In three stages, the participants cover 500 km and around 6000 metres in altitude. Starting in the German-Polish European city of Görlitz/Zgorzelec, this year's tour leads via Mladá Boleslav and Plzeň to Chemnitz. The idea for the European Peace Ride was born there in 2020 during the application process for the title of "European Capital of Culture", which is deliberately related to the "International Peace Ride", the largest joint cycling event of the former "Eastern Bloc" countries. The initiators of the European Peace Ride have set themselves the goal of developing a European-relevant, unifying project together with many partners in Poland and the Czech Republic, which creates encounters, reflects the history of the border regions and at the same time sets forward-looking impulses.
Culture and sport also come together in this year's Peace Ride in the person of translator and cyclist Lothar Quinkenstein, who will be taking part as a rider and chronicler. He will open the tour on the special train journey from Chemnitz to Görlitz/Zgorzelec on Friday 8 September with an essayistic reflection on the connection between cycling, literature and translation.
Lothar Quinkenstein teaches at the Collegium Polonicum in Słubice and is often out and about by bike in the border region between Poland and Germany. For him, travelling along the Oder and Neisse rivers is like a physical continuation of his work as a translator in the sense of translating - from one country to another, from one language to another.
Translating Prus is particularly close to his heart, says Quinkenstein, because for him, cycling today means exactly what the Polish author recommended to people over 100 years ago: Cycling is the best cure for irritated nerves, he said, it calms the mind and leads to a state of mental equilibrium. Prus wrote in a newspaper article that the bicycle was a means of transport that should be used by as many people as possible.
Passionate cyclist Lothar Quinkenstein has been translating the works of Polish Nobel Prize winner Olga Tokarczuk for Kampa Verlag in tandem with Lisa Palmes since 2017. The duo is currently working on a new translation of Bolesław Prus' novel "Lalka" ("The Doll"), a classic of Polish literature and the work of an author who was also a great cycling enthusiast and a member of the "Warsaw Cyclists' Society" (Warszawskie Towarzystwo Cyklistów), to which the two Nobel Prize winners Henryk Sienkiewicz and Marie Curie-Skłodowska also belonged.
The Foundation for German-Polish Cooperation is making the literary excursion possible as part of the European Peace Ride 2023.
The European Peace Ride is one of the major international partner projects for the European Capital of Culture Chemnitz 2025.
