Frankfurt Book Fair: The End
Oct. 10th, 2010 09:15 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
selenakSaturday and Sunday being the two book fair days open to the general public, they’re traditionally overcrowded. Also full of costumes, because if you were one in any way connected to a book – doesn’t matter whether it’s a Harry Potter get up or Mephisto from Faust - you get in for free. The crowds might have been the reason why Ingrid Betancourt was fifteen minutes late for her first panel, which was with one of our big networks, reporting live from the book fair. She made up for it with a low key entrance and being very patient with the tv journalist’s bad French. I mean, I’m rusty, and my French never was better than what you learn in three school years without much practice afterwards, and I still noticed some glaring mistakes, especially when he translated her answers back to the audience. (Why the ARD, which is our BBC, couldn’t spring the money for a simultanous translator is beyondme anyway.) You could tell who spoke French and who didn’t by their reaction.
This was one of two Betancourt panels I attended, and comparing the two – the other one was organized by the weekly magazine Die Zeit, and had a female reporter interviewing her , in English this time – was interesting in itself. Both commented on the terrible duress she was under as a hostage, obviously, but the ARD guy then asked about the other hostages, whereas the Zeit woman asked about the guards and the FARC people in general. I thought Ingrid Betancourt’s reply to the question about the other hostages was extremely smart (and showcased she used to be a politician), because she was all mild benevolence instead of counter accusations (which she raised in her book), declaring that the horrible imprisonment, having to live in close quarters with people you hadn’t chosen to live with, plus the FARC deliberately playing out the hostages against each other to diminish the likelihood of escape attempts „brought out the worst in everyone“, but that she prefered to remember the other times, when the others‘ heroism and compassion shone, as compassion is what makes us human. After this statement, it was impossible to bring up anything negative without looking callous. I was impressed.
In both panels, she said that the most important method to maintain your human dignity and your identity beyond mere survival was not to fall into the trap of accepting you deserve what happens to you, which unrelenting verbal abuse and being utterly dependent on your captors for everything can make possible. So remembering that no, this is wrong, they don’t have the right to do this to me is both hard at times and essential.
In the Zeit panel, she said that while the guards changed every few months – plus the hostages were also moved from camp to camp – she noticed a pattern which proved to be true for basically all of them, which was that they started out treating the hostages not badly, sometimes even kindly, and then worse and worse as the weeks turned into months. This she attributed to group pressure, the need to prove yourself to the group as tough, but also on the increasing headtrip the awareness of power over other human beings produced. These young people (since they were for the most part young) were themselves low in the hierarchy, but then realized there were others they could do nearly anything at all towards, who had to obey them. She said she believes, still believes, that human beings are good, and that if her own children were living in circumstances like those of the guerillos and brainwashed the same way, they would have been capable of the same cruelty; conversely, that there was the potential for goodness in the guerillos, if they’d been raised and living differently. That it wasn’t easy to keep in mind, to see them as human, too, but that this as well was essential for maintaining her own humanity. This was when she impressed me most, in a quite different way than her reply re: the negative impressions the other hostages give of her.
The physical: she has a precise speaking voice both in French and English, and looks younger in person than she does on the photographs I’ve seen on her – younger than on my photographs as well, but here you go:
Book wise, I checked out Tony Blair’s memoirs since I have no intention of buying them. Those excerpts quoted in papers before are just a glimpse at the crush on both American presidents, though when Bill is revealed to be cheating on
I also browsed through a novel about Mary Lincoln, about whom I only knew previously that she was married to Lincoln and ended up up insane. This novel, otoh, has the premise that she was compos mentis and that it was her son Robert who had her declared insane because that was convenient to him. I was sceptical until I checked the afterword and there the author says that Mary was indeed (as in the novel) released from the asylum and spend the last year of her life with her sister, refusing to see her son until the very end. Which makes the theory somewhat more plausible. The excerpts I read sound intriguing; if I see the novel again in a bookstore I’ll investigate further.
Sunday , the last day of the book fair, is also the day the peace prize of the German book trade is awarded. This year the recipient was Israeli novelist David Grossman, and the laudatory speech was given by Joachim Gauck, quondam East German dissident, and just recently not elected as President, to the regret of many. (More about that in a moment. Also, non-Germans, remember that our chancellors are the heads of goverment and the presidents are the heads of state. German presidents don't have much real political power, they represent, though depending on the president their moral authority can be considerable.) Both speeches were outstanding, and the introductions – by Honnefelder and Petra Roth, the mayor of Frankfurt – were very good as well.
The taxi driver who brought me to the Paulskirche where the ceremony takes place was an Afghan who currently learns about German history and thus as soon as he heard about my destination rambled about the 1848 revolution, the first parliament and first constitution. It reminds him of Aghanistan’s current struggles, he said. (I hope not, because the constitution was never put into effect and what followed were monarchists and conservatives winning the day and restauration everywhere, eventually ending up in the empire.) The Paulskirche being one of our big „what ifs“ in history, I always feel wistful when I see it. This time I brought my camera along, so you can see it as well:
Inside, where the ceremony takes place and where that doomed first German parliament attempted to create a constitution:
Petra Roth, mayor of Frankfurt, who in not so good years can always be relied upon because her speeches are always intelligent; this year, when the two main speeches were fantastic, she was a good warming up act:
Joachim Gauck as the main speaker was an inspired choice, because if you think about it, a German talking about a Jewish author’s work which specifically centres around the Israeli/Palestinian conflict is a potential minefield. The potential for fail, as the expression goes, is enormous. However, Joachim Gauck mastered the challenge. Aside from making believable a genuine love for David Grossman’s work, he also found the right words for the foundation of Israel, the current situation, the large scale and personal tragedies. A passage (my own translation; believe me, it sounds better in German:
„We all need an US to belong to – a family, a place, a language, culture, religion, nation, a state, something we connect to and which gives us security, the more security the less endangered it is. This „Us“ is something we remain attached to, no matter whether we deny it, push it away or quantify it, but every individual is in one way or the other connected towards an Us. Sometimes the wishes of the individual go in tandem with the wishes and desires of this Us, this We. „We are the people“ we called in 1989 in the streets, and we managed to bring down the old system, to achieve freedom and reunite Germany. But freedom came first, which should not be forgotten. Fate was kind to us twenty years ago. We could and were peaceful, not least because we were surrounded by peaceful neigbours.
When the state of Israel was founded, conditions were very different. „We waited for 2000 years for this hour“, David Ben-Gurion said in his speech of May 14th 1948, and now it happened.“ But the finally realised Zionist dream was threatened from day 1 by the Arab neigbours, and it collided with the wish of the Palestinians for their own independence. It was a tragedy in the making from the start.“
He spoke about the intricacies of loyalty, of how love, loyalty and critique do not contradict but compliment each other, and how hard it is to practice what is so easily said. David Grossman lost his son Uri in the second Libanon war; he was mid-writing the novel which was one of the main reasons for the award, “A woman flees from a note” (well, that’s the German title, I don’t know what the English or Hebrew one is), about a mother who thinks she can protect her son, keep him alive by talking about him, and then by escaping the likely news of his death (if she’s not there to hear it, it will not be real). Grossman went back to finishing the novel and did not fall into hate. Gauck first brought up that well known quote – “right or wrong, my country” and then said that the full quote actually goes like this “right or wrong, my country. If right – to be kept right; and if wrong – to be set right”, and what a difference that makes. Love as complete and critical at the same time, never more difficult than in a nation at war and genuinenly threatened, never more essential. The conclusion of Joachim Gack’s speech: “Thank you, David. You stand in front of your Goliath, the every day hatred – but not even with a slingshot anymore. But you are David.”
Joachim Gauck:
David Grossman held his speech in English, which meant I didn’t have to read the translation from the original Hebrew which was handed out to the audience, though I use it now for checking references. Some of the most striking passages started with his statement that if he’s asked about his wishes for the Israeli/Palestinian conflict, and if beyond the obvious reply – i.e. genuine peace – he’s asked “but since this is not likely to happen any time soon, what do you wish for now and for the near future”, he would say: ”I would like to learn to confront the horror, the injustice which this conflict produces every day both on a large and on a small scale as much as possible. Not to close myself off, not to protect myself; not to stop being hurt by it. To be in a conflict like this a human being – “ and here he then added a word which is both German and Jiddish into his English speech – “a Mensch in the full sense of the word – means to watch, to see, to keep my eyes open, all the time, as good as I can. I don’t always have the strength for this, but I know I need to insist to at least know what’s being done in my name. I have to see these things, to respond to them, to tell others and myself how I feel about them. I have to name them, with my own words, and can’t allow myself to be seduced by words and phrases which the goverment, the army or my own fears, or my enemy want to dictate to me. And what is sometimes most difficult: never forget. The one who confronts me, my enemy, who hates me and sees me as a threat to his life, is another human being; with his family and his children, his own ideas of justice, his own hopes, desperation and fears, his own blind spots.”
Peace, in his definition, also means borders. He points out that Israel, even after 62 years, does not have constant ones but ever shifting ones, and what effect this has. “If you do not have clear borders you resemble a man in whose house the walls are constantly moving, who does not feel firm ground under his feet. A man without a true home. Despite its immense military strength Israel still has not managed to give its citizens this every day feeling which a human being has who lives in safety in his country. (...) Israel was founded to provide a home for the Jewish people. This was the great vision which led to the creation of the state of Israel. But as long as there is no peace and no recognized and accepted borders, we Israelis will never have the home we deserve and which we need, and will not feel at home in the world.”
He talked about writing as the quintessential process to see and understand the other. “When I write a story, I struggle, sometimes for years, to understand all aspects of a human being, to be these characters. To understand the other from their own perspective. The way a writer listens with all his senses to the emotions of the characters he or she creates has something maternal. Being able to dedicate yourself to the character you’re writing, you forget to protect yourself. Perhaps this is what literature can do for people at war, for everyone living in exile, among strangers, discriminated against or in poverty; threatened by the feeing that his self will be permanently erased. Literature can return to us, all of us, our human face.”
When he spoke of his son, the pain, to me at least, was viscerating. And then the description of returninig to writing, to feel that sense of creating reawaken, despite all. To him, it also meant to stop being a victim (of fate, circumstance, whatever). “There are situations where the only freedom left is the freedom to describe: the freedom to choose your own words to describe fate given to you. And sometimes this can be the way to escape your victimhood. This is true for individuals, but also for communities and for people. My wish is that my own country, Israel, will find the strength to write its history anew. That it will learn to confront its history and its tragedy in a new way and to create itself anew. That we will find the strength in our souls to divide the genuine dangers waiting for us from the echo of the past horror and tragedy. To stop being victims, not of our enemies and not of our own fears. To finally come home.”
David Grossman:
And receiving the award:
Like every year, there was a celebratory lunch afterwards, at the Frankfurter Hof. Now, there were a lot of dignitaries present. Including former presidents:
And the current president, Christian Wulff. This might even have been the first event both he and Joachim Gauck spoke at since the elections, because while Wulff did not speak in the Paulskirche, he did make a toast during lunch. While not in the same league as Gauck’s, his was a good, amiable and admiring speech... right until the end. When he finished with: “And thus, once again, congratulations, Mr. Goldman.”
...the entire room went facepalming. I certainly did. But not before immortalizing the reactions of David Grossman and Petra Roth, who sat next to him:
And thus I conclude my tale of book fairs, publishers, writers and politicians, gentle readers. Now to unpack my luggage! But have one last look at the Argentina presentation:
