My Girlfriend, Russia, Ukraine, and Me. Christiane Hoffmann discusses her new book about the loss of personal and political dreams in conversation with Sabine Adler. Martina Gedeck reads from the book.

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The late 1980s: a group of young women are studying Russian. They read Dostoevsky, drink vodka, and travel through the Soviet Union, which is in the process of disintegrating. It is a time of new beginnings, of hopes and dreams of a democratic Russia and a peaceful Europe. Decades later, one of them takes her own life. It is the week Russia invades Ukraine.

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In a deeply moving way, this book intertwines a personal story with the upheavals of global politics. It tells of the disaster we failed to foresee because we did not want to see it coming. Of our dreams that did not come true—and perhaps could never have come true. It asks what we can change and what is inevitable. And it tells the story of a friendship whose significance one only fully grasps when it is suddenly gone. Christiane Hoffmann’s stirring book is not only sensitively observed and brilliantly written; it also tells the story of German-Russian-Ukrainian relations in a way that leaves room for doubt and grief, for questions and ambivalence. In doing so, she restores the emotional depth to the debates that was lost in the initial shock following the Russian attack, while simultaneously building bridges across the divides that this issue has created within German society.

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Christiane Hoffmann was the First Deputy Spokesperson for the German Federal Government. Hoffmann studied Slavic Studies, Eastern European History, and Journalism in Freiburg, Leningrad, and Hamburg. She worked for the _Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung _for nearly 20 years and served as a foreign correspondent in Moscow and Tehran. In early 2013, she joined the _Spiegel_’s Berlin bureau as deputy director. Since 2018, she has been a writer there and a frequent guest on radio and television. Hoffmann is the daughter of two refugee children. Her paternal ancestors came from Silesia, and her mother’s family from East Prussia. In 2022, her book Alles, was wir nicht erinnern was published.

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An event presented by Literatur LIVE in cooperation with C.H.Beck Verlag and Kino International