5 Questions for Svenja Leiber about Kazimira
News18.08.2021
In 2019, you visited the Kaliningrad region in which the novel is set. What led you there?
My writing is closely linked to the actual setting of a novel. Especially where historical themes are concerned, I think about how the past survives – in nature, in the plants, in the soil, in the sediments. I have to have moved through the landscapes that I want to invent my characters into, at least to some extent, to know the relations between terrain and sky, for example, or to get a feeling for what it is like to stand and walk in such a landscape. With a novel like Kazimira, which is about an excavation, a mine, among other things, it was essential for me to be there, to see the present-day open-cast mine, the architecture of the villages, this mixture of medieval, old German, socialist and neo-Russian architecture. But I also wanted to see the beach, the remains of the »Anna Pit«, the cliffs and the impressive phenomenon of amber constantly washing up on some parts of the beach. I also wanted to meet some of the people who now live and work in the Kaliningrad region.
How did you become aware of the »Anna Pit« in Yantarny in the first place?
I had hours of taped interviews with an old farm worker who lived in the village in Schleswig-Holstein where I grew up and actually wanted to write about the social division between farm workers and landowners in a community of forty people. However, since my interview partner was originally from East Prussia, I started to look into the history of East Prussia instead. In a book by the historian Andreas Kossert, I came across the tragic story of the old pit, which had been founded in the last third of the 19th century by the Jewish entrepreneur Moritz Becker.
By now it has been 75 years since the National Socialists murdered at least 3,000 women and girls in front of the »Anna Pit« – you have reported elsewhere that this massacre was one reason for writing Kazimira. What exactly was it that interested you about it?
Interested is the wrong word. It was the violence against women and girls taken to the absolute extreme that concerned me. The Nazis were not just planning to murder these people, but also came up with the obscene idea of immuring the Jewish women in the old »Jewish« pit. In an essay on anti-Semitism by the French rabbi and author Delphine Horvilleur, I also came across the term nekeva, which refers to both the feminine and to the cave in Hebrew ... I never intended to write about the massacre itself. Such things are not the stuff of fiction. There are eyewitness accounts. So the novel is not about the victims themselves, nor about the massacre. Instead, it is more of a call to remember by going back almost another 70 years, to the 19th century, the time when the mine was founded, and from there I tell the stories of women – women who are each endangered in their own way because they do not conform to mainstream society and its norms for various reasons. My aim was to describe the resistance of women and girls who oppose patriarchal violence and confinement.
The historical background of your novel – the construction of the most productive amber mine in history, but also the atrocities committed by the National Socialists in East Prussia – dates back many years. What traces of the past did you encounter on your journey?
To some extent, the Kaliningrad region and many neighbouring landscapes in Poland can in fact be read like a history book. While remnants of pagan culture that survived the violent colonisation by the Teutonic Knights in the Middle Ages (even if only symbolically) can still be found on the spit, there are also traces of violence in the name of Christianity in the form of huge brick fortress churches, remnants of various fortifications, Hitler’s »Wolf’s Lair«, decrepit mansions that recall the time of Junkers and landowners, brick houses next to prefabricated buildings, Russian wooden houses next to dilapidated Gothic churches that have storks nesting on them, old tree-lined roads that lead to nothingness, new tree-lined roads that lead to gigantic, brand-new holiday complexes ... It is very strange to see how so many testimonies of German wars and European politics have found their way into this so sparsely populated area.
With that said: Who is Kazimira?
Kazimira is a character who rebels against social norms. Although, despite of what her name actually suggests, she asks for nothing more than peace, or simply to be left in peace. She is the predecessor of a whole series of very different women and girls, therefore she is, so to speak, the outermost matryoshka doll, from which new, more or less rebellious figures continue to emerge right up to the present.
In Kazimira, Svenja Leiber tells the story of the fates of two families against the backdrop of the largest amber mining operation in history in a remote location on the Baltic Sea. She focuses on the female members of the families, whom the novel follows across five generations. At the centre of it all: Kazimira and her struggle for self-determination. Today, the Yantarny amber mine is an open-cast mine just barely saved from being shut down, a wilderness of excavation, traumatised nature and perhaps a symbol of a post-National Socialist, post-Soviet, post-ecological present.
My writing is closely linked to the actual setting of a novel. Especially where historical themes are concerned, I think about how the past survives – in nature, in the plants, in the soil, in the sediments. I have to have moved through the landscapes that I want to invent my characters into, at least to some extent, to know the relations between terrain and sky, for example, or to get a feeling for what it is like to stand and walk in such a landscape. With a novel like Kazimira, which is about an excavation, a mine, among other things, it was essential for me to be there, to see the present-day open-cast mine, the architecture of the villages, this mixture of medieval, old German, socialist and neo-Russian architecture. But I also wanted to see the beach, the remains of the »Anna Pit«, the cliffs and the impressive phenomenon of amber constantly washing up on some parts of the beach. I also wanted to meet some of the people who now live and work in the Kaliningrad region.
How did you become aware of the »Anna Pit« in Yantarny in the first place?
I had hours of taped interviews with an old farm worker who lived in the village in Schleswig-Holstein where I grew up and actually wanted to write about the social division between farm workers and landowners in a community of forty people. However, since my interview partner was originally from East Prussia, I started to look into the history of East Prussia instead. In a book by the historian Andreas Kossert, I came across the tragic story of the old pit, which had been founded in the last third of the 19th century by the Jewish entrepreneur Moritz Becker.
By now it has been 75 years since the National Socialists murdered at least 3,000 women and girls in front of the »Anna Pit« – you have reported elsewhere that this massacre was one reason for writing Kazimira. What exactly was it that interested you about it?
Interested is the wrong word. It was the violence against women and girls taken to the absolute extreme that concerned me. The Nazis were not just planning to murder these people, but also came up with the obscene idea of immuring the Jewish women in the old »Jewish« pit. In an essay on anti-Semitism by the French rabbi and author Delphine Horvilleur, I also came across the term nekeva, which refers to both the feminine and to the cave in Hebrew ... I never intended to write about the massacre itself. Such things are not the stuff of fiction. There are eyewitness accounts. So the novel is not about the victims themselves, nor about the massacre. Instead, it is more of a call to remember by going back almost another 70 years, to the 19th century, the time when the mine was founded, and from there I tell the stories of women – women who are each endangered in their own way because they do not conform to mainstream society and its norms for various reasons. My aim was to describe the resistance of women and girls who oppose patriarchal violence and confinement.
The historical background of your novel – the construction of the most productive amber mine in history, but also the atrocities committed by the National Socialists in East Prussia – dates back many years. What traces of the past did you encounter on your journey?
To some extent, the Kaliningrad region and many neighbouring landscapes in Poland can in fact be read like a history book. While remnants of pagan culture that survived the violent colonisation by the Teutonic Knights in the Middle Ages (even if only symbolically) can still be found on the spit, there are also traces of violence in the name of Christianity in the form of huge brick fortress churches, remnants of various fortifications, Hitler’s »Wolf’s Lair«, decrepit mansions that recall the time of Junkers and landowners, brick houses next to prefabricated buildings, Russian wooden houses next to dilapidated Gothic churches that have storks nesting on them, old tree-lined roads that lead to nothingness, new tree-lined roads that lead to gigantic, brand-new holiday complexes ... It is very strange to see how so many testimonies of German wars and European politics have found their way into this so sparsely populated area.
With that said: Who is Kazimira?
Kazimira is a character who rebels against social norms. Although, despite of what her name actually suggests, she asks for nothing more than peace, or simply to be left in peace. She is the predecessor of a whole series of very different women and girls, therefore she is, so to speak, the outermost matryoshka doll, from which new, more or less rebellious figures continue to emerge right up to the present.
In Kazimira, Svenja Leiber tells the story of the fates of two families against the backdrop of the largest amber mining operation in history in a remote location on the Baltic Sea. She focuses on the female members of the families, whom the novel follows across five generations. At the centre of it all: Kazimira and her struggle for self-determination. Today, the Yantarny amber mine is an open-cast mine just barely saved from being shut down, a wilderness of excavation, traumatised nature and perhaps a symbol of a post-National Socialist, post-Soviet, post-ecological present.
All photos: © Svenja Leiber