Since 2016, The Poetry Project has been accompanying young people with refugee experiences on their journey to use language as a means of self-empowerment. Thousands of texts have emerged from hundreds of workshops – courageous, tender, and political. The words of our authors move, unite, and transform. Many of them are now not only artists but also citizens of this country; they have learned German, pursued higher education, completed vocational training. They are taking on responsibility – including at The Poetry Project.
A New Generation Takes the Floor:
As part of the “Writing History Together” project—funded by the German Postcode Lottery—twelve young adults are being trained as workshop leaders for creative writing. In several modules, they learn to facilitate creative group processes and organize their own readings. They lead workshops at schools, educational centers, and cultural institutions—as experts on their own stories. They represent confident, equal participation—and a different vision of integration.
They Show What Participation Really Means:
Our new trainers embody participation on equal footing: confident, shaping, equal. They are bridge-builders between life worlds, languages, and biographies—and important role models for a society in transition. They bring not only the tools of writing, but also what cannot be learned: lived experience, shifts in perspective, and attitude.
A Call to Listen, Learn, and Shape Together:
In 2025 and 2026, The Poetry Project will bring writing workshops, readings, and educational support materials to schools in Berlin, Brandenburg, and beyond.
Do you work at a school, educational institution, or university? Are you looking for creative formats for democracy education and cultural participation? Do you want to help shape, think along, and contribute? Get in touch with us!
We are writing history together!
Image: © Mapping the In Between Foto Sascha Hoecker Potsdam
From 2023 to 2024, The Poetry Project received funding for its project "Witnesses of the Future – Stories of Tomorrow’s Germans" from the Federal Ministry for Family Affairs, Senior Citizens, Women, and Youth as part of the federal program "Demokratie leben!" (Living Democracy!), as well as from the Federal Agency for Civic Education and the Postcode Lottery.
We want to give a platform to the stories of the hundreds of thousands who have fled from countries such as Afghanistan, Eritrea, Iran, Iraq, Kurdistan, Syria and Ukraine in recent years – people mainstream German society talks about, but seldom listens to. A lively exchange between those who were born in Germany and those who have migrated here defuses tension and provides a unique record of recent migration history.
We have joined forces with PEN Berlin, whose authors will accompany our young writers on their literary journey. Some of PEN Berlin’s authors have experienced flight and migration themselves and can therefore serve as role models for a successful arrival in Germany. The project specifically uses the poetic form to express and preserve feelings and stories in verse. Things that seem unspeakable at first are transformed into an artistic dialogue; conversely, things that once seemed foreign become more familiar. Prejudices against people with a different origin, skin color, or religion are usually strongest in places with little contact and little knowledge of these people and their lives. Writing one's own history in such a way that people with similar experiences can find themselves in it and people with completely different experiences can learn something about "others" as well as themselves is the very task of literature.
Unfortunately, contemporary German literature does not adequately reflect our rapidly changing society. Most refugees — especially those who are young — have come to Germany to stay. However, they can only fully arrive in Germany when they can contribute to the social discourse and when society listens to what they have to say. Otherwise, they are here only in a physical sense. This means participating in the narratives that shape collective identity and the bonds that hold society together.
From 2017 to 2019, The Poetry Project was supported by the Federal Ministry for Family Affairs, Senior Citizens, Women and Youth, as part of the federal program “Demokratie leben!” (Living Democracy!), and by the Bundeszentrale für politische Bildung with the project “Flucht und Ankunft” (Flight and Arrival).
Throughout Germany, young people with and without a refugee background met regularly with workshop leaders and translators to write poetry. In all, around 750 writers got together and wrote thousands of poems. The idea came from project founder Susanne Koelbl, who repeatedly experienced the power of poetry during her work as a SPIEGEL foreign correspondent in countries such as Afghanistan and Iran. She encountered poetry in all kinds of everyday situations, whether in a cab or over dinner, and was able to give space to emotions that would otherwise not find expression. Berlin artist Rottkay provided photography and visual design for the project, while Theresa Rüger took on organizational and literary management.
Wir leben hier wirklich in so einer Art Bubble. Es tut uns einfach gut, uns mit diesen Notsituationen auseinanderzusetzen. Das ist, glaube ich, ein großes Geschenk.
The young poets wrote in their native languages about subjects that affect us all. About what they’ve experienced, their expectations, how they imagine their future to be. About foreignness and longing, about hope and love, and contemporary politics.
Their works were presented at the end of each workshop day, with the whole group working together to find the best-fitting translation for a particular passage, word, or term. These were wonderful moments of mutual recognition which we hoped to bring to the public. The poems that were drafted in our workshops were presented at readings and festivals, in magazines, radio reports, in plays and in films, so that the ongoing intercultural dialogue could include as many people as possible even beyond the project’s duration.
The first volume of poetry was published along with the opening of the international literature festival berlin in 2016. The texts published there were awarded the Else Lasker-Schüler Poetry Prize in 2018. A print edition of these texts in four languages is now available from our online shop under the title Allein nach Europa (Fled to Europe alone). In 2019, our poets Rojin Namer and Shahzamir Hataki received the THEO (Berlin-Brandenburg Prize for Young Literature) in the categories Poetry and Multilingual. Rojin has also won several awards at the lyrix (national competition for young poetry). She won a monthly competition in 2019 and won the annual competition for 2020; in 2022 and 2023 she joined the prize jury. At the end of the project, a comprehensive anthology was published under the title Ich wollte bleiben. Ich ging. (I wanted to stay. I left.) which is also available in our shop.
Image: © Rottkay
