POLAND MARKET 2026
POLENMARKT 2026 Book Presentation with Matthias Nawrat: “Das glückliche Schicksal”
Reading & Discussion
1983: The young Polish psychologist Wanda Karłowska travels to Venice to interview Henryk Mrugalski, who is living there in exile, about his research. Or is it an interrogation in which Mrugalski—once a Gulag prisoner, later a collaborator—shirks responsibility? Nawrat’s novel takes us deep into recent European history—even beyond the sphere of influence of the SED. For throughout the entire Eastern Bloc, people were familiar with a life of multiple truths, with their own stories of perpetrators and victims that persist within them, playing hide-and-seek with one another and with the past. Nawrat follows two generations on their journey toward the questions that humanity poses to us: Who do we grow close to? How can we live responsibly? When history and bureaucracy determine our fate, how are happiness and morality connected?
Matthias Nawrat, born in Opole, Poland, in 1979, emigrated with his family to Bamberg at the age of ten and now lives in Berlin. His work has received numerous awards, including the Alfred Döblin Medal, the European Union Prize for Literature, and the 2023 Fontane Literature Prize.
Admission: 5 euros
Organizers:
Koeppenhaus Greifswald and the Heinrich Böll Foundation MV as part of the Greifswald cultural festival “Polenmarkt”
The Polish cultural days “polenmARkT” were launched in Greifswald in 1997 and have since developed into a ten-day festival held annually in November.
