My Lithuanian Driving License

What is holding Europe together? What have Lithuanians done over the last quarter of a century with their recently won freedom? And how does the European Union function at the furthest reaches of its eastern borders? Rather than examining these questions theoretically, in 2011 Felix Ackermann left Berlin with his family in order to become a guest scholar at a Belarusian university in exile in the Lithuanian capital of Vilnius. There his children learnt Lithuanian and became good little patriots. His wife gave birth to a daughter who was immediately given a Lithuanian identification number. And Felix Ackermann finally managed to get his driving license in a little town called Utena.

Its tone, sense of humour and liveliness recalling Steffen Möllers’ Viva Polonia, the historian of eastern Europe and journalist Felix Ackermann writes about what it’s like to live in a country in which post-Soviet behaviours, national self-discovery and dreams of Europe coexist. And that through a negative perception of Middle Eastern refugees on the one hand and the fear of an aggressively more powerful Russia on the other is being challenged in completely new ways.