I’m having dinner with a Russian couple who are friends of mine in a cramped, cozy Thai restaurant in Berlin-Schoeneberg. It’s still the carefree time before the pandemic, before the Ukraine war. We talk about my love for the western Ukrainian city of Lviv. It’s called “Lwow” in Russian, Mikhail interrupts me harshly, there is no Ukrainian language at all. Didn’t I just read how Tsar Alexander II banned publications in the Ukrainian language? To ban something that supposedly doesn’t exist: I knew this kind of twisted illogical from Kremlin statements or from Russian propaganda media. But at a convivial dinner with friends? In a few years, Mikhail continues to get excited, refugees will be flocking to Russia, seeking salvation in the East, because our decadent societies will then have collapsed.
This memory comes to mind as hundreds of thousands of people are now fleeing Russian shelling in the opposite direction, west. I read that Russian President Vladimir Putin must be insane. The widespread belief in a resurrection of the great Rus’ empire runs deep even among people from St. Petersburg or Moscow who live in Berlin and speak German without an accent.
A few months after that conversation with Mikhail went awry, I met Kateryna in the gorgeous old town of Lviv, who casually revealed herself to be bisexual to two friends sitting at the table. We toast with craft beer and lemonade. The next day I learn to cook borsch and vareniki in Kateryna’s kitchen. With two friends we visit an exhibition about angels in the city art gallery. The city is celebrating Midsummer, we ride an ancient tram to a suburb where women braid wreaths of flowers in their hair and dance around a pond in colorful folklore garb. A wonderfully carefree summer evening for girls.
When my friend Peter, who lives in Lviv, wants to open the city’s first beer garden, I also support him out of love for this city. In the middle of the pandemic, the bar is literally bursting at the seams in summer: there was no need for advertising for the exuberant LGBTI party, the invitation spread rapidly by word of mouth. Lesbians, trans men, curious people come together, dance, laugh, sing karaoke. A celebration of freedom. Queer culture lived in public: This is still new in Lviv and other Ukrainian cities. Queer life is still viewed uncertainly, but we are not opposed to open hostility or even restrictions. I notice one or two curious looks while walking through the Lviv summer evening, but above all, a lot of impartial friendliness, also from older people.
Now the beer garden is deserted: When Peter leaves his city of Lviv at dawn with the last moving boxes in the van, the sirens are already wailing. He’s scared to death. “The first time in my life,” he tells me after arriving in Berlin late at night. The window to freedom that Ukraine opened a few years ago has shattered. But the painful impotence of how fragile an open society is, gives way to certainty: the tender little plant of freedom will sprout again from the rubble of the bombed-out buildings.