Hanna Veiler Writes Outside the Lines
Hanna Veiler was born into a Jewish family in Belarus in 1998 and grew up in a small town in southern Germany from 2005. Since her youth, she has been concerned with the topics of complex identity, migration and memory culture. After completing a voluntary service in Israel in 2017, she began studying art history and became involved in Jewish student activism. Today, Hanna is president of the Jewish Student Union of Germany, VP of the European Union of Jewish Students, a trainer in the ADL Words to Action program and a WJC Lauder Fellow. Hanna Veiler writes poems and short-stories mostly about Jewish identity topics and her eastern-European Jewish family since her youth, of which many were published in magazines and on social media.
Within her Jewish academic life, Hanna studied in a pretty small city with almost no Jewish students, which is why she founded a regional student union in this region herself. In this regard, being a student pushed her to take more responsibility for her Jewish community. Being an artist has also informed her Jewish identity. She believes in seeing the world through a creative lens. She is always interested in the stories of the people around her. Because of that, to her, being Jewish also means to tell our stories and to create a space for this in the larger society.
As the head of the German Union of Jewish students, Hanna has been on the forefront of this ever-present fight that Jewish students have experienced on campuses. It occupies her full time as she barely has time left to write anything other than statements or articles regarding the topic. Hanna mentioned, “I see that there is less and less space for us in different contexts such as universities or the arts scene. But I’m not ready to give up the fight”.
A clip from Hanna’s ongoing video series “Rant with Hannah”
Within art, Hanna sticks to mostly writing poems and short stories. Jewish identities and the struggles, pain, and beauty connected to it are the Center of her writings. She loves to write familial stories about her Jewish ancestry. And she doesn’t mean that historically. For her, it‘s more about the every day life, about the little things and gestures, situation, arguments and moments that can tell us so much about who we are and where we come from.
BLUES
A POEM BY HANNA VEILER, TRANSLATED FROM THE ORIGINAL GERMAN
Some people say it was a place.
Some people say it was a person.
Itried with people and places.
Both came and left.
"Home" is a weird word.
don't understand it in any of my languages.
Am home when I stop searching?
Or if I stop running?
What am Prunning from?
Hanna is the first person in her family that can live her Jewish identity freely and that has democratic rights. Hanna writes, “this is why it makes me very proud to see my work as a students leader and as an artist. Because I fought for it and never gave up. And I know how precious it is that I am able to speak up for my community. No matter if it’s through politics or the arts”.
Who Thinks of Us?
BY HANNA VEILER, TRANSLATED FROM THE ORIGINAL GERMAN
I emptied the contents of my bag on my carpet. My friends and I sat in a circle on the floor and marveled at our stolen goods. An hour earlier we were in the local drug store. We took everything. Make-up, nail polish and perfume. It was so easy. You just had to peel off the sticker with the barcode and pocket the product as long as nobody saw it.
We were all Jewish. But none of us had ever celebrated Shabbat, Hanukkah or Purim. Yet we all held Nowij God sacred. None of us had any significant experience of antisemitism at the time, but we were all ashamed of our names, our parents' Russian accents and the way our homes were decorated. Our foreignness and shame had brought us together. I was the only one in my circle of friends whose parents had managed to get their diplomas recognised. The parents of the others were living on occasional jobs, the mothers were cleaning and the fathers were drinking. I didn't need to steal. I did it out of boredom. We were invisible in the small town we lived in. Nobody thought about us. So we spent our free time on park benches and viewpoints, drinking and smoking pot between expensive cars and Gucci stores.
A little later, a classmate told me that Jews would rule the world. I thought of my friends, my family and their families. We didn't rule anything. We stole cheap make-up to cover our shame. We drank far too much far too soon to be noticed. When you think of Jews, everyone thinks of the Rothschilds and Goldbergs of this world. But who thinks of the Vejlers, Basinas and Dudkinas? We were invisible and we remain so. So, who thinks of us?