Frankfurt Book Fair 2017
Two thoroughly exhausting (but mostly in a good way) weeks are behind me; first the Frankfurt Book Fair, then a workshop (in a splendid environment, but still, it was work from morning till night). Hence no posts; I could only get online very briefly.
Frankfurt Book Fair: negative thing first, which I actually wasn't present for, but which it would be hypocritical not to mention. Now, among the many, many publishers, there have always been some right wing extremists. (Also Scientologists with their Hubbard stuff. They used to be far away along with the rest of the US publishers in hall 8, but these days were in their hall 6 corner.) However, this isn't just any year, but the year where 13% of the electorate voted right wing extremists advertising under that label into the national parliament for the first time in 70 plus years. Therefore, there was in advance debate of "free speech for all" versus "why give Nazis even more of a public platform, which the world's largest book fair undoubtedly is?". Sure enough, trouble ensued. Again, I wasn't present, I therefore can only reference reporting, please bear this in mind. There were several occasions, one of them an overnight reported vandalizing of one of the three extremist publisher's exhibitions, one in which a book fair visitor called out one of the extremists and got punched, and one, the one which got the most media attention, happened on Saturday late afternoon/evening when the book fair was about to close for the night, and yours truly was safely away with friends hanging out. According to what I've pierced together from conflicting reports (I'll get to that), the right extremist Antaios publisher had scheduled an event, at which one of the most notorious AFD members, Björn Höcke, showed up. (For non-Germans: AFD: the party just voted into parliament. Björn Höcke: guy who infamously complained this year about the Holocaust memorial in Berlin, saying we're the only nation to build monuments to our shame. He spouted a lot of other objectionable stuff, too, but that one is what he's currently most known for. Also, he is, believe it or not, a teacher. The mind shudders.) Cue demonstration and counter demonstration, chanting, calling each other Nazis and free speech surpressors. (Because the AFD is really good at a victim narrative where the evil liberals are the true Nazis oppressing them, etc.) One of the anti AFD people ended up on the floor, and the exact circumstances were what caused most of the headlines. Because he claimed afterwards on twitter that there had been Sieg Heil chants and it had been a Nazi wrestling him to the floor. This made the man who shot the photo and video depicting the event (himself an anti-AFD-guy) furious, because a) there had been no Sieg Heil chants (proven by the video; what they actually chanted was "everyone hates the Antifa"), and b) the man in question had been security, not a chanter, which the photographer had told the wrestled-down-guy when allowing him to use his photo. Basically: in order to dramatize even more what would have needed no dramatisation, the "I was assaulted by Sieg-Heil-chanting Nazis as the Book Fair!" person played directly into the AFD's "fake news" narrative. Thanks a lot.
On to what I actually witnessed. Which started at the Book Fair Opening on Tuesday 10th. This year's guest of honor was France (or, to be precise: "France and the Francophonie"), and the other result of this year being this year was that it weren't just minor officials of both countries doing the honors of opening the book fair, no, it were Emmanuel Macron and Angela Merkel themselves. And as literary representative - one of the speeches at the opening ceremony is always from a writer - representing "France et la Francophonie", Wajdi Mouawad, born in Libanon, emigrated to Canada, currently living in France. (A more pointed choice and gesture is hard to imagine.) He first recited a poem (with the text in German and English projected on the white screen behind him) about Hecuba post fall of Troy, the discovery of her daughter Polyxena's death (sacrificed to dead Achilles) being the one more loss that renders her screems of pain into barks, and with the poem being powerful already, we next got some performance art on film with Mouawad doing the screems-into-barking, which was searing. Then he told us about having known, as a small child in Libanon, a woman with 23 children, rumored to be a whore, who said that that the reason why she'd had all those children was that in her own childhood, 23 Muslim children had been killed by her own, Christian, village. This, quoth he, inspired his new novel, L'Amour, from which an actress then read a passage in German, in which the fictionalized woman describes witnessing the deaths as a child who still agrees with them along with the rest of her village, except for her brother, and the way her brother protests (which ends with his tongue getting cut out) changes her forever. Again, it was a visceratingly powerful text, and I felt pity for the poor slob who'd have to go up and speak afterwards.
That poor slob turned out to be Emmanuel Macron, Monsieur Le President himself, and he actually was up to the task. I've heard a lot of politicians talk, and whether or not they have charisma strikes me independent from party affiliation. The most powerful instances of political charisma I've personally encountered so far were Bill Clinton (live, not on tv) when he spoke to and answered questions of students in Munich, and a Republican DA in Louisiana whom I met when I was staying there with a friend and he was campaigning for his reelection. Well, now I can add Macron to the list. Granted, he had an audience which was by and large already in favour of what he had to say - and more than ready to listen to someone who talks with genuine enthusiasm and passion about Europe after this year's election campaigns -, but it was more than that: he spoke with barely two or three glances at this manuscript for roughly half an hour, and opposed to previous politicians on such occasions who talk about "the book" in general (which btw Angela Merkel also did afterwards), and who mention one or two individual authors at most, not least because, I suspect, they (or their speechwriters) don't want to come across as too elitist and high brow), he went into details, names, quotes, and all apropos. He started out with an anecdote from Eckermann's conversations with Goethe, in which over 80-years-old Goethe got presented by 18 years old Gerard de Nerval with the later's translation of Faust into French and declares that while he's sick and tired of his play in his own language, that translation managed to return the play to him anew as fresh. On that note, we got a brief summary of French-German cultural exchanges ("we" - meaning the French and Germans - "may have often had arguments, but we always talked"), with lots of personal references ("it was German writer Walter Benjamin who helped me understand Charles Baudelaire"), praise for Europe's multilingual identity as a virtue, not a drawback, and how the knowledge of languages is quintessential for the lot of us ("I reintroduced bilingual schools in France, and I hope more, not fewer languages will be taught in other European countries, too; Russian, for example, is a European language, and we need to make it a fixture in our schools").
He also praised translators, which had an ironic component because the guy who had the task of translating Macron into everyone's earphones was terrible, always four or so sentences behind and stumbling even there, so I relied more on my school French than this. But seriously, it was great that he singled out translators, because at literary events they often get forgotten or credited only at the end, and with so many books in the German book market being translations, this strikes me as massively unfair. So five minutes of the French President's speech being devoted to how much they rock was quite the thing. Not to mention that he finished his speech by telling us we were all the children of Goethe and Nerval.
Now some of the French writers present at this year's book fair were hard core Macron haters. (Didier Eribon, Eduard Louis.) And interviews and articles in which they detailed their objections had been amply printed. Nonetheless, by the time he finished speaking, tout Francfort was basically ready to yell "Vive la France, vive L'Europe, vive Macron" and swept away, and I'm not exempting myself. (Also, he didn't rush off once the ceremony was over but hung around for a further hour or so chatting with people.) Which meant Angela Merkel, who at the best of times is a sedate speaker, also had a tough job, and wisely didn't try to match him. Instead, she remained doing what she does best, being calm, with a touch of wry humor, noting that sadly she doesn't speak French, which, she said, why she was glad Macron had listed Russian as a European language, because "this at least I can speak".
(Given at this point she had just finished coalition negotiations with ghastly Horst Seehofer and was about to start them with the rest of the parties she needs to form a new government with, I bet hanging out with Macron for a while must have felt like a nice break.)
(I had a conversation with a writer born on the GDR side of the wall who told me that she loved the Russian bit not least because "Putin is not our enemy; look, we didn't love the Russians, but we knew them - we still know them". To which I said that a) Putin is not Russia, b) his approval rates notwithstanding, he's making life hell for Russians who disagree with him, c) he's a homophobic bastard making light of the Chechnian genocide against homosexuals next door, and d) he's sponsoring right extremists in the rest of the world. "Yes," she said, "but you know - he's sane. Unlike, well, you know. You know what he will or won't do. And he's not going to blow up the world. We can deal with Putin.")
A certain head of state on the other side of the Atlantic remained entirely unmentioned on that evening. This was not so at some of the other panels I attended, like Salman Rushdie's, there to present his new novel "Golden House" and inevitably asked about the Orange Menace. This was the first time I saw Rushdie in person, and I noted he has a mostly British accent with just the barest touch of India (when he pronounces "d"). He said that reality has become so grotesque that magical realism is basically out of job and has to fold, and maybe novelists need to tell the truth now. Also that being a character in a Salman Rushdie novel is a terrible lot. While he has some hope the Orange Menace won't make it to four years, he said that then we'll have to cope with the religious maniac (i.e. Pence). Listening to him in the crowd around the SPIEGEL forum, I remembered that my second or so Book Fair in Frankfurt had been the one after the Satanic Verses/Khomenei/Fatwa had happened. It had felt so bizarre then. Little did we know what was to come.
The conclusion and finishing highlight of the Frankfurt Book Fair is always the Peace Award of the German Book Trade, which gets delivered in the Paulskirche, the secularized St. Paul's church where our first ill fated German constitution was created in the aborted revolution of 1848.
This year's recipient was Margaret Atwood; her laudator was novelist Eva Menasse, who got extra applause for noting that there are still few female writers of international renown "and we all know this is not due to the female writers". Her laudatory speech in general focused a lot on Margaret Atwood's shorter work, not simply "The Handmaid's Tale", though neither she nor later Ms Atwood herself pretended that this novel hadn't currently gained a ghastly relevance. (Not just for the most obvious of reasons. Eva Menasse pointed out that the state of Gilead comes into being because of the way the environment got treated first.)
Margaret Atwood in person: tiny, alert, and more like Terry Prattchet's wise and not to be messed with witches than I'd have thought. She already charmed everyone before she spoke, because she smiled, nodded and mouthed along with Book Trade boss Heinrich Riethmüller's short detailing of reasons in German when he gave her the award, and then with her opening statement revealed what we had assumed, watching this: she does speak German.
Though she left it at a few sentences and then switched to English, putting on her glasses which hid those mischievious eyes which otherwise are her most arresting feature when she's standing in front of you. Her speech was a great balance of humor and seriousness, all delivered in a deadpan way, complete with homage to the local boys, Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm, and their fairy tales as her inspirations. She included a fairy tale of her own, about a wolf preaching to the bunnies how he, and only he, could keep them safe. And when listing recent year's disturbing events, she did include our own elections, those 13 percent, in a fairy tale way: "Who unlocked the crypt, and what body is stirring in the cellar?"
Her definition of writing went in a less Gothic and more 1001 nights direction - sending out messages in a bottle. Reading: "the greatest intimacy possible to have with another mind". I'm going to keep this one. The sun shone when I left Frankfurt, and it didn't stop shining for another week.
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