29.09.

Lithuanian Landscapes

Panel Talk between Volker Koepp and Jan Brachmann

Two films by Volker Koepp: ‘Greetings from Sarmatia for the Poet Johannes Bobrowski’ (1972)
‘Return’ to the100th Anniversary of Johannes Bobrowski

Johannes Bobrowski, born in 1917 in Tilsit, in Memelland, also known as Prussian Lithuania, is one of the most important German authors of the post-war period as a poet and novelist. Having grown up in a region where Poles, Russians, Lithuanians and Jews lived together, Bobrowski wanted, as he himself wrote, ‘to describe landscapes and people in order to tell my German compatriots something they do not know. Indeed, they do not know about their eastern neighbors.’ Volker Koepp, one of Germany’s most respected documentary filmmakers, has been fascinated by Bobrowski’s landscapes for half a century. He visited them again and again, and between two of his films he tells what he experienced there.