In the organizer's words:

Moscow memories

In her new autobiographical book The Key Would Still Fit, prominent Russian opposition activist Irina Scherbakowa shares her memories of life in Russia after perestroika. The co-founder of the human rights organization Memorial, which was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2022, closely interweaves her own experiences and social observations with Russian history and politics of the 20th century.

Since 2022, the historian, Germanist and journalist Irina Scherbakowa has been living in exile in Tel Aviv and Germany. Based on her life in Moscow and the apartment with many family memories and heirlooms that she and her husband left behind, she travels back in time. She reports on everyday life and the political upheaval in Russia at the beginning of the 1990s, describing the unfamiliar freedom and how people learned to deal with it more badly than well. Scherbakova's subject is also her active political work, which continues to this day, her fight against state terror and for the reappraisal of Stalinism and Russia's seemingly unstoppable slide into dictatorship.

Scherbakowa's Moscow memoirs follow on from The Hands of My Father, about her Russian-Jewish family history, which was published by Droemer in 2017.

In cooperation with the VHS Osnabrück and the Literaturbüro Westniedersachsen

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