The article deals with Donelaitis’s intertexts in Johannes Bobrowski’s (1917– 1965) novel Litauische Claviere (Lithuanian pianos). The author takes issue with Kristina Brazaitis’s paper “Donelaitis Viewed through Rose-tinted Glasses: Did Johannes Bobrowski Misread the Lithuanian Bard?” which tries to prove that Bobrowski aspired to conform to the ideology of East Germany and to emphasize the class struggle. Such an interpretation of Bobrowski’s novel is shown false by actualizing the importance of different discourses in Bobrowski’s text, of which the political, the cultural, and the religious discourses are perhaps the most distinctive. Donelaitis emerges in them not as just an author from the past but as a poet of potential significance to contemporary humans as well. The writer of East Prussia who lived under German colonial rule was capable of remaining a firm personality: he did not adapt to the ideology of the colonisers. Donelaitis became an example to the German intellectuals Voigt and Gawehn, who in the Nazi period tried to create an opera about the Lithuanian poet. Cultural processes may also be understood as polysemantic: Bobrowski emphasises that mass culture could become a tool of ideology not only in Nazi Germany, but in Lithuania, too. Real cultural dialogue begins only among intellectuals who are open to each other: between Donelaitis and Sperber, Voigt and Gawehn, and Storost and Potschka. Otherness here is not an obstacle but a creative inspiration. Bobrowski presents the religious-existential issues by showing Donelaitis’s efforts to be responsible for his community without dividing society into classes but instead treating all people as equal before God. Some 20th century German intellectuals, too, are keenly aware of what is going on in society: they resist the oppression of the Nazi regime by not fearing to be different in their thoughts and works, and in their creation.[...]