Mein litauischer Führerschein by Felix Ackermann

Mein litauischer Fürherschein — My Lithuanian Driver’s License — carries the subtitle “Ausflüge zum Ende der europäischen Union,” “Excursions to the End of the European Union.” He means one of the geographic ends of course, not the demise of the Union. I’m not sure I would have chosen Lithuania as the end of the Union either, since it’s nestled between Poland and Latvia. Depending on how you look at things, Estonia or Finland would have the better claim to being the end of the EU in this direction. Still, Lithuania’s frontier is part of the Union’s external boundary with direct links to Russia (westward, oddly enough) and Belarus (eastward), which turns out to be Ackermann’s relationship with Lithuania.

Ackermann moves with his wife and young children from Berlin to Vilnius, the capital of Lithuania, in the early 2010s. He is part of Germany’s sizeable apparatus of cultural diplomacy, though he is far from a functionary. Getting there requires a little backstory. In 1992, the first year after the collapse of the Soviet Union, some idealists led by Anatoli Mikhailov founded the European Humanities University in Minsk, the capital of Belarus. At the time, Boris Yeltsin was president of Russia, Belarus was not a dictatorship, and the moment seemed ripe to bring pan-European teaching and values into the former socialist bloc. EHU grew to include programs in the humanities, in modern and classical languages, and, somewhat incongruously, information technology. Anyway, democracy took root less well in Belarus than in other post-Soviet countries; the bureaucracy eventually decided that an independent university that was European and humanistic was not what they wanted, and they used various forms of chincanery to push it out. In 2004, Belarus revoked the EHU’s accreditation. In 2005, the university re-established itself in Vilnius with support from the Lithuanian government, the European Commission, Nordic countries and various foundations.

By the time Ackermann arrives, EHU has settled into the peculiar existence of a university in exile. Most of the students are from Belarus; some of the faculty commute from Minsk to Vilnius to teach. The powers-that-be in Minsk — that is, the dictatorship of Alexander Lukashenko — cracked down enough to push the university across the border, but not enough to prevent both students and faculty from continuing to have a university. Ackermann himself has a position financed by the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD), a public body that supports scholarship from and about Germany around the world. He’s integrated into the mission of the EHU, but his external support means that he’s insulated from the financial struggles that many of his students and colleagues face.

Fortunately, Ackermann does not make the intersection of academia and politics the focus of his book. I bring it up because it’s helpful to situate the author, to know his situation in relation to the society that he’s writing about: he’s an academic, a historian by trade, and he’s doubly an outsider in Lithuania. First as an immigrant and second as a worker in an organization that sees Lithuania as a temporary home during a time of exile.

My Lithuanian Driver’s License is mostly a memoir about coming to grips with a new society as a young family. The titular license is important because living without a car is much less practical in Vilnius than it is in Berlin. Getting a driver’s license in Germany is time-consuming and expensive (mandatory lessons have brought the cost up to around €3000 these days), and Ackermann had never gotten around to it even though he was in his early 30s when he moved to Lithuania. The experience with driving schools and official testing places provides a window into a different Lithuania from the one he knows at work or through his historical studies. The first school he chooses only has one driving teacher, and it turns out the reason that it’s so difficult to schedule lessons is that the teacher is a moonlighting policeman who never knows his schedule until the last minute. The school is also overbooked because that’s the only way they can come close to making any money. He eventually changes schools, and finds out soon afterward that the owner of the first school has gone into another business entirely. Ackermann is accustomed to some of this improvisation through his experience in other post-Soviet places, but much of his German audience will probably be surprised at just how much chaos continues more than a decade (at the time of his residence, now more than two decades) since Lithuania joined the European Union.

Ackermannn’s interests as a historian mean that he interleaves a lot of twentieth-century history into his recollections of twenty-first-century Lithuania. That means writing about people who are no longer part of Lithuania because they were killed or driven out. The country gained its first modern independence after the collapse of the Russian Empire; between the two world wars it was a fragile republic with some authoritarian tendencies. The interwar republic had its capital in Kaunas because Vilnius, then a mostly Polish and Jewish city, had gone to Poland. Under the terms of a secret agreement between Hitler and Stalin, when Nazi Germany started World War Two in Europe, the Soviet Union invaded Poland from the East and then occupied Lithuania as well as the other two Baltic states. The German invasion of the Soviet Union included the capture and occupation of Lithuania. During Nazi rule, Germans and their local collaborators murdered more than 90 percent of Lithuania’s Jewish people. As the Red Army marched on Berlin, the Soviet Union re-annexed Lithuania. German civilians, some of whose families had lived in the Baltic region for centuries, were killed out of hand or driven westward. Today’s Lithuania is the most ethnically homogeneous Lithuanian state that has ever existed; not everyone Ackermann encounters appreciates his knowledge of how that came to pass. Fortunately for readers, he dispenses this heavy lesson with care. He meets numerous people who are working to keep memories alive, to recall connections and shared humanity.

Mostly, the book is a look at life in a foreign society, the funny misunderstandings that inevitably ensue, and the joys of finding ways to understand other ways of doing everything. Ackermann takes language lessons from a woman who had once been a grande dame of Lithuanian theater and opera. For a while, they stumble along with limited and stilted communication, even though both of them are perfectly capable of speaking Russian. After she relents somewhat on her patriotic insistence of not speaking the former occupier’s language, they reach a greater understanding, and he learns more Lithuanian. His kids share a daycare with children of striving parent who want to see their children well integrated with a Europe that is open, free and, importantly, wealthy. Ackermann himself has the comfortable anti-materialism of a Western academic and does not always see eye to eye with these parents who want to give their children a leg up.

He’s an amiable guide to a particular time and place. If I see a fault with the book, it’s that there’s more detail than I cared about regarding intra-university disputes, but perhaps even that is now a bit of history. Ackermann relates a greater nationalism and rawer rhetoric in Lithuania after Russia’s seizure of Ukrainian territory in 2014. I suspect that has become much sharper since the full-scale invasion of 2022. Since 2020 repression in Belarus has increased, and the exile of the EHU looks increasingly permanent. Ackermann himself moved on to the German Historical Institute in Warsaw, and is now a professor in Germany. I wonder if he has a German driver’s license.

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There is no English translation of Mein litauischer Führerschein and it seems unlikely that there would be much of an audience for one.