Frankfurt Book Fair: The End
Oct. 10th, 2004 09:00 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
selenakWriting this in the train back to Munich. Yesterday was the day of meetings, including one with ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
hmpf and one with monanotlisa, whom I had never seen in person before. She was delightful, and tolerated my Sandman conversion speech beautifully. Moreover, it motivated the folks from DC comics to hand over Sandman volumes to us for free, all in the interest of spreading the fame of Neil Gaiman. And yours truly, who already has all the Sandman volumes, got the second trade cover of Rising Stars I was so sorry hmpf didn't have a mobile phone with her, otherwise I'd have told her there were free comics to be had.
Sunday, the final day, is especially noteworthy for being the day on which the Friedenspreis des deutschen Buchhandels, literary the "peace award of the German book trade", is given. In the Paulskirche, St. Paul, a very historical place in Frankfurt and one which always causes some melancholy sadness in me. Here was the high point of our botched revolution from 1848, here the first, never used German constitution was drafted, guaranteeing voting rights to all and sunder - and here the revolutionaries were betrayed and the forces of reaction prevailed, leading us straight into imperialist doom, the Second Reich and World War I. And you know what came after. 1848, in the Paulskirche, is one of the biggest "what if?"s and "if only"s in German history.
The ceremony takes place in the round central room where that first parliament of a few days was in session, a room of full of bright colours and, today, of sunshine. Last year there was a diplomatic incident around the ceremony, which several people alluded to today. You see, last year's honored writer had been Susan Sontag. And the American Ambassador, Daniel Coates, boycotted the ceremony, something which no previous ambassador (if a foreigner was the honored writer in question) had done before when a citizen of his/her nation received the Friedenspreis. (This particular award being the highest literary honour Germany can give.) This weekend there was an interview with him in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung, in which he mentioned, among other things, that Bush should so win the elections because people needed a strong leader in a time of crisis (isn't he supposed to be bipartisan as a representative of the US abroad?), and that he might have been less than professional when chiding our Chancellor for being against the Iraq war, but then, this was his first diplomatic appointment. (No kidding.) (He's leaving Germany now. I'd be relieved, but who knows, Dubya might just be able to find someone worse.)
Anyway. This year's honored writer was Peter Esterházy, and you bet the Hungarian Ambassador was there. As were one of our previous presidents, Richard von Weizäcker, and the new President, Mr. Köhler, and quite a lot of the Who is Who of politics and literature. The laudatory speech was given by Michael Nauman, former editor of the Zeit and former minister of culture, and both speeches were great, balancing wit and seriousness beautifully. Mr. Esterházy is a bit of walking history himself, being a descendent of the second famous family of the Austrian-Hungarian empire (the Habsburgs being the most famous). (The music lovers among you might recall the Esterházy who was Joseph Haydn's patron first.) He's also the first Hungarian I heard who didn't have an Hungarian but an Austrian-Hungarian accent when talking in German (there is a difference), and looks like a genetic mix between Liszt and an aged baroque angel. Meaning he has a chockful of shoulder length white hair, and a roundy face.
Decades of living in a dictatorship figured hugely in both speeches, and like everyone born on the Western side of the Iron Curtain, I had some "there but for the grace…" flashbacks. (My hometown is just an hour and a half away from where the border used to be.) The importance of irony and laughter as a defense against any kind of dogma. The constant need for a writer to rexamine assumptions; Esterházy had already finished his magnum opus about his family, Harmonia Caelestis, when he discovered, courtesy of thoroughly kept secret police files, that his father after his own run-in with the Ungarian police worked as an informer for years and years after. Which caused some major revisions in the novel, apparantly. (Sad to say, I haven't read it yet.)
Dealing with the past was a topic he spoke about remarkably without ire, and with the same dry wit he used throughout. Pointing out that there was no Ungarian word for Vergangenheitsbewältigung - there isn't an English one, either, it literary means "dealing with the past" but specifically means Germans confronting and dealing with the Third Reich past - because Hungary as opposed to Germany hasn't dealt with its past and like basically every European country, prefers to think of it as a nation of victims during the era in question, not as a nation of victims and murderers. But he also pointed out that the Hungarian expression for calling it quits with the past afterwards was "a veil over it", whereas the German is Schwamm drüber (a sponge over it), i.e. the Hungarian expression implies the past is still there, just veiled, whereas the German implies it has been dissolved into nothing by a sponge, which makes the Hungarian more realistic.
As for the present, there were only a few allusions in both speeches. Michael Nauman said "we of the Old Europe - and shouldn't we thank the soon to be former US secretary of defense for this noble title", which was greeted with laughter and applause, as was Peter Esterházy's introductary address ("Mr. President, Excellencies - you know, I was wondering about using the term "Excellencies", because though all ambassadors are surely Excellencies, not all ambassadors are always there…"). Esterházy later summed it up as: "Since this is a peace award, I suddenly felt obliged to look up all present wars and wondered whether a statement is expected of me on all of them, which would take too long, so let me just say two things: I have always admired America, and I think the war in Iraq was deeply, utterly wrong."
After the ceremony, all the dignitaries and some additional guests, including yours truly, wandered off to the Hotel Frankfurter Hof, where the celebratory lunch took place. I came to sit next to the head of the culture department in the Bundespräsidialamt, i.e. the guy who briefs the President on all things cultural, one Dr. Marcus Barth, who looked only about five years older than me. Naturally, I wanted to know how one ends up in his job, and he gave me a run-down of his life, which included spending five years as a Catholic priest, dropping out of priesthood but going back to the university of Tübingen for more theology and literature, being unemployed but writing freelance articles, and having the fortune of getting said articles read by the man who was assembling a new staff for the then new President Herzog, after Weizäcker had served his two terms. Dr. Barth then advanced to speechwriter; he wrote for example the speech of former President Johannes Rau three days after 9/11 at the Brandenburg Gate which was given as a demonstration of solidarity with America. (Cue much melancholy on the table when reflecting on how everyone was with the US then and how Bush squandered this.) Since he wanted that particular speech to be emotional (more so than German political speeches post war usually are), understandable to an American audience as well and of course memorable, he rewatched, relistened and reread basically all the speeches Ted Sorenson wrote for John F. Kennedy back in the day. (Sorenson apparantly still being the big ideal of speech writers.) When Rau went out of office and Köhler started his term, Barth was one of the few members of staff who weren't just kept but promoted, to head of the cultural department. For West Wing watchers: he's not at all like Toby, though. Not one acerbic remark, and he's quite thin.*g*
For Republicans: he met Bush when the later came a-visiting and said Bush came across as nice enough in person. A bit like an enthusiastic teenager. Not at all moronic as sometimes on TV. He would have liked him if W. had been a private citizen without any influence.
Most bizarre encounter: Henry Kissinger, talking about Ingeborg Bachman. ("And here you had that war criminal, because, let's face it, he is one, going on about one of the most sensive poetesses in the German language.") We swapped Kissinger anecdotes.
Lunch being done with at about 3 pm, I hurried back to the Fair, got my suitcase and hastily got out of my black dress and into jeans more suited for travelling, and caught the train I had a reservation on, which was lucky, since on Book Fair Sunday all trains are stuffed.
Now: what's this I hear about a drabble meme?
hmpf and one with monanotlisa, whom I had never seen in person before. She was delightful, and tolerated my Sandman conversion speech beautifully. Moreover, it motivated the folks from DC comics to hand over Sandman volumes to us for free, all in the interest of spreading the fame of Neil Gaiman. And yours truly, who already has all the Sandman volumes, got the second trade cover of Rising Stars I was so sorry hmpf didn't have a mobile phone with her, otherwise I'd have told her there were free comics to be had. Sunday, the final day, is especially noteworthy for being the day on which the Friedenspreis des deutschen Buchhandels, literary the "peace award of the German book trade", is given. In the Paulskirche, St. Paul, a very historical place in Frankfurt and one which always causes some melancholy sadness in me. Here was the high point of our botched revolution from 1848, here the first, never used German constitution was drafted, guaranteeing voting rights to all and sunder - and here the revolutionaries were betrayed and the forces of reaction prevailed, leading us straight into imperialist doom, the Second Reich and World War I. And you know what came after. 1848, in the Paulskirche, is one of the biggest "what if?"s and "if only"s in German history.
The ceremony takes place in the round central room where that first parliament of a few days was in session, a room of full of bright colours and, today, of sunshine. Last year there was a diplomatic incident around the ceremony, which several people alluded to today. You see, last year's honored writer had been Susan Sontag. And the American Ambassador, Daniel Coates, boycotted the ceremony, something which no previous ambassador (if a foreigner was the honored writer in question) had done before when a citizen of his/her nation received the Friedenspreis. (This particular award being the highest literary honour Germany can give.) This weekend there was an interview with him in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung, in which he mentioned, among other things, that Bush should so win the elections because people needed a strong leader in a time of crisis (isn't he supposed to be bipartisan as a representative of the US abroad?), and that he might have been less than professional when chiding our Chancellor for being against the Iraq war, but then, this was his first diplomatic appointment. (No kidding.) (He's leaving Germany now. I'd be relieved, but who knows, Dubya might just be able to find someone worse.)
Anyway. This year's honored writer was Peter Esterházy, and you bet the Hungarian Ambassador was there. As were one of our previous presidents, Richard von Weizäcker, and the new President, Mr. Köhler, and quite a lot of the Who is Who of politics and literature. The laudatory speech was given by Michael Nauman, former editor of the Zeit and former minister of culture, and both speeches were great, balancing wit and seriousness beautifully. Mr. Esterházy is a bit of walking history himself, being a descendent of the second famous family of the Austrian-Hungarian empire (the Habsburgs being the most famous). (The music lovers among you might recall the Esterházy who was Joseph Haydn's patron first.) He's also the first Hungarian I heard who didn't have an Hungarian but an Austrian-Hungarian accent when talking in German (there is a difference), and looks like a genetic mix between Liszt and an aged baroque angel. Meaning he has a chockful of shoulder length white hair, and a roundy face.
Decades of living in a dictatorship figured hugely in both speeches, and like everyone born on the Western side of the Iron Curtain, I had some "there but for the grace…" flashbacks. (My hometown is just an hour and a half away from where the border used to be.) The importance of irony and laughter as a defense against any kind of dogma. The constant need for a writer to rexamine assumptions; Esterházy had already finished his magnum opus about his family, Harmonia Caelestis, when he discovered, courtesy of thoroughly kept secret police files, that his father after his own run-in with the Ungarian police worked as an informer for years and years after. Which caused some major revisions in the novel, apparantly. (Sad to say, I haven't read it yet.)
Dealing with the past was a topic he spoke about remarkably without ire, and with the same dry wit he used throughout. Pointing out that there was no Ungarian word for Vergangenheitsbewältigung - there isn't an English one, either, it literary means "dealing with the past" but specifically means Germans confronting and dealing with the Third Reich past - because Hungary as opposed to Germany hasn't dealt with its past and like basically every European country, prefers to think of it as a nation of victims during the era in question, not as a nation of victims and murderers. But he also pointed out that the Hungarian expression for calling it quits with the past afterwards was "a veil over it", whereas the German is Schwamm drüber (a sponge over it), i.e. the Hungarian expression implies the past is still there, just veiled, whereas the German implies it has been dissolved into nothing by a sponge, which makes the Hungarian more realistic.
As for the present, there were only a few allusions in both speeches. Michael Nauman said "we of the Old Europe - and shouldn't we thank the soon to be former US secretary of defense for this noble title", which was greeted with laughter and applause, as was Peter Esterházy's introductary address ("Mr. President, Excellencies - you know, I was wondering about using the term "Excellencies", because though all ambassadors are surely Excellencies, not all ambassadors are always there…"). Esterházy later summed it up as: "Since this is a peace award, I suddenly felt obliged to look up all present wars and wondered whether a statement is expected of me on all of them, which would take too long, so let me just say two things: I have always admired America, and I think the war in Iraq was deeply, utterly wrong."
After the ceremony, all the dignitaries and some additional guests, including yours truly, wandered off to the Hotel Frankfurter Hof, where the celebratory lunch took place. I came to sit next to the head of the culture department in the Bundespräsidialamt, i.e. the guy who briefs the President on all things cultural, one Dr. Marcus Barth, who looked only about five years older than me. Naturally, I wanted to know how one ends up in his job, and he gave me a run-down of his life, which included spending five years as a Catholic priest, dropping out of priesthood but going back to the university of Tübingen for more theology and literature, being unemployed but writing freelance articles, and having the fortune of getting said articles read by the man who was assembling a new staff for the then new President Herzog, after Weizäcker had served his two terms. Dr. Barth then advanced to speechwriter; he wrote for example the speech of former President Johannes Rau three days after 9/11 at the Brandenburg Gate which was given as a demonstration of solidarity with America. (Cue much melancholy on the table when reflecting on how everyone was with the US then and how Bush squandered this.) Since he wanted that particular speech to be emotional (more so than German political speeches post war usually are), understandable to an American audience as well and of course memorable, he rewatched, relistened and reread basically all the speeches Ted Sorenson wrote for John F. Kennedy back in the day. (Sorenson apparantly still being the big ideal of speech writers.) When Rau went out of office and Köhler started his term, Barth was one of the few members of staff who weren't just kept but promoted, to head of the cultural department. For West Wing watchers: he's not at all like Toby, though. Not one acerbic remark, and he's quite thin.*g*
For Republicans: he met Bush when the later came a-visiting and said Bush came across as nice enough in person. A bit like an enthusiastic teenager. Not at all moronic as sometimes on TV. He would have liked him if W. had been a private citizen without any influence.
Most bizarre encounter: Henry Kissinger, talking about Ingeborg Bachman. ("And here you had that war criminal, because, let's face it, he is one, going on about one of the most sensive poetesses in the German language.") We swapped Kissinger anecdotes.
Lunch being done with at about 3 pm, I hurried back to the Fair, got my suitcase and hastily got out of my black dress and into jeans more suited for travelling, and caught the train I had a reservation on, which was lucky, since on Book Fair Sunday all trains are stuffed.
Now: what's this I hear about a drabble meme?
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2004-10-10 12:37 pm (UTC)But I didn't know that you knew
LJ is a small world, after all...
no subject
Date: 2004-10-10 12:57 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2004-10-10 02:54 pm (UTC)Hope the rest of yer weekend and the rest of yer week is great as well!
no subject
Date: 2004-10-10 10:47 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2004-10-10 03:10 pm (UTC)Sigh. . .this is the kind of thing that has me pulling my hair out watching the presidential debates. W's argument is that anybody who criticizes the war is "demoralizing the troops," and that we can't trust Kerry to handle the situation in Iraq because he "doesn't believe we should be there in the first place. To which I say -- if he's limiting the people who will be involved in improving the situation to people who think we should be there in the first place, well, it's going to be a very lonely battle. Which seems to be what they want.
I kept wanting Kerry to make this argument during the debates, but apparently asking your audience to use logic risks turning off the voters, because voters apparently reject candidates who try to act smart. Or something like that. It's a weird country. I'd guess that Pres's Clinton and Carter were actually the most intelligent people we've had in office in my memory, but Carter had to run as an aw-shucks Peanut farmer, and Clinton was just Clinton.
In cheerier news, the first line meme (http://www.livejournal.com/users/karabair/98169.html) is a blast. Do play!
no subject
Date: 2004-10-10 10:52 pm (UTC)(Why Dubya, who is a child of privilege if ever there was one, is seen as a "man of the people" then I don't know, and am rather tempted to ascribe it to him coming across as none-too-bright, but that might be me falling into prejudice myself.)
no subject
Date: 2004-10-11 02:13 am (UTC)A couple of nights ago I watched a documentary about Dubya's family background that covered large parts of the Bush clan and the widespread web of connections that the Bushes had managed to establish over several decades.
Spooky.
My personal theory about George W.'s reputation as "a man of the people" :
It's his not only his language or his way of interacting with people, but also his self-proclaimed evangelical calling. Picturing himself as a "just a brave man obeying the will of God" shrouds him in a certain air of humility he would not possess otherwise.
no subject
Date: 2004-10-10 03:49 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2004-10-10 10:52 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2004-10-10 10:09 pm (UTC)People post the first lines from their stories. Other people write drabbles with the same first line. A selection of my first lines is up here.
*tries to look innocent*
no subject
Date: 2004-10-10 10:55 pm (UTC)Eeeeek!
Date: 2004-10-12 04:45 am (UTC)I have all of 'Sandman', but I talked to John about Neil Gaiman at the book fair 'cause it turned out he has never read any of his work (he was surprised to see so much Gaiman stuff around - he *really* doesn't know a lot about comics!), so I could have used some comics to increase John's comic education. ;-)
Oh well.
What is 'Rising Stars'? A new Gaiman comic? I haven't heard of it yet. I bought this at the fair, though: http://www.scherbenmund.de. Gotta support German fantasy/horror comics!
BTW... a friend of mine who's just started doing an M.A. in writing told her class and her teacher recently that she would like to see her work, once it gets published, on a shelf with 8 of her favourite SF novels, the 'Sandman' series, and 'It's Walky!' *g* (I have to ask her which 8 novels she was thinking of... though I can hazard a guess at a few of them.)
It's odd... although I don't want 'It's Walky!' to end, I now can hardly wait for the ending, as I will be able to burn it on CD for you (and other people, as well) then...
I also can't wait to see it in print, but that may take a few years. The first volume of its prequel, 'Roomies!', has only just been made available. Frell. I'll probably buy that, as well, but it only really gets incredibly good once 'It's Walky!' starts.
Re: Eeeeek!
Date: 2004-10-12 04:59 am (UTC)