Mia Raben – Journalist and author
Mia Raben’s family history is complex: Her father was from Hamburg, studied medicine and was interested in the Eastern bloc countries. Impressed by Willy Brandt taking the knee, in 1972 he and a friend decided to do their clinical traineeship, which at the time was a four-month internship, in Poland. So he arrived in Łódź, where he met a Polish girl at a party, who was a talented linguist and interested in art. She spoke fluent German and was training to be a sound engineer. This was a specific course in Poland which trained people to direct the music in film and theatre. It also included the right for the musically trained person to co-determine the content; a right which did not really exist in Germany in this form. In short, the future sound engineer and the future doctor fell in love. So it was not ideal that he had to go back to Hamburg. Now the couple could only meet when he got a 24-hour visitor visa for East Berlin. This was an obstacle and did not allow them to share a life together. So Danuta and Ralph married and established a family in Hamburg. Mia Raben was born in 1977, her brother had arrived a year earlier. Relationships became somewhat complex when her parents separated and married again. So Mia Raben has a younger half-brother on her mother’s side, a significantly younger half-brother on her father’s side, and four stepbrothers and sisters from the previous marriages of her parents’ new partners.
“When my brother and I were little, my parents only spoke German at home”, recalls Mia Raben. Her mother was new to Hamburg and wanted to make her children’s start in kindergarten easier. “But she did things differently with our younger half-brother, who she had ten years later, because she knew that you lose the language otherwise.” Suddenly, Polish was spoken at home, which Mia Raben reflects on saying: “But I was already ten years old then and I tried to soak up as much as possible because for me it was also a way to get closer to my mother. For a time, I was quite melancholy when I saw that my little brother had simply been handed the Polish language in his cot“.
Mia Raben tried her best to learn the Polish language. When she was growing up, she was particularly motivated by the frequent visits to her relations in Łódź or to the Baltic Sea near Puck. She looks back fondly at the large, loud, cheerful get-togethers with family and friends. In the mid-1990s after completing her secondary education, she went to Kraków, did a language course and began “to learn Polish properly”.
Mia Raben has always seen her Polish heritage as a treasure that she somehow has to find. The better she could understand and speak Polish, the more important it became for her work. After the language course in Kraków, she did a traineeship at Pinneberger Tageblatt, a local newspaper on the outskirts of Hamburg. She got the tip from one of her father’s friends, whom she remembers as a great journalist: “Write about the volunteer fire brigade, that’s where you’ll learn your craft.” She also said: “Don't study journalism. Study a subject. So that you know something.”
For as long as she has been able to think, Mia Raben has wanted “to do something with language”. She did a language course in Spain and went to Amsterdam, where she studied Spanish, European law and political sciences. Of course, she also picked up Dutch at the same time. She was then awarded one of the coveted places at the Berlin School of Journalism and engrossed herself in the tools of her trade. She fondly remembers her mentor Christian Bommarius: “He is not just a razor-sharp analyst of current political events; he is also a literary person. When I said to him that I intended to go to Warsaw to work as a freelance correspondent, he said “That is wonderful!”, and gave me the thick Fischer paperback edition of Witold Gombrowicz’s diaries.”
During her time in Warsaw, Mia Raben sometimes felt like an imposter who is not as Polish as she claims. She says, “I was feeling my way in this country that was in one way so familiar to me and at the same time so foreign.” Although the people there were mostly friendly towards her and were happy that she was learning Polish, Mia Raben was actually ashamed because she thought that she ought to speak it better by now. As if it was her fault that they had only spoken German at home when she was a child. Perhaps it also had something to do with the less positive image of Poles that she had come to be aware of in Germany: “People in Germany seldom reacted to Poland and to anything Polish with genuine interest, with curiosity or good will; instead they had this particular mix of dismay and sympathy which was very unpleasant to me as a child; I still remember it exactly.” Fortunately, Mia Raben thinks that this has changed in many places. However, she still does not believe that the derogatory indoctrination from the Nazi era has been completely overcome: “The tales of “Slavic subhumans” or of “peasant folk”, whose manpower was to be exploited, have done a lot of damage.” In 2022, Mia Raben expressed her view of the processing of the Nazi era in Germany in a critical text. In the same literature blog, she also published her autobiographical essay ”Wovon wir sprechen, wenn wir Versöhnung sagen” [What we mean when we say reconciliation], in which she grapples with her relationship with Poland and Germany.
Back to Warsaw in the Noughties. It is not the case that Mia Raben just feels foreign and ashamed here; often she also feels light and inspired. Elated by the desire to get to know, discover and recount, she experiences Warsaw as a goldmine. The exciting material seemed to wait for her on the street corners. She wrote about milk bars, about the Orange Revolution in the Ukraine, about Auschwitz, about the Kaczyński twins. Time and again, however, she had the feeling that she had not managed to describe the fundamental characteristic. She found that the journalistic form was not enough to capture her impressions, observations and also her subjective associations and speculations.
So she started to write short stories in which she takes real events and experiences a step further. She produced a whole pool of short stories which all related to the system change of 1989 in one way or another. Whilst she was doing this, she worked as a journalist during the day, writing about the scandal surrounding the so-called Wildstein list for example, or about the “perceived neighbourship” between Poland and Germany.
Mia Raben made friends with an American woman with Polish roots. They lived together, explored the city, went to museums, clubs and theatres or went to a party hosted by Sławomir Sierakowski, the founder and editor-in-chief of the “Krytyka Polityczna”, who Mia Raben had interviewed for the “taz” not long before. The party was held in an empty villa in the suburb of Praga on the east bank of the Vistula. The host had placed much of the furniture, lamps and carpets in the garden as if there was a salon there. This picture left a lasting impression on Mia Raben. For her it symbolised “the Poles’ unbelievable creativity and their longing for freedom.” Mia Raben had the impression that, in contrast to Germany, freedom is truly loved in Poland. She called this love “libidinously charged“ and saw in it a love for people who she found very attractive. In her eyes, people in Germany should try to compensate a bit more for their tendency to be strict and to conform, which sometimes gives Mia Raben the creeps.
In 2007, Mia Raben moved back to Hamburg, had two sons and was employed by a PR agency before she turned her back on the “writing trade” and switched to the “Nido” and “Neon” magazines. “Neon was the coolest magazine in Germany”, said Mia Raben smiling. “And Nido was the magazine for cool parents.” She fondly remembers this “super time” and the many experiments with her children: Carving in the woods, cooking the meatballs from Lilly Brett’s novel “Chuzpe”, making donuts based on a Polish recipe. Mia Raben very much regrets that the two magazines no longer exist and that Gruner & Jahr has been “eviscerated like a shot deer.”
Mia Raben continues to write literature “almost secretly on the side”. Only a few ever get read by others. This changed when she was invited to attend a novel writing workshop at the Bavarian Academy of Writing. Now, for the first time, she is actually seeing herself as a literary author. The author Ulrike Draesener told her about a Masters in Creative Writing in Leipzig, for which Mia Raben successfully applied. She submitted her master’s thesis a year ago. This work forms the basis for her novel “Fallende Steine, die sich der Schwerkraft widersetzen“ on which Mia Raben is currently working. In December 2022, she was awarded a research grant by the cultural authority in Hamburg and by the Hamburg Literature House for the material. She wants to use the money to travel to Łódź, her mother’s home town, and to research the Polish textile industry.
Anselm Neft, February 2023
Instagram-Account by Mia Raben:
https://www.instagram.com/miakolumna
