The multilingual OSTPOL BERLIN Festival, a forum dedicated to Eastern European art, has opened in Berlin. The festival aims to rethink the connections between the past and the present, and between East and West.
The festival opened with an evening dedicated to Belarus, featuring contemporary poetry, prose, and music by Belarusian artists living in Berlin.
Poet and translator Yulia Tsimafeyeva presented readings from her poetry collection Circulation. The book was published in German by the Berlin-based publishing house Edition Fototapeta in a translation by Tina Wunschmann. It tells the story of her family over the course of a century and of “the long journey away from home.”
Alhierd Bacharevic presented the German edition of The Paper Golem, which was published in 2025 in a translation by Magdalena Vogt, also by Edition Fototapeta. In the book, the author reflects on what it means today to be a writer, an emigrant, a man, a Belarusian, and a European.
The evening concluded with a live performance by WTBSK, a joint project of Sveta Ben and Siarhei Navitski.
“WTBSK with Sveta Ben took the stage several times and performed, among other songs, my favorite one about the ‘Berlin Ocean.’ My thanks to Marcin Jankowski for the idea and moderation, and to Ulrike Almut Sandig for reading Yulia’s poems in German translation,” shared Alhierd Bacharevic.
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