Magdalena Parys
And, in the end, life beyond her books also began to get better. It did not take long for the small family to be able to get an apartment in Rudow. As is often the case, the children integrated more quickly than the adults.
It took quite a while for her mother to finally find a job at a Waldorf school after studying again and working in a factory. By now, Magdalena Parys was attending Gustav Heinemann school in Marienfelde, which she still remembers fondly today. “There was a super atmosphere”, she said. “There were great teachers who encouraged my willingness to learn. And, like me, some of the pupils came from Poland.”
Parys quickly made friends. She was happy to accept the hour’s journey to school. It was just annoying that the report that was sent from Poland showed much worse marks that she had actually received. This was one of the typical vexations with which the children of “traitors” were tormented. Despite this, Magdalena Parys got good grades in her school-leaving certificate before studying educational studies, Polish studies and archaeology at the Humboldt University. During her degree, she met lots of people with a different view of Poland. Only later did she recognise that that did not apply to the majority of Germans. “Even today, there are prejudices and highly simplistic views of life”, she said. “I wish that people here would recognise how many people in Poland are cosmopolitan and liberal. The governing party PiS does not in any way represent all the people in the country.”
In the end, Parys worked as a scientific assistant and wrote a doctoral thesis. But she became increasingly bored by it and wrote a story in Polish. In 2011, this text became her highly praised and much read debut novel “The Tunnel”. But to get to this stage, there were a number of states that Parys had to go through in her literary career. She made her debut in 2001 in the literature magazine “Pogranicza” which over time published her poems, stories, book reviews and essays.
She also organised an international literature competition with Isabella Potrykus and was the editor-in-chief of the German-Polish literature magazine “Squaws” from 2006 to 2007. The success of the “The Tunnel” heralded the start of Parys’s life working as a full-time author, feature writer and podcaster (including for “COSMO Radio” on WDR). In 2014, the political-historical thriller “Magik” (“The Magician”) was published and in 2016 the family saga “Biała Rika”. Its central figure is “Oma Rita”, the ethnic German mother of Magdalena Parys’s stepfather. The books were translated into a number of languages. The German translation of “Magik” was written by Lothar Quinkenstein who also translates the works of Nobel prize winner Olga Tokarczuk from Polish to German. “I am absolutely thrilled by his translation skills,” said Magdalena Parys. “Even though he always wants to get rid of a few dirty words.”
If you ask Magdalena Parys about her homeland, today she will say that it is Berlin, where she lives with her husband, two sons and a daughter. She says: “Whenever I am somewhere else for a longer period, I get a yearning for Berlin. For me, Berlin is also somewhat of a Polish city. The architecture is not much different to that in Gdansk or Szczecin.” When Magdalena Parys longs for Poland, she mainly thinks about the sea and the places of her childhood. But thanks to her numerous book tours through Poland, the author has also got to know other cities, like Warsaw and Kraków. She is much better known there than in Germany. “With a little smile, Parys says: “It almost seems like Poles are more interested in the abysses of German history than Germans are in historical thrillers written by a woman.”
Either way, Parys is already working on a third part of the Berlin trilogy which began with the “The Magician”. And she still is not done with digging in the past and telling exciting stories.
Anselm Neft, January 2021
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