Marta Kijowska:

The idea of writing a few sketches about places that were important in Polish 20th century literary life came to me for the first time shortly before the Frankfurt Book Fair in 2000. Poland was the guest of honor at the Book Fair and I wanted to write a small book to bring the supposedly so difficult and hermetic Polish literature closer to German readers. Instead of smothering them with names, dates and titles, I wanted to take them on a journey through several Polish “literary landscapes” – starting from the personality of an author, or the character of a location, or perhaps the political or economic conditions that influenced literary life. Unfortunately, I neither had enough time nor sufficient funds to go through with the project. So I am all the more pleased that now, seven years later, it has come about after all, allowing me to make three trips to Poland and visit at least some of the places I had considered: Warsaw, Lodz, Cracow and Zakopane. Even so, I was unable to go everywhere. For instance a trip to Vilna or Lvov was impossible. So it was all the more important to be able to fall back on “substitute situations”, such as the special exhibition on Bruno Schulz at the Warsaw Literature Museum (instead of traveling to eastern Galicia) or discussions with friends and colleagues of Nobel Prize Laureate Czeslaw Milosz in Cracow (instead of an escapade to Vilna). Thanks to such on-site research, I was able to get a better picture of the climate and style of the former literary meeting places: the cafés, private homes that served as literary salons, and the editorial and publishing houses. So the travels were of great value to me – and I hope my book - both in factographic and atmospheric respects.

“Polen, das heißt nirgendwo”
Ein Streifzug durch Polens literarische Landschaften
C.H. Beck Verlag  2007. 220 pages. Hardback.
EUR 19.90
ISBN 978-3-406-56375-1