Leipzig 2007

Draußen vor der Tür

Borders may mean different things, negative as well as positive ones, separation and distrust, but also connection and exchange, and thus enrichment. It depends on the perspective, on attitudes. This is also true for those borders newly drawn through our continent in the course the eastern  enlargement. In the first place, these were supposed to separate, to isolate, to exclude - naturally. But we don’t want to content ourselves with that. Literature has always had the magical power to bring about the penetration of borders, even of the well-guarded ones. Especially of those. The young authors from Belarus and Ukraine prove this power, they are used to transgress, to ignore borders, they are versed frontier runners, so who would be better suited than them to tell us about these regions - funnily, ironically, tenderly, ruggedly, in post-proletarian, archaic, wonderfully lyric ways, and whatever else one could find to say about their poems and prose...

Martin Pollack