Politik und Biographik

To mark the publication of her book Der Schlüssel würde noch passen. Moskauer Erinnerungen (The Key Would Still Fit. Moscow Memories. Munich: Droemer Knaur, 2025), historian, publicist, and writer Irina Scherbakowa will discuss the connection between politics and biography with literary scholar Franziska Thun-Hohenstein.

In her book, Irina Scherbakowa weaves together memories of her life in Moscow over the past three decades and reflections on her enduring dedication to telling the stories of those who suffered under Stalinist terror. In a sense, this autobiographical work is also the biography of Memorial, the Russian human rights organization that was dissolved by the Russian Supreme Court at the end of 2021, yet continues its work in exile.

The conversation also touches on broader issues. To what extent does politics dominate people’s lives in Russia? Is propaganda more powerful than education? Can biography be used as a means of resisting manipulation? Considering that the majority of the Russian population supports Putinֽ’s war against Ukraine, can we speak of the failure of the Russian intelligentsia?

With the kind support of Droemer Knaur.

Irina Scherbakowa is a Russian historian and Germanist who co-founded the human rights organization Memorial. Since the 1980s, she has researched the history of Stalinism and political repression in the Soviet Union, as well as forms of individual and collective memory. A particular focus of her work is German-Russian history of memory. Considered one of the most important voices in Russian civil society, Scherbakowa now lives in exile. She has received numerous awards, most recently the Marion Dönhoff Prize for International Communication and Reconciliation in 2022 and the Hambacher Freiheitspreis 1832 in 2024. In 2022, Memorial was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize alongside Belarusian human rights activist Ales Bialiatski and the Ukrainian human rights organization Center for Civil Liberties. Irina Scherbakowa has been an honorary member of the ZfL since 2010.

Franziska Thun-Hohenstein is the author, among other works, of Gebrochene Linien. Autobiographisches Schreiben und Lagerzivilisation (Broken Lines. Autobiographical Writing and the Civlization of Camps. Berlin: Kulturverlag Kadmos, 2nd revised edition, 2014), and Das Leben schreiben. Warlam Schalamow: Biographie und Poetik (Writing Life. Varlam Shalamov: Biography and Poetics. Berlin: Matthes & Seitz, 2022). Since 2007, she has been the editor of the German-language edition of Shalamov's works. Thun-Hohenstein studied at Lomonosov Moscow State University and received her PhD in Berlin. She was a long-time researcher at the ZfL and is now a senior fellow there.

Fig. above: Franziska Thun-Hohenstein and Irina Scherbakowa, © Matthias Stief