Born to Leave), which has since won awards and for which Begag, by his own account, served as Sow’s voice.

The book is an appeal against indifference and for compassion. Begag, himself a successful author of books for children and young people, says that he found Sow without papers and without a future, but with a great past and great dreams. “It was my job to get him talking. Today he is a writer; he has a passport, a wife, a child – thanks to literature.”

Azouz Begag, born in Lyon to Algerian immigrants, has made it a matter close to his heart to engage with the history of migration and the people it affects, and to write about it. Unlike Franz Kafka, Erich Kästner or Hans Fallada, the 68-year-old finds no creative atmosphere in the comparatively affluent Baltic region. “I cannot write in Graal‑Müritz; it is too comfortable. I would sleep all day.” The landscape, the sea and the forest, he says, are simply too beautiful; he needs to be among people who must fight to survive. “I was born poor; I love the history of the poor. I have to see poverty and talk to the poor – every day.”

Azouz Begag and Mamadou Sow: “Né pour partir”, ISBN 978-3-12-592364-5

Opening up Kafka’s cosmos with knife and fork

There are few more fitting places than Graal‑Müritz to present “Kafkas Kochbuch – Franz Kafkas vegetarische Verwandlung in 544 Rezepten”, published in August 2025. It was on the Baltic coast, after all, in the summer of 1923, that Kafka (1883–1924), gravely ill with tuberculosis, met the last great love of his life, Dora Diamant.

For the journalist, literary critic and prolific author Denis Scheck, Kafka is the most important writer of his life. “But the road to him was long,” he admits. “One has to grow into Kafka.” The end of that road, for now, is the 448-page cookbook, with tempting recipes for beetroot salad and lamb’s lettuce salad, risi-pisi, asparagus pudding and baked parsnips.

The gastronomically inclined critic and his co-author, his long-standing friend, the physician Eva Gritzmann, had by their own account found a tiny reference to Kafka’s vegetarian cookbook in a passing remark in Reiner Stach’s three-volume Kafka biography. “What Troy was for Heinrich Schliemann, this cookbook was for us,” Scheck says. “It electrified us at once.”

After his final examinations at the beginning of the twentieth century, Kafka had been sent by his parents to the most fashionable sanatorium of the Wilhelmine Empire, Dr Lahmann’s sanatorium in Dresden. At the end of his stay he was given Elise Starker’s “Hygienisches Kochbuch zum Gebrauch für ehemalige Kurgäste” (a health cookbook for former spa guests). “We read it. It reads as freshly as if today’s chefs Yotam Ottolenghi or Jamie Oliver had written it yesterday,” Scheck enthuses.

Many stories unfold around “Kafkas Kochbuch”, and Scheck – a media-savvy, articulate Swabian – regales his audience with them. As a child, for instance, he says he developed a particular love for Jules Verne’s novels, all bound in red cloth with gold lettering. “It exceeded our wildest expectations that Klett-Cotta went along with our wish and that the cookbook is now bound the same way.”

In “Kafkas Kochbuch”, the recipes from the Dresden cookbook, now well over 100 years old, are reproduced in full. The book is also enriched with excerpts from Kafka’s works; every reference to eating and drinking is preserved. “Through this book one gets to know a completely different Kafka. We have opened up Kafka’s cosmos with knife and fork.” Many recipes are printed as in the original, even if some ingredients may since have fallen out of use. Only for the excessively long cooking times for vegetables, he says, did he and Gritzmann make an exception.

Kafka’s affinity with vegetarianism may lie in the fact that his grandfather was a butcher and his father loved meat dishes. In a letter the writer wrote: “The more he slaughtered, the less meat I must eat.” Kafka, he says, used food as a weapon in his struggle with his parents’ generation. “So there is a guilt that he had to work off through his eating habits,” is Scheck’s analysis.

Denis Scheck and Eva Gritzmann (eds.): “Kafkas Kochbuch. Franz Kafkas vegetarische Verwandlung in 544 Rezepten”. Klett-Cotta, Stuttgart 2025, ISBN 978-3-608-96665-7

“We are on the right side of history.”

The journalist and writer Sergei Lebedev has lived in exile in Potsdam since 2018. Lebedev, regarded as one of the most significant and prolific writers from Russia, is a close observer of life in his homeland. But although Moscow is only a little over 1,700 kilometres away as the crow flies, it is beyond his reach.

“I have not been able to sleep peacefully for a long time,” says the 44-year-old. For him this is nothing new. It began, he says, 20 years ago with his research into Russian war crimes in Chechnya. At a reading in the pavilion in Graal‑Müritz’s Rhododendron Park he does not go into detail. But his listeners sense that terrible images weigh on Lebedev’s mind.

“Sergei’s parents are geologists,” says a friend of Lebedev’s. He digs into the past, the friend adds. “He unearths the skeletons in history’s cupboard.” This kind of reckoning with the past is anything but a matter of course in Russia.

Moreover, it is life-threatening to speak out against the government in Russia, says Lebedev, who learned German very quickly. Those who dare to do so nonetheless are persecuted, end up in prison or die under mysterious circumstances.

Many people, among them many writers, have left their homeland and now live in exile. As editor of the book “Nein! Stimmen aus Russland gegen den Krieg”, Lebedev gave 25 of his colleagues a platform. Their stories, poems and essays show the cultural diversity that once defined Russia and can no longer find expression today. “I bring people and their stories together,” said Lebedev. Among them are many young authors. “The book is a portrait of the younger generation in Russia.”

In Lebedev’s view, wars such as those in Chechnya or Ukraine are colonial wars. “The authentic, true struggle for liberation against Hitler’s armies and National Socialism is used today as a lie to justify the invasion of Ukraine and the war.” Added to this, he says, is the fact that most of the more than 150 different peoples and ethnic groups within the Russian Federation are very poor. “They send the soldiers for money. People are raw material.” The smallest peoples, he says, are being wiped out as a result. “I want to give writers from the small peoples a voice and the opportunity to write in their own language.”

Lebedev knows that literature has a power all its own. “A secret network of readers is developing.” Once they have read the novels, they share them with other people they can trust. Lebedev, his colleagues and their readers want to show one thing: “We are on the right side of history.”

Yet Lebedev does not sound very optimistic when he speaks about Russia after Vladimir Putin. “After that comes an endlessly hard period of coming to terms with the crimes of the Stalin era, the Soviet era and the Putin dictatorship,” he says with conviction.

In his latest book, “Die Beschützerin” (published in English as “The Lady of the Mine”), Lebedev likewise makes clear that he currently sees little chance of an early, peaceful change of course in his homeland. “Die Beschützerin” is a European novel about the prelude to the war in Ukraine, following the downing of Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 over the Donbas on 17 July 2014. There the young Zhanna lives with her mother and protector Marianna. In poetic images Lebedev tells of the dirt that remains and the evil that never disappears.

Sergei Lebedev: “Die Beschützerin”, 256 pages, S. Fischer, ISBN 978-3-10-397521-5, €26.00
Sergei Lebedev (ed.): “Nein! Stimmen aus Russland gegen den Krieg”, 384 pages, Rowohlt, ISBN 978-3-498-00743-0, €28.00

Liao Yiwu misses his homeland but loves pork knuckle

To Central European ears the sounds are bewildering when the Chinese writer Liao Yiwu gives free rein to his emotions with his singing bowls and his piercing voice. He offers no explanation of their meaning and leaves his listeners alone with them. Yet in the end there is no doubt: this music is an expression of despair and pain.

These are emotions that echo in his books, such as “18 Gefangene – Fluchtgeschichten aus China, dem größten Gefängnis der Welt”, published in 2025. In it Liao Yiwu, who was himself imprisoned from 1990 to 1994, recounts the experiences of 18 prisoners who were incarcerated in decades past. The recipient of the Geschwister Scholl Prize (2011) and the Peace Prize of the German Book Trade (2012) wants to give the forgotten their voices back. And those voices are expressive and harrowing.

His fellow prisoners are not only political detainees like himself. They come from all social strata and were imprisoned as criminals or as victims of religious persecution. Liao Yiwu does not flinch from the cruelties, which he describes in disturbing detail. He wants to give the people in prison their dignity back and regards himself as a chronicler of the violence his state inflicts. At the same time, he says, writing has unburdened and detoxified him.

It was the events on Tiananmen Square in Beijing on 4 June 1989 that led to his imprisonment. After months of protests by the Chinese democracy movement, the military moved in with tanks. What exactly happened then has never been conclusively established. The Chinese government hushes up the bloody suppression of the student protests. How many people died that night is unknown. Estimates range from several hundred to 3,000.

Liao Yiwu recounts that immediately afterwards he wrote the poem “Massacre” in all its horrific detail and then recorded it on a cassette recorder. “Through friends, this poem was spread throughout China.” Months later he was put on trial. “I was told I had been very lucky. Because had I been found out as the author earlier, I would have been shot on the spot – without a trial.” Prison, with all its degrading treatment, made him a writer, he says.

Against this background Liao Yiwu looks at what he sees as a chaotic world and at the precarious state of human rights. It is fortunate, he says, that the EU exists. “That is a sign of solidarity among countries.” Chancellor Angela Merkel’s greatest achievement, he says, was her unshakeable defence of the European Union. “In the face of Russian aggression, a united EU is today the most important force supporting Ukraine.” The USA, meanwhile, has in his view largely ceased to be a standard-bearer for human rights under President Donald Trump: “He thinks only of making deals, and besides, he has no feel for aesthetics whatsoever.”

Although, in his view, Merkel did much for human rights with her famous words “Wir schaffen das” (“We can do this”), Liao Yiwu is critical of her: “Germany’s close economic relations with dictatorships such as Russia or China were and are a mistake.” But Merkel, he says, greatly valued his book “Fräulein Hallo und der Bauernkaiser”. When she was asked about Chinese literature during a visit to China, he says, she named this book – and embarrassed her hosts.

“I long for my homeland in Sichuan province,” says the 67-year-old, who has lived in Berlin since 2011. But he does not want to return to China in its present state; it would be far too dangerous. “I like the German people best,” says the much-travelled writer. He admits, however, that he struggles with German food – with one exception, Eisbein (pork knuckle): “It tastes wonderful to me.”

Liao Yiwu: “18 Gefangene. Fluchtgeschichten aus China, dem größten Gefängnis der Welt”. Translated by Brigitte Höhenrieder and Hans Peter Hoffmann. 528 pages, S. Fischer, ISBN 978-3-10-397078-4

Towards an understanding of the Germans

Although the Afghan writer Taqi Akhlaqi has lived in Germany for a good four years and speaks almost perfect German, he keeps finding himself puzzling over the language and customs of his host country. In his homeland, and in Iran, where he lived for many years, there is a strict rule that “thank you” comes first and only then “please”. So why does the waitress in a German restaurant come up to him and set his plate on the table with a “bitte” (please), without waiting for his “danke” (thank you)? Is she displeased – or has he perhaps made a mistake?

This is just one of the many details about language, German peculiarities and cultural differences that he describes with great empathy and wit in his book “Versteh einer die Deutschen”.

Born in 1986, Akhlaqi is regarded as one of Afghanistan’s most active and prominent writers. When he was a child his family emigrated to Iran; at 18 he returned to his homeland and studied international relations in Kabul.

Akhlaqi’s first contact with Germany came in 2016/17 through a scholarship from the Heinrich Böll Foundation. For several months he was able to immerse himself in the German language and its literature at the country house of the German Nobel laureate in Langenbroich (North Rhine-Westphalia). “That was a turning point in my life,” he says. It was a turning point because Akhlaqi, who had grown up in a religious family and learned the Koran by heart, read “Thus Spoke Zarathustra” by Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900). “It is written like a holy book – only without God.”

The conflicts Akhlaqi subsequently lived with in Afghanistan become clear when he says that he could read Nietzsche in Kabul without danger only because the book was written in German. A Nietzsche quotation such as “God is dead” would be judged differently in the Islamist Taliban state than in Germany, and would be a sure way to lose one’s freedom.

Akhlaqi says that thanks to Nietzsche he enjoyed learning German. “It is very beautiful to listen to and very logical.” But he was greatly disappointed to find that hardly any Germans knew Nietzsche. “I thought that would be important for everyone.”

Over his years of exile in Germany, German habits have become his own. That is why he could no longer write “Versteh einer die Deutschen” today – the distance is gone. And so he says that he sometimes wants to go back to Afghanistan in order to think about Germany from afar. Just as he did after his scholarship.

For him, German is the language of philosophy and clarity. Germany means safety. Thanks to his roots in Afghanistan and Iran and his command of several languages, Akhlaqi today plays an important part in refugee support work, which enables him to provide for his family. These are difficult times for him, however, not least because of the international situation. Yet he and his audience can still wrest something positive from this state of affairs: “After all, pain and suffering ultimately lead to good literature.”

Taqi Akhlaqi: “Versteh einer die Deutschen”. Translated by Jutta Himmelreich. 275 pages, Sujet, Bremen, ISBN 978-3-96202-135-1, €19.80

“Die Frau als Mensch” – A look into the early history of humankind

The comics artist Ulli Lust has always been interested in the history of humankind and the role women played in it. “Early history in particular was a pet subject of mine,” the Austrian says at the reading from her graphic novel “Die Frau als Mensch – Am Anfang der Geschichte” at the 1st international literature festival graal‑müritz.

But biographies or stories by and about women are often depressing, she says; the literary characters mostly struggle against the prohibitions imposed on them. “I had always flirted with the idea of drawing a non-fiction book.” The problem for her and many others with an interest in the subject is that non-fiction books make very high demands of the reader. Archaeologists and historians, she adds, lay out their findings with a great many references. “That makes for extremely difficult reading.”

Lust proves it can be done quite differently with “Die Frau als Mensch – Am Anfang der Geschichte”, published in 2025, in which she ventures into the early history of humankind. With this multi-layered yet witty work she offers her readers a new lens through which to view that era and the role of women. Turning away from the patriarchal and Eurocentric view, Lust sees women as the more active force in early human history.

In these early cultures, she says, femininity and physicality were not turned into a vast complex of guilt and shame, as they were in Christianity. “The idea of being able, as a woman, to have a positive sense of my body and not having to be constantly ashamed of the feminine – I simply found that interesting and seductive,” says Lust. And as a comics artist she has the tools to make such content vivid in a different way. She presents her findings, drawing on the traditional ways of life of indigenous groups, in particular the Khoisan peoples of Namibia and Botswana. They are among the oldest peoples in the world.

The years of research also included an extended stay in the Pyrenees, where the details of how to mix the colour ochre correctly were worked out. From the countless materials gathered – for example which animals lived then, what the landscape looked like, which plants were available for people to use – she says she then tried to imagine the statistically most probable past. “I value working with documentary material and trying to translate it into a sequential narrative.” That she has succeeded is evident not only in the commercial success of her work but also in the German Non-Fiction Prize, which she has already won.

Ulli Lust, who has lived in Berlin since 1995, had already won success and recognition with graphic novels such as “Today Is the Last Day of the Rest of Your Life” and “How I Tried to Be a Good Person”. According to literary experts, it is largely thanks to her that graphic novels are so widely recognised today. They can be more than light comic entertainment: high art and literature, and thus a medium to be taken seriously.

Ulli Lust: “Die Frau als Mensch – Am Anfang der Geschichte”. 256 pages, Reprodukt, Berlin 2025, ISBN 978-3-95640-445-0, €29.00