“I had a love-hate relationship with this country back then...”

Gabriele Leupold was born in 1954 into a displaced family: her father originally came from Silesia, her mother from East Prussia. She grew up in Rhineland-Palatinate with the feeling that “real life is happening somewhere else”. She read Dostoyevsky as a teenager and wanted to study psychology. But then she turned to Slavic Studies. When she travelled to the USSR for the first time in the early 1970s, she was impressed by the size of the country and the variety of worlds. She made friends, also with dissidents. As a student she already began translating challenging works of literature. From the beginning, she had a love for authors who “consist of language”. Ossip Mandelstam’s “Conversation about Dante”, translated together with Wolfgang Beilenhoff, was one of her first publications. Today, we can read Andrei Bely, Andrei Platonov and Varlam Shalamov in Gabriele Leupold’s translation. She likes building bridges between people. Shortly before reunification, she founded the “Berliner Russischgruppe” with others. The group is still active and is an important place of exchange between translators of different generations.

Rosemarie Tietze, born in 1944 in the Black Forest, didn't know her father – “he never came back from Russia”, went missing in action during the war. That is likely the biographical reason why she dedicated herself to Russian, says Rosemarie Tietze. In 1969, she travelled to Moscow for the first time for a longer period and met people who helped her discover this fascinating new world. Her desire to convey this world grew quickly, but she had to fight for a long time before the authors so close to her heart could be published in her translation. This had not least to do with the Cold War and the divided Germany. The most important contemporary author for Rosemarie Tietze is Andrei Bitov, whose work she introduced to the German public. We can also read Tolstoy and Pushkin today in her retranslations. In addition to her work as a literary translator, Tietze was an early advocate for the guild. That the Deutscher Übersetzerfonds (German Tranlators' Fund) exists today is largely due to her initiative and commitment.

Ganna-Maria Braungardt was born into a family of actors in Crimmitschau in 1956, but never wanted to become an actress herself. She went to the USSR, studied Slavic studies and was hired as an editor for Soviet literature at the Volk und Welt publishing house in 1984. "A dream job," she recalls today. Soon Ganna began translating as well: The editor and translator Thomas Reschke arranged the younger colleague's first translation assignments and showed her solidarity as a mentor. When reunification meant that everyone at the publishing house was laid off, Ganna didn't want to give up her profession. Now she was also the one who helped the older GDR colleagues adapt to the new working conditions as a mentor. Ganna-Maria Braungardt made a name for herself as a translator from Russian. She has translated, among others, Svetlana Alexeyevich and Lyudmila Ulitskaya. Since Russia's invasion of Ukraine, she sees her work as even more important: "We are no less in demand today, indeed we are perhaps even more in demand as mediators," she said on 29.03.22 on WDR Kultur.

Aljonna Möckel was born in Moscow, the child of Erwin Johannes Bach, a German anti-fascist Musicologist of Jewish descent. The Holocaust, and a life in exile between Stalin and Hilter, the Siege of Leningrad, the war, all left their tragic traces in the family history. In 1947, her parents returned to Berlin. After studying Slavic Studies and Romance Studies in Jena, Aljonna started work for the publisher “Volk und Welt” as an editor of Soviet literature. In 1966, her disabled son Dan was born. This forced her to quit her job and try to make it as a freelance translator in the GDR. She enjoyed translating texts which describe fantasy worlds: children’s books and science fiction. In March 1989, she took part in the legendary German-German translation workshop in Straelen. After reunification, she wrote fantasy novels together with her husband, Romanticist Klaus Möckel, under the pseudonym Nikolaj Bachnow.

Thomas Reschke, born in 1932, experienced the beginning of the Second World War aged seven and its end aged thirteen. In 1945 he fled his home city of Gdansk and began studying Slavic studies in war-torn Berlin. In 1955 the state assigned him the job of editor at the publishing house “Kultur und Fortschritt”. As part of an “ideological leading company”, Thomas Reschke soon learned the value and the limits of freedom as it could be experienced in the workers’ and farmers’ state of the GDR. After the merger with “Volk und Welt” in 1964, Reschke worked in this leading GDR publishing house as an editor for almost 35 years. In 1956 he began translating. Since then he has become one of the most renowned translators from Russian into German. After reunification, he established himself as a freelancer, partly together with his wife Renate. He has translated, amongst others, Mikhail Bulgakov, Ilya Ilf & Yevgeny Petrov and Mikhail Shoshchenko.

Claudia Dathe was born in 1971 near Leipzig. She began to study Translation with Eastern European languages in the early 1990s, which were defined by turmoil. In the 1990s and early 2000s she spent several periods studying and working in Russia, Kazakhstan, and Ukraine, in order to get to know post-Soviet environments and gather experiences of transformation. In Kyiv, she witnessed the Orange Revolution in 2004/5. The kitchen of her friends in Kyiv, Mark Belorousets und Alla Zamanska became a place of encounter with intellectuals and early dissidents, of insight into the repressive years of the Soviet Union, and of discussions about literature and translation. Claudia Dathe began to learn Ukrainian. Today she is among the most active mediator of Ukrainian literature in Germany. She has translated Evgenia Belorusets, Marianna Kijanowska and Serhij Zhadan, amongst others.

Thomas Weiler, born in 1978 in the Black Forest, understands himself as someone who likes discovering small niches. His interest in the Slavic world led him not to Moscow, but to Belarus. In Minsk he volunteered with disabled people, learned Russian through Russian rock music and experimented as a translator, working on the Soviet children’s classic “Crocodile Gena and his friends”. Thomas liked the puzzling it required. The well-known German translator Swetlana Geier encouraged him to get involved with the adventure of translation. He went to Leipzig, studied translation, and discovered the Belarusian language and its literature. Today, Thomas translates from Belarusian, Polish and Russian. His repertoire extends from children’s literature across poetry to contemporary novels. Thomas understands the mediation of Belarusian literature as his mission. He has translated Alhierd Bacharevič, Viktor Martinowitsch, Ziemowit Szczerek and many others.