Politics and poetry are two fields that could hardly be more different. But Eva van de Rakt knows how to combine the two. The head of the EU and North America department at the Heinrich Böll Foundation published her German-Czech poetry collection „Unter Oberflächen / Pod povrchy“ („under surfaces“) in 2019. The idea that this would require two separate parallel lives – discussing during the day, writing poetry at night – seems completely absurd to van de Rakt. The poems undoubtedly reflect a part of her day-to-day work, and not a separate refuge, she says.