Dmitrij Kapitelman: A Decade in the Drawer—Reading and Discussion with Natalia Herrera

After ten years as a reporter for *Die Zeit*, Dmitrij Kapitelman knows them all: the beautiful, the ugly, the familiar, the foreign, the funny, and the sad sides of Germany. The hometown of the murdered CDU politician Walter Lübcke. A street named “Arrest Warrant Street” in Offenbach? Eastern-European Berlin during the Russian war against Ukraine.
In his novel *Russian Specialties* (Hanser Berlin, 2025), the author—born in Kyiv and now living in Germany—transforms the bizarre distortions of reality in the present into the fantastical: Against the backdrop of the “Magasin,” a store for Russian specialties in Leipzig, people transform into oversized cigarettes, fish, and machine guns begin to speak, while the “accursed mother tongue” in the mouths of the warmongers lures the narrator’s mother with television lies. Kapitelman speaks with cultural mediator Natalia Herrera about his insightful reportages and his moving novel.
---
Photo: Paula Winkler

Co-organizer: Egalitäre Jüdische Chawurah Gescher e.V. Freiburg, sponsored by the Central Council of Jews in Germany

Date: November 19, 2026, 7:30 p.m.
Location: Literaturhaus Freiburg, Bertoldstraße 17
Admission: 11/7 euros

Reading and discussion
Literaturhaus