Suhrkamp presents Classics from the Backlist: "Refugee Conversations" and "I Didn’t Want to Leave Any Questions Unasked"

Uwe Johnson's I Didn’t Want to Leave Any Questions Unasked. Conversations with Escape Helpers, on the other hand, deals with a completely different aspect of migration and fleeing: he interviewed people who helped others leave the GDR after the Berlin Wall had been built. What were their motivations? Why did they risk everything – including their own lives – to facilitate an escape for people who found themselves in an inhospitable system? I Didn’t Want to Leave Any Questions Unasked for the first time gives direct, immediate insight into the inner workings of Fluchthelfer – whose courage and dedication is as important now as it was then.

The dialogues in Bertolt Brecht's Refugee Conversations, written in the early 1940s, deal with the everyday life of those expelled from Germany, represented by the intellectual Ziffel and the worker Kalle, who are talking about the international (German troops have occupied Denmark and Norway and are advancing in France) and their own situation in a cafe in Helsinki’s main railway station: »The passport is man‘s most precious organ.« In light of the current situation and the moral dilemmas and duties we are facing, re-reading Bertolt Brecht's text about the experience of displacement provides a valuable contribution to the contemporary discourse.