Frankfurt Book Fair, Day One
Oct. 7th, 2010 12:01 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
selenakThis year’s guest of honour at the Frankfurt Book Fair is Argentina. This meant that after last year’s pre- Book Fair fail and embarrasssment re: China (check out the relevant entries from last October fro the gruesome details if you missed it), everyone chilled and relaxed at the opening ceremony on Tuesday evening. Everyone, that is, except for the book trade representative, Gottfried Honnefelder, whose speech basically can be summed up with: „E-books won’t replace real books. Google, on the other hand… Fight the Google Settlement with your last dying breath! Fight the Power! Long live Judge Danny Chin, and long may he continue to rule in our favour, or the world’s biggest publisher whom nobody signed contracts with is going to be a bunch of programmers. We hates them, precious.“
The rest of the speakers were in somewhat more optimistic moods, plus they didn’t forget to involve Argentina in their speech. There was just one allusion to our current big controversy (involving one Thilo Sarrazin, if you were lucky enough to not read about it so far), and that demanded, gasp, backstory knowledge, otherwise you’d miss it. It came when the mayor of Frankfurt, Petra Roth, was honoured as a „friend of books“ ; she’s been the mayor of Frankfurt for the last 15 years, which was a big shocking to realise as I remember her first speech for the occasion. Time flies, etc. Said speech was given during the peace award of the German book trade, which in the year Petra Roth started her job was given to Annemarie Schimmel, translator of the Qu’ran and various other Islamic texts. There was some controversy then, too, involving Ms. Schimmel versus Alice Schwarzer if I recall; in any case, Jürgen Boss, the director of the book fair, said that Petra Roth in her speech handled the matter superbly and in her years as mayor o fthe city with the highest quota of immigrants in Germany always spoke intelligently and without sensationalism on the subject. As opposed to more current day examples. And that was it for your daily Sarrazin allusion.
The two Argentine speakers were Griselda Gambaro, representing the Argentine authors; a tiny old lady with a speaking voice that reminded me of a song Julie Taymor used on the soundtrack of Frida. I noticed that the translation was pretty much simultanously, which meant she was reading from a prepared manuscript, whereas later, when the president of Argentina, Cristina Fernández de Kirchner, spoke, the translator had trouble keeping up as she spoke not only without looking at a manuskript (she kept eye contact with the audience the entire time) but also apparently improvised. Back to Griselda Gambaro: her speech touched on what was going to turn into a red thread in all things Argentine in the book fair so far, the era of the military dictatorship and the ongoing wounds from that, and the way writers can resist, keep silent, aquiesce or even be in the service of power, something Argentine and German literature and Argentine and German history have in common.
This year’s representative from the German goverment was Guido Westerwelle, who praised the 700 bookstores of Buenos Aires, then compared the Frankfurt Book Fair to the UN assembly (as in „we are the United Nations of books“) since it’s the world wide largest and most international, and promptly managed to add a malapropism: „Even before my time as secretary of foreign affairs, I always enjoyed visiting the Buchmasse“ instead of „Buchmesse“ (i.e. „the book masses“ instead of „the book fair“). The papers decided to be kind and ignore this one (they’ve been on his case for years now) in today’s report. The rest of his speech was devoted to cheering up the publishers in his own way about the e-book and the internet full of downloadable property („when Gutenberg invented print, a lot copyists and painters of letters must have cursed him for putting them out of business, but he made reading democratic for the first time instead of letting it be only available for nobles and monks; the internet, too, is democratic“), which was meant well but caused mild facepalm.
Then it was time for the red-haired, vibrant president of Argentine, and my, but she rocked the hell out of her speech. First of all because after all the sedate tones of the earlier speeches, suddenly there was this passionate speaking voice as if she was on an election campaign and we were the voters she needed to convince. Secondly because of the eye contact. Thirdly because for her opening salvo, she said she couldn’t name all the 60 plus Argentine writers who’d come with her to represent Argentina at the fair because that would take too long, but she wanted to call up one woman to her on the stage, who wasn’t a writer but the widow of one, Elsa Oesterheld, whose husband and four children dissappeared/were killed during the military dictatorship. Elsa Oesterheld turned out to look only a bit younger than Griselda Gambaro and got a standing ovation while she was kissed and hugged by Christina Kirchner. Audibly fighting tears Mrs. Oesterheld then said „I thought I was dead, but this is like a rebirth!“
Political ploy or no political ploy, it was impossible not to be moved and consequently also feel sympathy for the president who had after all ended the amnesty of the generals for the deeds during the dicatorship. She seconded Westerwelle in declaring all things e-book a parallel to Gutenberg’s letters but worked in a mild reproof to something else he had said; he’d declared Argentina „the most European of Latin American countries“ and quoted a writer who’d described Argentinians as „Italians who speak Spanish and wish they’d be Brits living in France“. „We are indeed very European in our heritage, and African, too“, quot Ms. Kirchner, „at the cost of genocide of nearly our entire indiginous population.“
The military dictatorship and what we call Vergangenheitsbewältigung in Germany were, as mentioned, a big theme. About Argentine history and present in general, she said: „We had terrible eras and wonderful ones, but one thing we never were was indifferent or neutral. We were never Switzerland; for good or ill, we were there.“ At which point it seems to have occured to her that there might be Swiss people in the audience, so she added: „No offense meant to Switzerland or the Swiss, of which the grandfather of the former president Kirchner (her husband) was one.“
Now, at the end of the opening ceremony, once the highest ranking guest has finished his or her speech, Gottfried Honnefelder traditionally declares the book fair opened via putting down a hammer. President Kirchner spotted the hammer, concluded it was meant for her, and at the end of her speech joked whether she was meant to bash someone with it or finish the ceremony. Honnefelder was already half way to the stage at that point, joined her and declared that today there would be a new ceremony, and thus she opened the book fair.
The guest country of honour always gets one big room to themselves to present their country, and I must say, the Argentine presentation, to which we afterwards wandered (this being the only part of the book fair you were allowed to go at night) is one of the best. They used every square metre and showcased both literary works and various film versions of same (I must say my knowledge of Argentine literature sucks, though I did recognize at least one writer other than Borges – Manuel Puig, because I had read Kiss of the Spiderwoman), graffiti, history – as far back as the skull of a gigantosaurus found in Argentina, and as recent as the military dictatorship in the 70s; there were walls with the photos of the 400 children who dissappeared during it because they were taken from their families, and walls with the photos of all the writers killed or imprisoned as well. There were famous sketches projected on banners and other walls, and the shape of Argentina combined with photos of places and sights. And there were tributes to the most famous Argentinians to non-Argentinians, to wit, Eva „Evita“ Peron, Ernesto „Che“ Guevara and Diego Maradona. In Che’s case, they included two notebooks for the exhibition. Some photos of the Argentinian hall:
Today, Wednesday, was the first „real“ day of the fair. I kept running into old aquaintances which is part of the thrill of being there. One of whom had my address from 12 years ago, so that’s how long we hadn’t met, which we did via Lion Feuchtwanger, the author I wrote my thesis about. Volker Skierka, a journalist, is a Feuchtwanger expert, but the reason why he was at the fair was a) for a discussion with Cuban exiles on conditions in Cuba, since he’d written the most recent German Fidel Castro biography (briefly: among the depressing list of bad conditions, the surreal highlight was the list of jobs now available and reccommended to the 500 something state employees just sacked; they include „soothsayer“ and „dandy“), and b) his Castro biography appearing in another medium. „Did you know,“ he asked me, „that they make comics out of books these days? That there are comics on serious subjects? They are called graphic novels.“
He’s always been nice to me, so I didn’t reply „yes, dear, I might have heard that during the last decades when I’ve been reading them“. After all, living in fandom you tend to forget that perspectives from non-comics readers are quite different, and a lot of them go through their lives without realising „comics“ can mean something other than Donald Duck. Anyway, the guy who did a Johnny Cash graphic novel has now cartoon-ized Skierka’s Castro biography, so Fidel, the comics, is out there. (And looks quite good from what I’ve seen. The drawings are black and white and remind me a bit of Chinese ink sketches. Skierka’s opinion on Castro in said biography can basically summed up with the statement of how disturbing it was that a former leader of a revolution which was welcomed and respected in wide parts of the world, one of the most well-read and intelligent heads of goverments, would then be responsible for the persecution of writers, journalists, homosexuals and just about everyone who didn’t fit with the agenda of the day.)
Book-wise, the one which upon first browsing impressed me most were the memoirs of Auma Obama (older sister of Barack), published by Bastai Lübbe, which appears to be not a translation (I couldn’t find a „translated from the…“ credit) but an original publication. Now „Dreams of my father“ mention her and that she had a scholarship in Germany, but those passages had left me with the impression that she didn’t like it here so I had assumed she’d left again after studying. Turns out she lived in Germany, all in all, for 16 years, not non-stop but back and forth. From browsing, the book looks really interesting, with her childhood and youth in Kenya described vividly, as is life here which includes both life long friends – the girl she shared her first living quarters with, Elke, is still her best friend - and experiences of every day racism (such as a lot of people automatically using what she calls „Tarzan German“ when talking to her, i.e. assuming she doesn’t speak it well). The description of her father is an interesting counterpoint to the mostly mythical, since absent, figure he is in her brother’s book, because she lived with him a lot (and it wasn’t easy), same with the various wives and siblings. Interestingly, the American who impressed her most is…. Hillary Clinton. She starts the book with getting a letter from her and mentions that because of the campaign battles between Hillary and her brother during the primaries, she had felt obliged to hate her out of sibling loyalty, so actually meeting her in the flesh, sitting next to her at a dinner was confusing at first because she wasn’t what Auma had expected, and they immediately struck a conversation about C.A.R.E. programs. But she still wrote it off as mere politeness and good manners on Ms. Clinton’s part, except that then came the letter, and apparantly the two are still in contact and meet when it’s possible. I’ll try to read the book entirely once the book fair is over.
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Date: 2010-10-08 09:44 am (UTC)Wanting to say that I won't be online tomorrow and Sunday, maybe in the afternoon? I 'm not sure exactly yet so I will have the pleasure of reading your John's anniversary post a little later than planned.
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Date: 2010-10-08 05:54 pm (UTC)