Agnieszka Lessmann. Writing as necessity

It would be another two years before Bolesław Lessmann spoke German well enough to be offered a paid contract at the Deutschlandfunk radio station in Cologne. Agnieszka grew up mainly in Cologne, the city on the river Rhine where she still lives today. Her mother, Jadwiga Lessmann, found a job there as a personnel officer in a German government agency. In the meantime, Agnieszka discovered her love of writing. From the age of twelve onwards, she expressed her inner life in poems and prose texts. “For me, writing is a necessity”, she says. “There’s no other option.” She continued to write throughout her time as a student, became a member of the Cologne writers’ workshop, and sent her short stories and poems to literary magazines and anthologies. Some of them were published, and the young Agnieszka was encouraged to be bolder in presenting her work to the public. She not only chose German, Italian and theatre, film and television studies as her subjects at university, but also wrote audio plays and radio features alongside her poems and stories. Even while she was still a student, she began working as a cultural journalist for the “Süddeutsche Zeitung”, “Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung” (more precisely: for the “FAZ magazine” at that time) and “Kölner Stadt-Anzeiger” newspapers. In her literary work, she focused particularly on her origins. The pain of losing her homeland and her native language as a result of an antisemitic defamation campaign runs deep, particularly since her father was a survivor of the Nazi concentration camps and consciously chose to remain in Poland after the war. As Agnieszka Lessmann says: “He loved his Polish homeland. He even wrote a historical novel about Łódz, where he was born.” Agnieszka can still remember learning a poem in preschool about “our capital city” (nasza stolica) and how proud she was of it. However, she also remembers how ashamed her mother was to be Polish when she experienced the degree of hatred towards Jews.

“Frequent themes in my writing are prejudice and general categorisation”, she explains. “Where do they come from? What consequences do they have? How are they communicated through language?” Lessmann’s writing is influenced by her ability to speak three languages from early on in her life, which honed her sensitivity to the connection between words and meanings. In her words: “At the same time, I am painfully aware of the emotionality of the language that I learned as a small child. Polish words that I learned at that time are linked to strong feelings and immediately invoke images and smells in me.”

Agnieszka Lessmann’s style is simultaneously precise and poetic. She attempts to stay true to her feelings, while her style is sometimes laconic, sometimes harsh, and sometimes light and airy. When asked about her literary role models, she says: “Certainly, when I was very young, there was Julian Tuwim and Jan Brzechwa, whose poems were read to me by my grandmother.” When she began considering becoming a professional writer at the age of around 20, Uwe Johnson was an important author for her. Lessmann’s other sources of inspiration, to name just a few, are Jane Austen, whose irony she loves, while Emily Brontë’s “Wuthering Heights” still has an impact on her decades later. She also admires Shakespeare’s ability to speak to different parts of his audience, always addressing them at eye level. Finally, she also mentions Margaret Atwood’s feel for the important issues of the future, which impresses and motivates her.

For Lessmann, audio plays are an important part of her work. She already began working as an audio play author when she was a student. Finally, she wrote her Master’s thesis on the War Blinded Audio Play Prize (Hörspielpreis der Kriegsblinden). Later, she remained true to this format, working as an audio play and features writer for the Deutschlandfunk, WDR, SWR, Bayrischer Rundfunk and Radio Bremen radio stations. Her works included “Variations on a Front Door Key” (“Variationen um einen Haustürschlüssel”; Radio Bremen, 1991), the award-winning “Cobain’s Ashes” (“Cobains Asche”; SWR, 2004), the “Monologue of an Ugly Woman” (“Monolog einer hässlichen Frau”; SWR, 2015) and the audio play “Murderer” (“Mörder”; Dlf/SWR, 2011), which tells the story of her migration to Germany. The play was chosen as the German submission to the Prix Europa competition, and was subsequently translated by Polskie Radio and produced in Polish. “It felt a bit like coming home”, she says.

From 2000–2013, Lessmann also wrote and produced the “Audio Play Calendar” (“Hörspielkalender”) radio magazine for Deutschlandfunk, which was presented by her husband, Frank Olbert. For Lessmann, audio plays are inspiring as a form because they offer so many possibilities: “You can make them dramatic, lyrical or narrational, you can create a collage of original soundtracks or make music the dominant feature. For many years, audio plays accounted for almost everything I’ve written, and I’ve no doubt I’ll return to this form every now and then.”