Frankfurt Book Fair, the end
The Book Fair ended, as it always does, with a last highlight, the awarding of the Peace Prize of the German Book Trade in the Paulskirche, i.e. the church where we had that brief, aborted experiment with democracy in 1848, the year of failed hopes and failed revolutions in which a first parliamentary German constitution was drafted and promptly crushed. We got the second empire instead. So 1848 is one of the big what ifs in German history, and I always thought it was very fitting that the ceremony should take place there.
This year's recipient was Saul Friedländer, for his epic history of the Shoah. As was said in the ceremony: "Friedländer is one of the last historiographers to have witnessed and experienced the Holocaust - a genocide that was announced early on, planned openly, and carried out with machine-like precision. Friedlänger rejects the distanced approach often associated with the writing of history: he creates a space for incomprehensibility - the only possible reaction to such an unfathomable crime." He survived through being hidden away at a Catholic French school while his parents both died at Auschwitz. As did many other family members. So you can imagine Saul Friedländer accepting the award, coming here, was by no means taken for granted, especially since a couple of years ago, one of our more famous writers, Martin Walser, had created a big scandal in the very same church with the very same award when he held an infamous speech about how he was sick of hearing about the holocaust. There had been speculation ahead of time whether or not Saul Friedländer would mention this in his acceptance speech. He didn't; what he did instead was so poignant and so devastating. He didn't give a conventional speech at all. Instead, after making a joke about his French accent when speaking German, he read from letters written by his parents and those other dead family members, during the last years of their lives, going to France, trying for Switzerland, being sent back to France, always trying not to lose hope, the last letter written in that train going east and given the a Quaker woman at a railway station, thrown out of the window. I started to cry early on, and later once it was over and you could see the rest of the audience again it was obvious so had many of the others. There was no other response possible, I think. When I visited the house where Anne Frank and her family were hidden in Amsterdam, I had a bit of a similar experience when reading, in the exhibition, the letter of Otto Frank to one of his surviving siblings directly after the war was over and he was found in a camp, so fervently hoping that his children and wife were still alive. And you knew they weren't, just as you knew, listening to Saul Friedländer reading those letters, that all of them would be murdered. In the laudatory speech preceding Friedländer's, Wolfgang Frühwaldt - who is one of our most eminent professors for literature - closed with: "A prayer of praise for the creator of the sky and the earth, a Kaddish can also be said by children for their parents. (...) As I see it, Saul Friedländer's life's work is a type of Kaddish for his parents."
After the ceremony, we wandered over to the Frankfurter Hof where the reception was held. This being one where both the current and the former president of Germany attended, there was lots of security, but one got inside surprisingly smoothly. As it happened, I sat next to Friedländer's editor, and on my other side was someone I had encountered the year before, too, a judge from our supreme court. We were all still reeling from hearing the letters - in German, as they had been written, and in the voice of the son, and there is that ambiguity you encounter, the language of the victims is the language of the murderers and vice versa, and if you're German you always wonder at first whether you should use the language at all when talking to someone who lost so much - but after a while, a conversation started that consisted of more than "no matter how well one learns at school, it's different when -" "-Yes, it is". Said conversation turned to the supreme court decision mentioned in my last post. As it turned out, the jugde on our table wasn't one of those who had been involved in this particular decision because he has a different field of expertise, and this meant he could talk to us about it. Opinions at the table were as divided as they had been in among the judges (three of which had been issuing a minority report). "The Mephisto precedent was so simple in comparison," the judge said. "For one thing, it was already regarded as a certified classic, for another, Gründgens was already dead when Peter Gorski (Gründgens' adopted son) sued. But this woman is young, she has many years ahead of her, which means many years for the novel to be forbidden as well."
The editor, who had actually read the novel as opposed to the rest of us (except the judge) before it had to be withdrawn said that in his opinion, in this case the right of the individual to privacy superceded the freedom of artistic expression and that the court had decided correctly. "Because," he said, "Biller made the character so easily identifiable that you could find her address. Everyone who has read the book. Never mind artistic merit, that's going too far."
One of the managers for Weltbild, a major German book club, asked whether maybe if the offending passages could have been cut... "She's the main character," the editor said. Which left us with the uneasy consensus that we sympathized with the woman more than with Biller but still were troubled by the problem of precedent in court-ordered withdrawal of novels.
After the reception, most of the dignitaries hurried off to their hotels to pack and go back to their respective cities of origin. I'm in Osnabrück tomorrow, so going back to Munich would be superfluos (wrong direction), which means another night in Frankfurt. This meant I could go to one more event of the book fair, Sigrid Damm's reading of her new Goethe-related book, out barely three weeks. Said book, titled "Goethe's last journey", uses said last journey he made with his grandsons as a framing narration and offers a Goethe portrait, which, considering Goethe has been written about more than any other German poet ever, somehow still managed to come across as vibrant and sensitive and not just repeating the various approaches thousands had made before. It's a meditation on aging and reconciling oneself to one's mortality, Sigrid Damm's as well as Goethe's, and in the excerpts she read, you got great descriptions of his interactions with his grandsons (she unearthed such things as the kind of sweets he ordered for them from his hometown, Frankfurt, complete with wry affectionate quote) and great analysis of poetry such as Über allen Wipfeln herrscht Ruh (which has been called the most perfect poem in the German language and just might be). It's a non-fiction book written better than many a novel, and I got my own copy at once.
The reading didn't take place at the fair but in the Goethehaus, where J.W.G. was born, and I used the opportunity to go through the exhibition again. (Last time was over a decade ago.) There is a new section dealing with Faust, precedents, aftermaths and all, and I was very amused that that Marlowe fellow still isn't mentioned. It's the big English/German divide, of course, and not helped by the fact that Marlowe, as opposed to Shakespeare, never found a good German translator, nor Goethe an English one. And this considering one scene in Faust starts with him trying to translate logos. Come to think of it, though, that one ends with Mephisto showing up. Maybe translators thought this was a bad precedent?
This year's recipient was Saul Friedländer, for his epic history of the Shoah. As was said in the ceremony: "Friedländer is one of the last historiographers to have witnessed and experienced the Holocaust - a genocide that was announced early on, planned openly, and carried out with machine-like precision. Friedlänger rejects the distanced approach often associated with the writing of history: he creates a space for incomprehensibility - the only possible reaction to such an unfathomable crime." He survived through being hidden away at a Catholic French school while his parents both died at Auschwitz. As did many other family members. So you can imagine Saul Friedländer accepting the award, coming here, was by no means taken for granted, especially since a couple of years ago, one of our more famous writers, Martin Walser, had created a big scandal in the very same church with the very same award when he held an infamous speech about how he was sick of hearing about the holocaust. There had been speculation ahead of time whether or not Saul Friedländer would mention this in his acceptance speech. He didn't; what he did instead was so poignant and so devastating. He didn't give a conventional speech at all. Instead, after making a joke about his French accent when speaking German, he read from letters written by his parents and those other dead family members, during the last years of their lives, going to France, trying for Switzerland, being sent back to France, always trying not to lose hope, the last letter written in that train going east and given the a Quaker woman at a railway station, thrown out of the window. I started to cry early on, and later once it was over and you could see the rest of the audience again it was obvious so had many of the others. There was no other response possible, I think. When I visited the house where Anne Frank and her family were hidden in Amsterdam, I had a bit of a similar experience when reading, in the exhibition, the letter of Otto Frank to one of his surviving siblings directly after the war was over and he was found in a camp, so fervently hoping that his children and wife were still alive. And you knew they weren't, just as you knew, listening to Saul Friedländer reading those letters, that all of them would be murdered. In the laudatory speech preceding Friedländer's, Wolfgang Frühwaldt - who is one of our most eminent professors for literature - closed with: "A prayer of praise for the creator of the sky and the earth, a Kaddish can also be said by children for their parents. (...) As I see it, Saul Friedländer's life's work is a type of Kaddish for his parents."
After the ceremony, we wandered over to the Frankfurter Hof where the reception was held. This being one where both the current and the former president of Germany attended, there was lots of security, but one got inside surprisingly smoothly. As it happened, I sat next to Friedländer's editor, and on my other side was someone I had encountered the year before, too, a judge from our supreme court. We were all still reeling from hearing the letters - in German, as they had been written, and in the voice of the son, and there is that ambiguity you encounter, the language of the victims is the language of the murderers and vice versa, and if you're German you always wonder at first whether you should use the language at all when talking to someone who lost so much - but after a while, a conversation started that consisted of more than "no matter how well one learns at school, it's different when -" "-Yes, it is". Said conversation turned to the supreme court decision mentioned in my last post. As it turned out, the jugde on our table wasn't one of those who had been involved in this particular decision because he has a different field of expertise, and this meant he could talk to us about it. Opinions at the table were as divided as they had been in among the judges (three of which had been issuing a minority report). "The Mephisto precedent was so simple in comparison," the judge said. "For one thing, it was already regarded as a certified classic, for another, Gründgens was already dead when Peter Gorski (Gründgens' adopted son) sued. But this woman is young, she has many years ahead of her, which means many years for the novel to be forbidden as well."
The editor, who had actually read the novel as opposed to the rest of us (except the judge) before it had to be withdrawn said that in his opinion, in this case the right of the individual to privacy superceded the freedom of artistic expression and that the court had decided correctly. "Because," he said, "Biller made the character so easily identifiable that you could find her address. Everyone who has read the book. Never mind artistic merit, that's going too far."
One of the managers for Weltbild, a major German book club, asked whether maybe if the offending passages could have been cut... "She's the main character," the editor said. Which left us with the uneasy consensus that we sympathized with the woman more than with Biller but still were troubled by the problem of precedent in court-ordered withdrawal of novels.
After the reception, most of the dignitaries hurried off to their hotels to pack and go back to their respective cities of origin. I'm in Osnabrück tomorrow, so going back to Munich would be superfluos (wrong direction), which means another night in Frankfurt. This meant I could go to one more event of the book fair, Sigrid Damm's reading of her new Goethe-related book, out barely three weeks. Said book, titled "Goethe's last journey", uses said last journey he made with his grandsons as a framing narration and offers a Goethe portrait, which, considering Goethe has been written about more than any other German poet ever, somehow still managed to come across as vibrant and sensitive and not just repeating the various approaches thousands had made before. It's a meditation on aging and reconciling oneself to one's mortality, Sigrid Damm's as well as Goethe's, and in the excerpts she read, you got great descriptions of his interactions with his grandsons (she unearthed such things as the kind of sweets he ordered for them from his hometown, Frankfurt, complete with wry affectionate quote) and great analysis of poetry such as Über allen Wipfeln herrscht Ruh (which has been called the most perfect poem in the German language and just might be). It's a non-fiction book written better than many a novel, and I got my own copy at once.
The reading didn't take place at the fair but in the Goethehaus, where J.W.G. was born, and I used the opportunity to go through the exhibition again. (Last time was over a decade ago.) There is a new section dealing with Faust, precedents, aftermaths and all, and I was very amused that that Marlowe fellow still isn't mentioned. It's the big English/German divide, of course, and not helped by the fact that Marlowe, as opposed to Shakespeare, never found a good German translator, nor Goethe an English one. And this considering one scene in Faust starts with him trying to translate logos. Come to think of it, though, that one ends with Mephisto showing up. Maybe translators thought this was a bad precedent?