“For me, ageing and sometimes despairing, reading about Jeff Young’s wild twin helped me to welcome my own ones, and to look forward to accumulate more memory and immersing myself in it, despite the dangers. “Wild Twin” is, on the one hand, a weird and wonderful and fucked-up “Time of Gifts” full of mouth ulcers, legions of mice and the necessity of stealing chocolate croissants. On the other it is a bittersweet and honest meditation on memory and the loss of it, and how we can get unmoored by both. Read it.”
The Library: Jeff Young - Wild Twin. Dream Maps of a Lost Soul and Drifter, Elsewhere Journal, November 2024
“Das Material für einen fortgesetzten literarischen und künstlerischen Dialog über die Wichtigkeit von Erinnerung in Deutschland und Polen ist also vorhanden, seien das die Steine des Friedhofs in Olsztyn oder die Familiengeschichten in beiden Ländern. Es bleibt zu hoffen, dass es weiterhin viele Übersetzungen von Werken gibt, die sich damit befassen, aus dem Polnischen ins Deutsche und anders herum. Kunst, egal ob Literatur, Film, Musik oder bildende Kunst, kann sich Erinnerung häufig am ehrlichsten näheren: fragmentiert, subjektiv, und zum Nachdenken anregend. “
„Ehemals deutsch“ in der deutschen und polnischen Kunst – Eine Momentaufnahme, Dialog Forum, September 2024
“Like a night train itself, it is a container for many things at the same time: an unfulfilled love story, a Hitchcock thriller, a chase movie, a portrait of Polish post-war society and a quintessential European post-war film. In the Poland the train crosses there are no ruins of the recent past like in The Third Man or Germany, Year Zero, but the European context of destruction is everywhere: there is the aforementioned survivor of Buchenwald who spends the night reading in the train corridor as he can’t sleep in a compartment where he is reminded of concentration camp bunks; Marta reads a collection of stories from the Spanish Civil War by German writer Rudolf Leonhard with a picture of Picasso’s Guernica on the cover; and when the police — or more precisely the Citizen’s Militia of the Polish People’s Republic — enter the train everyone watches them with suspicion.”
Minute 9: Night Train, 3:AM Magazine, April 2024
“Folgt man der gegenwärtigen Diskussion um Erinnerungskultur in Deutschland, könnte man meinen, dass wir uns aus der Rolle der Täter befreit haben, um Beobachter und moralische Richter zugleich zu sein. Glazers außergewöhnlicher Film führt diese Vorstellung ad absurdum und konfrontiert seine deutschen Zuschauer*innen mit einer Selbstbetrachtung wie es lange kein Film mehr über den Holocaust getan hat. “The Zone of Interest” zeigt, wie lange man doch unter Umständen bereit ist, um der eigenen kleinen privilegierten Welt willen viele dramatische Entwicklungen um einen herum zu ignorieren, und sogar willfährig Teil einer Mordmaschine zu werden.“
Häuschen und Blumen für Massenmörder – Über die Wirkung des Films “The Zone of Interest”, 54Books, April 2024
“For Germans today this must mean acknowledging the guilt and at the same time the suffering of our forebears, and to ensure it never happens again. And to understand who to support in the fight for democracy and human rights. But this is nothing new, neither for me nor for Heinrich Böll, us two friends of Ireland. As he wrote in 1979: “Amnesia is still recognised as a sickness, and one cannot heal those suffering of it by talking about another sicknesses. Auschwitz is and remains part of our history.” The fight continues, in Germany and in Ireland.“
The Area Has Not Yet Been Cleared of Mines: On Heinrich Böll, Germany, and Fascism, Minor Literatures, May 2023
“Even though the neighbors will be relieved, the one thing that I’ll miss about Tegel the most is the direct, loud and smelly experience of travel. There was something genuinely appealing about waiting at the bus stop on Kurt-Schumacher-Platz near the kebab stands and Chinese restaurants and watching the planes roar in just 50 meters overhead on their final approach to the airport. Tegel was one of the last of a dying breed: a veteran city airport, battered and forever unbeaten.”
Berlin Tegel: Farewell to the airport that wouldn’t die, CNN Travel, June 2021
“All families in Germany, Poland and Russia are related in the stories we hear and tell about the second World War and its aftermath. And once you start digging in the past, you find that even today these stories lie just under the surface of every day like hastily buried bodies, their outlines still visible. The more you know, the greater the realisation that there is so much more to find out. The war remains an unending repository of buried memory, which will keep families and historians busy forever.“
My Grandmother’s War, Irish Times, January 2018