Frankfurt Book Fair: The End
Oct. 24th, 2005 02:07 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
selenakThe “Friedenspreis des Deutschen Buchhandels” (= „peace award of the German book trade“) is one of the highest honours we bestow on a person over here, and the ceremony always serves as the unofficial conclusion of the Book Fair as well. This year, it went to the Turkish author Orhan Pamuk, whose works I must admit I do not know, though I had heard of him pre-award. To recapitulate some of the points of the laudatory speeches, he started out as a painter, then switched to writing, is famous for European-Turkish bridge-building in his books, was the first author of the Muslim world to condemn the fatwah against Rushdie, brings the fate of the Armenians and the treatment of the Kurds (still taboo subjects in Turkey) to the public mind, and is an ardent proponent of the acceptance of Turkey in the European Union.
Which a good deal of his own speech was about. It’s a big subject over here, all the more so because certain politicians, among them our new chancellor, tried to exploit it for election campaign purposes this year. My own feelings on the subject are that the carrot of membership has been dangled in front of the Turks so long and so often that to reject the possibility now and insist it will never be more than a “privileged partnership” would be worse than a slap in the face and fuel every fundamentalist movement in the country. Which was one of Parmuk’s arguments as well, though he put it more poetically - “the hopeful waiting of a man who knocks at a door and begs to be let in, the curiosity and at the same time the fear of being rejected, and the anger about feeling this fear – all this never leaves my mind any more than it leaves the minds of my countrymen, and from there it’s only a small step to shame”.
(The reason why I can quote directly is because a copy of the speech in German had been provided for all the guests, since Mr. Parmuk held the speech in Turkish. More about this later.)
Aside from this very important issue and between ponderings of the novel as a quintessential European art form and an introduction to Europe for non-Europeans (also a big part of the speech) what for some reason touched me deeply was a throwaway line in his speech and in one of the earlier speeches, about Istanbul, the old Byzantium, as the city to unite Turkey (and by implication the East) with Europe. It’s been many years since I was there, but the place, like Rome and Jerusalem, has a special air of mystery and blood and history about it. And like those other cities, it has been build in literature so many times. Yeats and Byzantium being just one case in point.
So anyway, here we were, in the Paulskirche which never fails to make me feel wistful for lost chances because that was where our first abortive attempt in parliamentary democracy took place in 1848, applauding. And then a writer who shall be distinguished in this journal solely by his initial of H, who was sitting next to me, started complaining. And didn’t stop until we had arrived at the Frankfurter Hof where the ensuing reception and lunch took place. First, he whined about Orhan Pamuk having held his speech in Turkish. I said that two years ago, Susan Sontag had held hers in English and nobody had any problems with it.
“Yes,” he said, “but everybody understands English. If you’re invited somewhere and get an award, you should hold your speech in a language everyone can understand.”
I restrained from rolling my eyes and said that if I didn’t speak a language everyone understood or didn’t speak it fluently, I wouldn’t have chosen it, either, especially since the award was for mastery in my own language, and that he had provided a written translation for every single guest in the auditorium, so where was the problem?
“It’s impolite,”
he insisted. Then we spoke of dead writers which seemed to be safe until he said (of Robert Musil, if I recall), “of course, he had hare-brained ideas about politics. Leftist ideas”.
“How do you know I don’t have leftist ideas myself?” I said, annoyed at the hare-brained=leftist equation, though as German politics go, I’m pretty much middle of the road (meaning I voted for neither of the parties now in a grand coalition).
“That’s your problem,”
he said, and moved on to his next rant object. Who happens to be Ulla Unseld-Berkéwicz, widow of Siegfried Unseld and current owner of the Suhrkamp Verlag, one of our most distinguished publishers. Now, like H, I’m sort of friends with Joachim Unseld. (The entire thing is pretty much a literary soap opera: old publisher with son set to suceed him falls for younger woman, ditches wife of many years and disinherits son who sides with his mother.) And I read the newspapers. So I have heard and read many not so good things about Ms. Berkéwicz and her handling of Suhrkamp. But still. H went on and on about how the woman was a witch, a horror, even looked like a witch, simply disgusting, that someone should write a novel about what a witch she was and…
…that was when I snapped.
“If I were to write a novel about her,”
I said,
“I’d try to understand her first. Where she comes from. What her feelings and goals are. So she wouldn’t be a caricature but a three-dimensional human being. That’s what separates writers from caricaturists, doesn’t it?”
End of conversation with H.
The reception and lunch went well, otherwise. Cem Özdemir who is a German MP of Turkish descent held an improvised additional speech in Pamuk’s honour, with an aside of how support and applause for Turkish authors critisizing the regime would have been nice in the Cold War days when everyone was busy cozying up the other side instead. And he quoted a reply Orhan Pamuk had given last year on a panel they had both been on in Turkey, when Mr. Pamuk had been asked whether he didn’t love his country since he critisized it. Whereupon O.P. had spoken about two different ways to love one’s country – cajoling it and repressing it and allowing only for one opinion being the way he didn’t choose. Not just a Turkish issue, methinks.
Afterwards, I wandered back to the Book Fair and met hmpf again. We had planned to pay the English-language Hall 8 one last visit, but the publishers there were already busy packing, so it basically amounted a goodbye with a glass of water earlier in hall 3. And now, the road calls to me again. It doesn’t exactly go on and on forever, but I’ll be travelling for three more days.
Which a good deal of his own speech was about. It’s a big subject over here, all the more so because certain politicians, among them our new chancellor, tried to exploit it for election campaign purposes this year. My own feelings on the subject are that the carrot of membership has been dangled in front of the Turks so long and so often that to reject the possibility now and insist it will never be more than a “privileged partnership” would be worse than a slap in the face and fuel every fundamentalist movement in the country. Which was one of Parmuk’s arguments as well, though he put it more poetically - “the hopeful waiting of a man who knocks at a door and begs to be let in, the curiosity and at the same time the fear of being rejected, and the anger about feeling this fear – all this never leaves my mind any more than it leaves the minds of my countrymen, and from there it’s only a small step to shame”.
(The reason why I can quote directly is because a copy of the speech in German had been provided for all the guests, since Mr. Parmuk held the speech in Turkish. More about this later.)
Aside from this very important issue and between ponderings of the novel as a quintessential European art form and an introduction to Europe for non-Europeans (also a big part of the speech) what for some reason touched me deeply was a throwaway line in his speech and in one of the earlier speeches, about Istanbul, the old Byzantium, as the city to unite Turkey (and by implication the East) with Europe. It’s been many years since I was there, but the place, like Rome and Jerusalem, has a special air of mystery and blood and history about it. And like those other cities, it has been build in literature so many times. Yeats and Byzantium being just one case in point.
So anyway, here we were, in the Paulskirche which never fails to make me feel wistful for lost chances because that was where our first abortive attempt in parliamentary democracy took place in 1848, applauding. And then a writer who shall be distinguished in this journal solely by his initial of H, who was sitting next to me, started complaining. And didn’t stop until we had arrived at the Frankfurter Hof where the ensuing reception and lunch took place. First, he whined about Orhan Pamuk having held his speech in Turkish. I said that two years ago, Susan Sontag had held hers in English and nobody had any problems with it.
“Yes,” he said, “but everybody understands English. If you’re invited somewhere and get an award, you should hold your speech in a language everyone can understand.”
I restrained from rolling my eyes and said that if I didn’t speak a language everyone understood or didn’t speak it fluently, I wouldn’t have chosen it, either, especially since the award was for mastery in my own language, and that he had provided a written translation for every single guest in the auditorium, so where was the problem?
“It’s impolite,”
he insisted. Then we spoke of dead writers which seemed to be safe until he said (of Robert Musil, if I recall), “of course, he had hare-brained ideas about politics. Leftist ideas”.
“How do you know I don’t have leftist ideas myself?” I said, annoyed at the hare-brained=leftist equation, though as German politics go, I’m pretty much middle of the road (meaning I voted for neither of the parties now in a grand coalition).
“That’s your problem,”
he said, and moved on to his next rant object. Who happens to be Ulla Unseld-Berkéwicz, widow of Siegfried Unseld and current owner of the Suhrkamp Verlag, one of our most distinguished publishers. Now, like H, I’m sort of friends with Joachim Unseld. (The entire thing is pretty much a literary soap opera: old publisher with son set to suceed him falls for younger woman, ditches wife of many years and disinherits son who sides with his mother.) And I read the newspapers. So I have heard and read many not so good things about Ms. Berkéwicz and her handling of Suhrkamp. But still. H went on and on about how the woman was a witch, a horror, even looked like a witch, simply disgusting, that someone should write a novel about what a witch she was and…
…that was when I snapped.
“If I were to write a novel about her,”
I said,
“I’d try to understand her first. Where she comes from. What her feelings and goals are. So she wouldn’t be a caricature but a three-dimensional human being. That’s what separates writers from caricaturists, doesn’t it?”
End of conversation with H.
The reception and lunch went well, otherwise. Cem Özdemir who is a German MP of Turkish descent held an improvised additional speech in Pamuk’s honour, with an aside of how support and applause for Turkish authors critisizing the regime would have been nice in the Cold War days when everyone was busy cozying up the other side instead. And he quoted a reply Orhan Pamuk had given last year on a panel they had both been on in Turkey, when Mr. Pamuk had been asked whether he didn’t love his country since he critisized it. Whereupon O.P. had spoken about two different ways to love one’s country – cajoling it and repressing it and allowing only for one opinion being the way he didn’t choose. Not just a Turkish issue, methinks.
Afterwards, I wandered back to the Book Fair and met hmpf again. We had planned to pay the English-language Hall 8 one last visit, but the publishers there were already busy packing, so it basically amounted a goodbye with a glass of water earlier in hall 3. And now, the road calls to me again. It doesn’t exactly go on and on forever, but I’ll be travelling for three more days.
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no subject
Date: 2005-10-24 12:01 pm (UTC)Nipick: you don't hold a speech in English; you could make a speech, or give it, or deliver it, and probably several other alternatives I've forgotten, but I've never seen "hold". "Make" is the most common.
no subject
Date: 2005-10-24 12:11 pm (UTC)Thank you: will try to remember that!
no subject
Date: 2005-10-24 12:18 pm (UTC)Great account of the book fair. So where is the road taking you now?
no subject
Date: 2005-10-25 01:00 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-10-24 01:01 pm (UTC)And yes, trying to understand someone first....
Small book rec for you -- not exactly vaturliteratur, but the same period and the same vein, The Button Box, by Ruth Patton Totten, which is the somewhat disjointed biography by Patton's daughter of her mother. And the only book I've ever seen that doesn't treat Beatrice as an occasional table in the background. I have to write Beatrice someday, for real, not just the LOTR stories you beta'd for me. It's kind of facile in some places, as when Ruth explains that while her parents were active in the very demimonde "little Polynesian naughtiness" of Hawai'i in the 20s and 30s that she's absolutely sure they never, never took part in any of the wildness, because she certainly never saw anything. Right. I should imagine that most people try to keep notorious license away from their school aged children!
Anyway, I ramble. Where are you off to next?
no subject
Date: 2005-10-24 03:30 pm (UTC)Oh yes, quite. Still, can't blame someone for not wanting to speculate about their parents' sex lives.
no subject
Date: 2005-10-24 01:12 pm (UTC)It couldn't have been him, though. He's too smart and besides, his views on politics are different. :-)
no subject
Date: 2005-10-24 02:46 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-10-24 03:01 pm (UTC)And O.P.'s comments about patriotism are spot-on; I wish more people would understand that. He sounds like someone I should find out more about.
Also, hare-brained or not, I was sorry to see that Joschka Fischer lost his position in the new coalition. I'm not a big fan of politicians, but I rather liked what I saw of him.
Thank you for your posts! It's always really interesting hearing about this stuff.
no subject
Date: 2005-10-24 03:36 pm (UTC)H was irritating to the extreme. Alas, we have mutual friends, so I won't have seen the last of him.
no subject
Date: 2005-10-24 03:52 pm (UTC)On the other hand, I am truly in awe of your verbal smackdown powers :) Perhaps he will tread more carefully around you in future?
no subject
Date: 2005-10-24 03:17 pm (UTC)And quoting from your early post, at times like these, it helps to channel one's inner Wesley:
Tea: one of the great, great benefits of civilisation.
Meanwhile
no subject
Date: 2005-10-24 03:31 pm (UTC)Orhan Pamuk
Date: 2006-01-07 12:08 am (UTC)Re: Orhan Pamuk
Date: 2006-01-07 05:54 am (UTC)