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selenakI strongly suspect some peculiar magic to be responsible for the last day of the Frankfurt Book Fair to always be a sunny one. This means when you sit inside the Paulskirche, waiting for the award ceremony to begin, your eyes tear a bit with the sunlight coming through the church windows, being utterly unlike the artificial light in the halls you're used to after one week locked in them. It suits the emotionalism of the place and occasion.
This year, the peace price of the German booktrade went, for the first time, to someone who isn't a writer: the artist Anselm Kiefer. Which was a tad controversial because well, weren't there any deserving writers? I will admit to having been somewhat skeptical myself. However, both the laudatory speech by Mr. Spiess, the director of the George Pompidou in Paris, and the acceptance speech by Anselm Kiefer were among the best I've heard in recent years; especially Kiefer's speech. Not just because he quoted the two poets influencing him most, Paul Celan and Ingeborg Bachmann. No, he came up with some amazing word imagery of his own and at the climax of his speech gave a description of how, for him, the act of creation happens, from an idea to a finished painting. That's something fiendishly difficult to capture verbally, and very intimate, and he managed it, so I sat there full of admiration.
Later on, at the reception in the Hotel Frankfurter Hof, I found myself promoted from table 35 - where I sat in recent years, along with some Frankfurt industry folk and a judge from our Supreme Court - to table 5, where lo and behold, I found myself next to Josef Haslinger. Who is Austrian and probably one of the most famous German-writing authors of the last decades. On the other side of the table was a lady who headed a literary club in Stuttgart and asked him about his novel Opernball, aka the one which made his name. Her book club is reading it next month, so she said, and: "That's why I reread it for the first time since years. Now my question to you is whether one can read it the same way as in the early 90s when you published it. I mean, back then, one could understand the terrorists you describe. Going against the fat cats at the Vienna opera ball.."
"Wait a minute," he interrupted. "If you phrase it like that, I have to ask whether it would have made a difference to you if the location had been a football stadium during, say, a Germany-Austria match."
"Well, no," she replied, sounding somewhat doubtful. "But my point is: I could understand your terrorists. Especiallys since the politicians were described so dislikeable. So back then, I was hoping they'd succeed."
"Err," said Mr. Haslinger, "and the fact that I included scenes where the terrorists cut off other people's fingers didn't prevent complete identification on your part? That's why I did it, for the record."
Quoth she: "No, I still wanted them to succeed. Back then, I mean. But now everything has become real, and when we read something like this, we think of the victims and - well, that's what I'm asking. Can we read it the same way?"
"No," he said, "and that's why I don't do readings from this particular novel any more. But you can find a different way of reading it. Which is true for any book that survives, I suppose."
"But isn't what you're really asking whether one can write terrorists in a way that makes readers understand or at least feel for terrorists?" I asked, and added, since the lady in question was in her early 60s: "If you think one can't, what was your reaction to The Lost Honour of Katharina Blum when Böll wrote it in the 70s, at a time when the RAF wasn't history but very much present?" (Sidenote: The Lost Honour of Katharina Blum by Heinrich Böll is a novel in which a woman who has a one night stand with a guy who later turns out to have been a terrorist - which she didn't know - is hounded by the yellow press, loses job, friends and just about everyone, her life utterly ruined, until she finally becomes a killer herself. There is also a successful film version by Volker Schlöndorff.)
"I never read it," she confessed.
"I did," said Haslinger. "Loved it."
"I did see the movie," the lady said. "I liked it. But she just kills the reporter in the end, does she? No one else. That's different. You made me feel for these people," she continued, addressing Haslinger again, somewhat accusingly.
"That's a novelist's job," he said, and then we all changed the subject and started to eat.
This year, the peace price of the German booktrade went, for the first time, to someone who isn't a writer: the artist Anselm Kiefer. Which was a tad controversial because well, weren't there any deserving writers? I will admit to having been somewhat skeptical myself. However, both the laudatory speech by Mr. Spiess, the director of the George Pompidou in Paris, and the acceptance speech by Anselm Kiefer were among the best I've heard in recent years; especially Kiefer's speech. Not just because he quoted the two poets influencing him most, Paul Celan and Ingeborg Bachmann. No, he came up with some amazing word imagery of his own and at the climax of his speech gave a description of how, for him, the act of creation happens, from an idea to a finished painting. That's something fiendishly difficult to capture verbally, and very intimate, and he managed it, so I sat there full of admiration.
Later on, at the reception in the Hotel Frankfurter Hof, I found myself promoted from table 35 - where I sat in recent years, along with some Frankfurt industry folk and a judge from our Supreme Court - to table 5, where lo and behold, I found myself next to Josef Haslinger. Who is Austrian and probably one of the most famous German-writing authors of the last decades. On the other side of the table was a lady who headed a literary club in Stuttgart and asked him about his novel Opernball, aka the one which made his name. Her book club is reading it next month, so she said, and: "That's why I reread it for the first time since years. Now my question to you is whether one can read it the same way as in the early 90s when you published it. I mean, back then, one could understand the terrorists you describe. Going against the fat cats at the Vienna opera ball.."
"Wait a minute," he interrupted. "If you phrase it like that, I have to ask whether it would have made a difference to you if the location had been a football stadium during, say, a Germany-Austria match."
"Well, no," she replied, sounding somewhat doubtful. "But my point is: I could understand your terrorists. Especiallys since the politicians were described so dislikeable. So back then, I was hoping they'd succeed."
"Err," said Mr. Haslinger, "and the fact that I included scenes where the terrorists cut off other people's fingers didn't prevent complete identification on your part? That's why I did it, for the record."
Quoth she: "No, I still wanted them to succeed. Back then, I mean. But now everything has become real, and when we read something like this, we think of the victims and - well, that's what I'm asking. Can we read it the same way?"
"No," he said, "and that's why I don't do readings from this particular novel any more. But you can find a different way of reading it. Which is true for any book that survives, I suppose."
"But isn't what you're really asking whether one can write terrorists in a way that makes readers understand or at least feel for terrorists?" I asked, and added, since the lady in question was in her early 60s: "If you think one can't, what was your reaction to The Lost Honour of Katharina Blum when Böll wrote it in the 70s, at a time when the RAF wasn't history but very much present?" (Sidenote: The Lost Honour of Katharina Blum by Heinrich Böll is a novel in which a woman who has a one night stand with a guy who later turns out to have been a terrorist - which she didn't know - is hounded by the yellow press, loses job, friends and just about everyone, her life utterly ruined, until she finally becomes a killer herself. There is also a successful film version by Volker Schlöndorff.)
"I never read it," she confessed.
"I did," said Haslinger. "Loved it."
"I did see the movie," the lady said. "I liked it. But she just kills the reporter in the end, does she? No one else. That's different. You made me feel for these people," she continued, addressing Haslinger again, somewhat accusingly.
"That's a novelist's job," he said, and then we all changed the subject and started to eat.
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no subject
Date: 2008-10-19 03:40 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-10-19 05:35 pm (UTC)That lady scares me. I congratulate both you and Haslinger on your wonderful composure. I think I would have asked her to repeat "But now it has all become real" to someone from Ireland. Or Israel. Ye gods.
no subject
Date: 2008-10-20 06:18 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-10-19 10:13 pm (UTC)But the book club lady comes out as pretty silly, doesn't she? Obviously privileged since she scored a place at that table; and yet she has no qualms mentioning the Vienna Opera Ball "fat cats." Really, Tom Wolfe's Radical Chic ought to be a textbook in class.
no subject
Date: 2008-10-20 06:12 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-10-20 07:17 am (UTC)