“Each of us carries a piece of history in itself, of a large, the other a little, and from all this arises the great history.” That said Svetlana Alexievitch in her acceptance speech when she was awarded the 2013 Peace Prize of the German Book Trade. These words already infected the literary program of her work. It is not the mass that counts, but the individual human being. Not the milestones of history are important but the private moments.
“I have written five books, but basically I now for nearly forty years to write a single book”, Alexijewitsch explained in the Paulskirche. “At a Russian-Soviet History: Revolution, Gulag, war … Chernobyl … the demise of the red empire.”
But who reads their books today, knows: It describes not only history, but the presence, yes, maybe even the future. “Everything repeats itself” – that is also a set of Alexijewitsch. On the literary stage, she has already received many awards. But in her native Belarus the books of Nobel laureate prohibited. For Zinc Boys , her book about the war in Afghanistan the Soviet Union, she was indicted – for defamation of the Soviet Army. But Alexijewitschs works attract not only with the powerful impetus. In the courtroom, the writer met once the mother of a fallen soldier. As Alexijewitsch the woman asks her why she is here, she says: “I do not need your truth I want that my son was a hero!”.
Where the birds from the sky rush
Alexijewitsch sees itself as a “man of the ear”. The street is for them “a choir, a symphony”. Since childhood, the writer hears these voices. Alexijewitsch is born in 1948 in Ukraine, the daughter of a Ukrainian and a Belarusian. She grew up in a small Belarusian village. The women there are talking about war and peace. And they talk about the birds that fell from the sky by the thousands when they were caught in artillery fire. The girl Svetlana listens and remembers Satzfetzen. Alone attentive listening catapulted into a hell, in which it has gone for her books again and again.
You need a few words to describe great horror. She tells us of SS soldiers accused of shooting candy into the pit in which they then buried Jewish children alive. Or from a contaminated man, the sources the innards out of his mouth after the Chernobyl nuclear disaster.
Alexijewitsch has previously worked as a reporter and editor. As a writer, she has created her own genre: its “novel of the vote”. Your documentary prose is shocking nice – and great literature. Because Alexijewitsch in their records the essence of their experiences interlocutor distilled. buried
secret
thrift time , Chernobyl , The war has no female face , The Last Witness , Zinc Boys – these titles are for a literary cosmos in which you amazed yourself may startle and cry. It is fortunate that the voice Alexijewitschs that draws on voices of countless others, will be heard in the West. The Nobel Prize will continue to carry out in the world.
In addition to working on their great works, the author commented on current crises and wars. “The war in the east of Ukraine did not exist -. Without Russia, if it is not Putin with his geopolitical strategy would be,” she said about 2014 in an interview. Alexijewitsch which is itself subject to hostility, is not afraid of no uncertain terms: “The Russian state has always spit out that people do not want to die – even today, the Russian patriotism is a tried and tested means to cheap soldiers. find. Today recruit the military district offices throughout Russia volunteers for the war in Ukraine. After that they are sent back in coffins. buried secret. At night. Like when they brought back the Soviet soldiers in zinc coffins from Afghanistan. ”
Not perpetrator and victim, but individuals
In her book, The Last Witness. Children in World War II they gathered memories of men and women who were children during the German invasion of Belarus. The protocols lead back to a past in which the children “German painting” and serve as hiding places cemeteries. Again and again Alexijewitsch so the people at the center. Not the head of state, but the soldiers. The nurse, the widow, the child. In Alexijewitsch there are no victims and perpetrators, but individuals who are both sometimes in a.
Always it is thereby the subjectivity of impressions consciously. “Memories are a fickle thing,” she says. “Witnesses are fewer witnesses, rather they are an actor and storyteller.” They remind us that there are no simple truths. How a story is told, is already part of history.
“In my books the ‘little man’ of itself tells. The grain of sand of the story,” says Alexijewitsch. “He is never asked, he disappears without a trace, he takes his secrets to the grave. I will go to those who have no voice.” Svetlana Alexievitch has stories from oblivion and preserved in world literature. She has kindled from many grains of sand a storm.
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