Frankfurt Book Fair: The End
Word to the wise: do by all means book a seat instead of just buying a ticket without reservation if you're travelling by train from Frankfurt to Munich. I did, and was very glad about it, as the train is currently crowded like hell with people standing in the aisles.
Which makes it look quite like the book fair itself on the weekend. I don't actually look much for books during the last two days of the fair, the public days, because it's that packed with people. Sometimes you can hardly move. So the weekend is when you meet friends at the fair, go to readings and debates, and wish other people good luck when they try to actually glimpse into a book or two.
One of the book presentations I attended was of a non-fiction book I had read some time ago, Rüdiger Safranski's book about Goethe & Schiller. One question he got was to account for the paradox of Schiller being the more socially progressive of the two (poet of freedom, some of the most famous speeches in German dramatic history, etc.) yet married into the nobility, whereas Goethe was the more conservative yet openly lived with and ultimately married a working-class woman, Christiane Vulpius, who was horribly snubbed by Schiller. (Goethe in his letters to Schiller always includes regards to the wife. Schiller in all his letters to Goethe never once mentions Christiane, not even in thank-you-I-had-a-great-time letters when he had been staying for two weeks in Goethe's house where she would have been his hostess.) Safranski not being wise to the ways of fandom did not bother to bring up the slash explanation but boringly and truthfully pointed out Schiller's wife was the goddaughter of Goethe's ex, the Baroness von Stein who was Christiane's number 1 enemy in Weimar and responsible for most of Weimar society cutting her for near two decades until Johanna Schopenhauer finally offered her a cup of tea. But! he added, suddenly going out of his professor of literature mode and into lighting up in happy fanboy mode instead, he had found a reference in one of Christiane's letters to Goethe from when she was on holidays and happened to be in the same Kurbad where Schiller had gone about two years before his death, and in that letter Christiane writes Schiller not only said hello but offered to row her over the lake in one of the little boats available for the guests, and then did so. "I was so happy when I found that," declared Mr. Safranski. "It was my balm of comfort." ("Mein Trostpflaster.") "I just couldn't stand the idea of Schiller having been horrible to Christiane till the end."
Moving on to the 21st century, Saturday was also when I listened to a presentation by three dissident Chinese writers, all three of whom are living in exile in other countries, and whose number included Bai Ling, one of the two writers whose invite/disinvite/invite caused such uproar and shameful embarassment in September. The others were a co-founder of the independent Chinese PEN and another writer; unfortunately, I have the programm in my suitcase, and I'm sitting in the train right now, so I can't look their names up. Not-the-PEN-founder seems to be a member of the Falun Gong, as he brought up not once but twice that they are the most persecuted of Chinese religions as they are "the most purely Chinese". (I have sympathy for anyone persecuted for their religion, but this singling out and unconditional praise of the Falun Gong made me distrustful of them instead, I have to admit.) All three are writing for an exile Chinese newspaper, The Epoch Times, and had a lot to say about how growing up with the system stays with you even once you've turned against it because of the words, the phrases you use. One of the writers, referencing the Cultural Revolution from the 60s but talking about the decades before and after as well, used an image that stuck with me: "Chinese culture," he said, "is like a beautifully coloured glass. It got smashed irrevocably. Now all we're left with are glass splinters. What the party does is put these splinters into a kalaidoscope, like the ones we use at children, and the image you look at is beautiful, too, in its own way, but it distorts and changes every time you want it to, and nothing is ever fixed." Switching from Chinese - which got translated (the translators were so the unsung heroes of this fair, always having to do three languages - Chinese, German and English) - into German for one sentence, Bai Ling interjected "Die Partei hat immer recht" and said that to understand the China of today we - the German audience, that is - should just think of the GDR, not of Chinese history.
All these speeches on part of the exile writers were very heartfelt and moving, but you know, there was one problem: they were basically preaching to the converted. There were Chinese attendants as well as German ones - actually the room was pretty packed, with all age groups represented - but the Chinese all seemed to be locals from Frankfurt. None from the Chinese delegation. And I don't think the German audience was labouring under the delusion that China is anything but a dictatorship, either. So attention was paid, but not from the people who would have been able to do something with these words.
Saturday evening I met a friend of
shezan's, but arrived a bit early at his hotel and thus was sitting in the lobby for a while. Whereupon one businessman type sauntered towards me, looked me up and down in my Saturday outfit (because the fair is so crowded on Saturdays and Sundays, it's wise to wear the lightest things you can get away with instead of the trousers and jackets you wear for the rest of the weak, so in my case I was wearing a short knitted purple dress) and enquired: "Are you free?"
Note to self: now you can say you've been mistaken for a hooker at the Frankfurt Book Fair in your memoirs.
Today was mostly about the Friedenspreis, the peace award of the German book trade handed over in the Paulskirche. This year's recipient was Italian essayist, journalist and novelist Claudio Magris. The laudatory speech returned time and again to Magris' hometown Trieste as a symbol of European strife, European multiculturalism and European unity. Magris' own speech, which was riveting, managed to address patterns and injustices in past and present alike, starting with Italy once having exported fascism and now and more recently populism, that deadening of democracies. (Insert open loathing of Berlusconi here.) He pointed out that we did and do have a war after WWII in Europe, one we're in denial about and which involves organ trade, the camps for refuges, the way they're treated and often sent back, all the dead of illegal immigration and that wasn't counting Bosnia and currently our involvement in Afghanistan. Listening, I decided I needed to read one of his books now; this was a man who knew how to engage his audience on both an emotional and intellectual level.
Also present was nobel prize winner Herta Müller, which later at the celebratory lunch led to Gottfriend Honnefelder (remember, the head of the booktrade association) telling everyone that he had wanted to congratulate her in his own speech at the Paulskirche (there are always four: one by Honnefelder, one by the mayor of Frankfurt, one laudatory speech and one acceptance speech) but she had asked him not to, as this was Claudio Magris' big moment, but now we could congratulate her, yes? So everyone got up and cheered and toasted. Mind you, I bet most of the people present, including yours truly, hadn't read Müller's work, but never mind.
"So," said a lady at my table, "why do you think the Bildzeitung didn't have a headline saying "We won the Nobel prize"?
(Footnote: Bild is our biggest yellow press paper and prone to such embarassing headlines as "We are Pope" - back when Joseph Ratzinger was elected.)
Replied an ex Mr. Speaker of our parliament: "Because the Americans got there first?"
On that note, once I'm back in Munich, I must read all the delicious fanfic I saw tantalizingly referred to by other people on my list, as well as watch The Sarah Jane Adventures. And then I'll probably sleep like a stone. But truly, I would not miss the Frankfurt Book Fair for the world.
This entry was originally posted at http://selenak.dreamwidth.org/520806.html. Comment there or here, as you wish.
Which makes it look quite like the book fair itself on the weekend. I don't actually look much for books during the last two days of the fair, the public days, because it's that packed with people. Sometimes you can hardly move. So the weekend is when you meet friends at the fair, go to readings and debates, and wish other people good luck when they try to actually glimpse into a book or two.
One of the book presentations I attended was of a non-fiction book I had read some time ago, Rüdiger Safranski's book about Goethe & Schiller. One question he got was to account for the paradox of Schiller being the more socially progressive of the two (poet of freedom, some of the most famous speeches in German dramatic history, etc.) yet married into the nobility, whereas Goethe was the more conservative yet openly lived with and ultimately married a working-class woman, Christiane Vulpius, who was horribly snubbed by Schiller. (Goethe in his letters to Schiller always includes regards to the wife. Schiller in all his letters to Goethe never once mentions Christiane, not even in thank-you-I-had-a-great-time letters when he had been staying for two weeks in Goethe's house where she would have been his hostess.) Safranski not being wise to the ways of fandom did not bother to bring up the slash explanation but boringly and truthfully pointed out Schiller's wife was the goddaughter of Goethe's ex, the Baroness von Stein who was Christiane's number 1 enemy in Weimar and responsible for most of Weimar society cutting her for near two decades until Johanna Schopenhauer finally offered her a cup of tea. But! he added, suddenly going out of his professor of literature mode and into lighting up in happy fanboy mode instead, he had found a reference in one of Christiane's letters to Goethe from when she was on holidays and happened to be in the same Kurbad where Schiller had gone about two years before his death, and in that letter Christiane writes Schiller not only said hello but offered to row her over the lake in one of the little boats available for the guests, and then did so. "I was so happy when I found that," declared Mr. Safranski. "It was my balm of comfort." ("Mein Trostpflaster.") "I just couldn't stand the idea of Schiller having been horrible to Christiane till the end."
Moving on to the 21st century, Saturday was also when I listened to a presentation by three dissident Chinese writers, all three of whom are living in exile in other countries, and whose number included Bai Ling, one of the two writers whose invite/disinvite/invite caused such uproar and shameful embarassment in September. The others were a co-founder of the independent Chinese PEN and another writer; unfortunately, I have the programm in my suitcase, and I'm sitting in the train right now, so I can't look their names up. Not-the-PEN-founder seems to be a member of the Falun Gong, as he brought up not once but twice that they are the most persecuted of Chinese religions as they are "the most purely Chinese". (I have sympathy for anyone persecuted for their religion, but this singling out and unconditional praise of the Falun Gong made me distrustful of them instead, I have to admit.) All three are writing for an exile Chinese newspaper, The Epoch Times, and had a lot to say about how growing up with the system stays with you even once you've turned against it because of the words, the phrases you use. One of the writers, referencing the Cultural Revolution from the 60s but talking about the decades before and after as well, used an image that stuck with me: "Chinese culture," he said, "is like a beautifully coloured glass. It got smashed irrevocably. Now all we're left with are glass splinters. What the party does is put these splinters into a kalaidoscope, like the ones we use at children, and the image you look at is beautiful, too, in its own way, but it distorts and changes every time you want it to, and nothing is ever fixed." Switching from Chinese - which got translated (the translators were so the unsung heroes of this fair, always having to do three languages - Chinese, German and English) - into German for one sentence, Bai Ling interjected "Die Partei hat immer recht" and said that to understand the China of today we - the German audience, that is - should just think of the GDR, not of Chinese history.
All these speeches on part of the exile writers were very heartfelt and moving, but you know, there was one problem: they were basically preaching to the converted. There were Chinese attendants as well as German ones - actually the room was pretty packed, with all age groups represented - but the Chinese all seemed to be locals from Frankfurt. None from the Chinese delegation. And I don't think the German audience was labouring under the delusion that China is anything but a dictatorship, either. So attention was paid, but not from the people who would have been able to do something with these words.
Saturday evening I met a friend of
shezan's, but arrived a bit early at his hotel and thus was sitting in the lobby for a while. Whereupon one businessman type sauntered towards me, looked me up and down in my Saturday outfit (because the fair is so crowded on Saturdays and Sundays, it's wise to wear the lightest things you can get away with instead of the trousers and jackets you wear for the rest of the weak, so in my case I was wearing a short knitted purple dress) and enquired: "Are you free?"
Note to self: now you can say you've been mistaken for a hooker at the Frankfurt Book Fair in your memoirs.
Today was mostly about the Friedenspreis, the peace award of the German book trade handed over in the Paulskirche. This year's recipient was Italian essayist, journalist and novelist Claudio Magris. The laudatory speech returned time and again to Magris' hometown Trieste as a symbol of European strife, European multiculturalism and European unity. Magris' own speech, which was riveting, managed to address patterns and injustices in past and present alike, starting with Italy once having exported fascism and now and more recently populism, that deadening of democracies. (Insert open loathing of Berlusconi here.) He pointed out that we did and do have a war after WWII in Europe, one we're in denial about and which involves organ trade, the camps for refuges, the way they're treated and often sent back, all the dead of illegal immigration and that wasn't counting Bosnia and currently our involvement in Afghanistan. Listening, I decided I needed to read one of his books now; this was a man who knew how to engage his audience on both an emotional and intellectual level.
Also present was nobel prize winner Herta Müller, which later at the celebratory lunch led to Gottfriend Honnefelder (remember, the head of the booktrade association) telling everyone that he had wanted to congratulate her in his own speech at the Paulskirche (there are always four: one by Honnefelder, one by the mayor of Frankfurt, one laudatory speech and one acceptance speech) but she had asked him not to, as this was Claudio Magris' big moment, but now we could congratulate her, yes? So everyone got up and cheered and toasted. Mind you, I bet most of the people present, including yours truly, hadn't read Müller's work, but never mind.
"So," said a lady at my table, "why do you think the Bildzeitung didn't have a headline saying "We won the Nobel prize"?
(Footnote: Bild is our biggest yellow press paper and prone to such embarassing headlines as "We are Pope" - back when Joseph Ratzinger was elected.)
Replied an ex Mr. Speaker of our parliament: "Because the Americans got there first?"
On that note, once I'm back in Munich, I must read all the delicious fanfic I saw tantalizingly referred to by other people on my list, as well as watch The Sarah Jane Adventures. And then I'll probably sleep like a stone. But truly, I would not miss the Frankfurt Book Fair for the world.
This entry was originally posted at http://selenak.dreamwidth.org/520806.html. Comment there or here, as you wish.