Dorota Danielewicz – Culture manager, Slavicist, author and journalist

Literary bridges between Germany and Poland
 

After her return to Berlin, Dorota Danielewicz began working at the Literary Colloquium Berlin (Literarisches Colloquium Berlin, LCB). She took her first steps at the LCB with Werner Fritsch. In Berlin, Dorota became a one-woman institution. At a time when there was no internet, she was able to bring many of the most brilliant Polish authors to the LCB. Having obtained their latest books beforehand, she would confidently present them to her colleagues who did not speak Polish. The Book Institute (Instytut Książki) in Poland, which is now a partner of many German literary institutions, did not yet exist. Although DAAD literature scholarships have always been awarded to Polish authors in Berlin, there was no equivalent in Poland for a long time. Dorota Danielewicz filled this gap in her own way. In the 1990s, she set out to build a bridge between Polish and German literature. The events organised by Danielewicz were highly successful and are still considered “legendary” in Berlin. Shortly after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, she organised the “Polish Literature Week” (Tydzień literatury polskiej) at the LCB, drawing authors such as Agnieszka Osiecka, Ryszard Krynicki, Hanna Krall, Paweł Huelle, Tadeusz Konwicki, Tadeusz Nowakowski, Janusz Głowacki and Janusz Anderman to Berlin. The readings were followed by an evening of lively discussions in a smaller group. Dorota Danielewicz was often accompanied by her partner and later husband, the political scientist Basil Kerski. The couple met at a Slavic seminar in Berlin on Polish poetry from 1968 and would later meet many of the authors discussed there in person. In 1989, parallel to the Polish Literature Festival, an exhibition of books published in Poland during the so-called “second circulation” (drugi obieg) was organised in the LCB building. Danielewicz compiled it together with Leszek Szaruga, a poet and writer living in Berlin at the time, who provided his extensive collection of underground publications from the communist era. 

Danielewicz balanced her activities with her family life and studies. In 1992 she married Basil Kerski. Their first son Jan was born in 1993, followed four years later by Alexander. In 1992/93, Dorota Danielewicz wrote her master’s thesis under the supervision of Professor Witold Kośny on the translation authors’ own texts as a third literary form based on the works of Stanisław Przybyszewski and Tadeusz Rittner.

Literary gems
 

In the early 1990s, numerous female writers made their debut in Poland, a development that Danielewicz observed closely. On her initiative, the later Nobel Prize winner Olga Tokarczuk came to Berlin for the first time in 1995 with her debut novel “Journey of the People of the Book” (Podróż ludzi księgi). Magdalena Tulli, Natasza Goerke, Anna Bolecka, Inga Iwasiów, Hanna Kowalewska and the poet Mira Kuś were presenting their books at this time. In 1996, in collaboration with the Akademie der Künste and the DAAD Artists-in-Berlin Programme, Dorota Danielewicz invited the classic authors of Polish literature: the emigrated Gustaw Herling-Grudziński, Sławomir Mrożek and Adam Zagajewski. At the LCB, Danielewicz also organised the series “Second Generation after the Holocaust” with Ruth Klüger, Imre Kertész and Leo de Winter as well as the series “Literature by Sinti and Roma” with the writer Matéo Maximoff. Dr Ulrich Janetzki from the LCB liked to engage Dorota Danielewicz as an assistant when German writers travelled abroad. She went to Poland with Katja Lange-Müller, Klaus Schlesinger, Andreas Neumeister and Edgar Hilsenrath for readings at the Goethe Institutes, and to Romania and Moldova with Brigitta Burmeister, Marion Tietze, Martin Ahrends, Wolfgang Hilbig, Andreas Neumeister and Jan Koneffke. 

Dorota Danielewicz has particularly fond memories of two trips through Germany with Hanna Krall in 1996 and 1997, where she moderated and interpreted readings with the author in North Rhine-Westphalia and Frankfurt am Main. Years later, when Hanna Krall received the Samuel Bogumil Linde Prize in Göttingen together with Marcel Reich-Ranicki in 2000, Danielewicz was again asked to accompany the prizewinner. At the time, she interviewed the author of the laudatory speech for Hanna Krall, Ryszard Kapuściński. The readings by Ryszard Kapuściński himself, at which she interpreted, for example at the Haus der Kulturen der Welt in Berlin, also left lasting memories.

In 2000, Dorota Danielewicz organised a series of literary events at the LCB entitled “Cosmopoles 2000” (Kosmopolen 2000). In order to avoid the term “emigration”, in her opinion no longer appropriate for Polish writers living abroad, she chose the catchy name “cosmopoles”, coined by Andrzej Bobkowski in one of his essays. Czesław Miłosz, Krzysztof Rutkowski from Paris, Bronisław Świderski from Copenhagen, Henryk Grynberg from New York, the up-and-coming author Krzysztof Niewrzęda, Janusz Rudnicki and Dariusz Muszer, who lives in Germany, were presenting their works in Berlin at this time. As always, the author readings had a perfect setting at the LCB – they were accompanied by an excellent team of interpreters, and editors from newspapers and radio stations were invited. “It’s really about the literature, not about me”, says Danielewicz in the interview with “Porta Polonica”. “It was very important to me that the content of Polish literature should go out into the world.” 

Spurred on by this, Dorota Danielewicz wrote reviews for German publishers and recommended Polish authors – Paweł Huelle, Martyna Bunda, Dorota Masłowska, Michał Witkowski, Jerzy Pilch, Wojciech Kuczok, Janusz Anderman. Together with Katharina Raabe from “Suhrkamp Verlag”, she worked on the publication of a bilingual volume entitled “Der Augenblick. Chwila” by Wisława Szymborska[2]. She vividly remembers the programme “Gespannt auf...”, which was recorded by WDR television in Bonn in 1992. The discussion about Andrzej Szczypiorski’s books was moderated by Iris Radisch. Dorota Danielewicz appeared in the programme alongside Verena Auffermann and Henryk M. Broder.

Although Danielewicz’s career took off in the 1990s, she was unable to take on a full-time job. In the late 1990s, she was under tremendous stress in her private life due to the progressive, inexplicable illness of her older son, who was developmentally delayed. It would take several years for him to be diagnosed with the very rare and incurable disease GM1 gangliosidosis. Years later, she recounted the moving story of her son’s battle with the disease and his disability in a touching book entitled “Jans Weg” (“Jan’s Path”)[3]. During these difficult times, Dorota Danielewicz continued her work to the best of her capacity.

After 2000, she continued to organise readings – now at the Literaturforum im Brecht-Haus, where she invited Olga Tokarczuk, Adam Zagajewski and Inga Iwasiów. It would be impossible to list all the German-Polish literary events that have taken place in Berlin thanks to her commitment. One of the largest in recent times is the “Unrast” festival, which Danielewicz organised in autumn 2022 together with the renowned Polish journalist Ewa Wanat, who lived in Berlin, in cooperation with the Berliner Literarische Aktion association. The event was attended by 50 writers, translators and moderators from Poland and Germany.

In autumn 2023, Danielewicz moderated seven events for the general public of Berlin and the German-Polish Society in Berlin under the title “Reading what the neighbours write” (Lesen, was die Nachbarn schreiben), at which local Polish writers and writers from Poland presented their works.