Agnieszka Lessmann. Writing as necessity
Warsaw, November 1968. A four-year-old girl is standing with her parents at Dworzec Gdański railway station. She knows that she has to leave her homeland, along with her beloved grandmother and great-grandmother in Łódź. Today, a plaque at Gdańsk station in Warsaw commemorates the Jews who were deported from there in special trains. At that time, few people in Polish society overall were interested in remembering the fate of the Jews. Antisemitism was widespread and encouraged by the government. Finally, it came to a head in the form of a campaign by the ruling Communist Party, in which hundreds of Jewish doctors, academics, artists, journalists, generals and officials were forced out of their jobs. As a result, Jewish Poles were no longer able to earn a living and had to leave their homeland. The non-Jewish population remained largely silent in the face of this cruelty.
On leaving the country, the Lessmanns were forced to give up their citizenship, and became stateless. They were only permitted to take seven dollars each with them – 21 dollars in total. The train took them to Vienna, where there was a reception camp. In Vienna, Bolesław Lessmann went to the Israeli embassy, which issued the family with passports and plane tickets to Israel. Agnieszka Lessmann has blurred memories of her arrival in Arad, Israel. There, she went to preschool while her parents attended a language course. Her father quickly realised that he would not be able to learn enough Hebrew to work as a journalist in the country. When he was offered a post at a Polish-language radio station in Germany, he therefore decided to take it. In the spring of 1969, the small family moved to Germany – specifically, to Hanover. However, there was one caveat to the job: the station was Radio Free Europe, which was regarded in at least Eastern Europe and Russia as a mouthpiece for US propaganda. As Agnieszka Lessmann recalls: “My mother’s younger sister had remained in Poland. And my parents were afraid that she would not be allowed to take her higher school-leaving exam if her brother-in-law worked for a western propaganda station.”
The Lessmanns were at least given German citizenship, and with it, their name in its present form, after the original version, Lesman, was altered to Lessmann by the German authorities. From a writer’s perspective, this is of practical use: the short “e” and “a” vowels in the new version of the name convey the correct pronunciation for German readers and listeners. Also, the family’s German ancestors used “Lessmann” as their surname. Agnieszka Lessmann is not aware of any family connection with the famous Polish poet Bolesław Leśmian/Lesman (1877–1937).
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.”
However, Agnieszka Lessmann also remains true to poetry, publishing individual poems or entire volumes every so often, such as “State of Flight” (“Fluchtzustand”, published by Elif Verlag, 2020). In the 100-page volume of poetry, Lessmann processes her experiences as a teacher of German as a foreign language from 2015 onwards.
In 2025, her first novel was published by the Berlin-based Gans Verlag. “Aga” is a work of autofiction that sensitively and poetically describes the childhood and youth of traumatised people, bringing their experience close to home for the reader. Here, we also find out more about Agnieszka’s father and other survivors of the Holocaust, whom she encountered as a child at a meeting place used by the Jewish community when she arrived in Germany.
The term “transgenerational trauma” has now become somewhat overused when talking about literature. However, “Aga” is an outstanding example of how this complex topic can be approached. The story is told from a child’s perspective, and forces us as readers to open up to something that we generally prefer to bury under clever terminology and well-rehearsed displays of concern: our feelings. The silence of the parents in the story doesn’t mean that their terrible experiences are no longer present. Rather, they continue to exist as atmospheres, which children can sense like high-precision seismographs. In the novel, the author writes: “They don’t know, and they don’t understand; instead, they can sense something. [...] It sinks to the bottom of the jug, and when the coffee has been poured out, a black essence remains.”
Although Germany was the country of origin of the perpetrators (and many victims) of the National Socialist dictatorship, in Cologne, Agnieszka Lessmann feels at ease and is closely connected with the literary life in the city. She is a member of the Cologne Literary Scene (Literaturszene Köln) and the Poetry Network (Netzwerk Lyrik), as well as the PEN Germany (PEN Deutschland) writers’ organisation. Currently, she is working on a poetry cycle about the Jewish quarter in Cologne and her family history, funded by a stipend from the German Literature Fund (Deutscher Literaturfonds). She is also in the process of completing her second novel.
Agnieszka Lessmann has spent many more years of her life in Germany than in Poland. However, her connections with her birth country go beyond her forced departure. She loves the Polish language, as well as Polish literature and film. She also explains that Poland was the first Eastern Bloc country to stand up to the Soviet dictatorship: “There’s a part of society that is making serious efforts to secure both a democratic future and to study and process Polish history, including antisemitism in Poland.”
She admires the willingness among many people in Germany to engage with the past, even if it is painful to do so. What particularly stands out for her, however, is the fact that the Germans have succeeded in developing a functioning democracy, and that even in the current difficult times, the large majority of Germans are fighting to maintain and defend it. With this in mind, she hopes that the relationship between Poland and Germany, as well as the ties between the two countries and the rest of Europe, will become even stronger. “After all, that’s our only chance to beat authoritarian regimes.”
Anselm Neft, January 2026
The author’s website: https://agnieszkalessmann.de/
