We have two book fairs in Germany, one in autumn in Frankfurt and one in spring in Leipzig; I'm currently at the second one, which is why it'll take me a while to catch up with fannish tv etc. However, I spotted the TARDIS herself as well as Kili and Fili at the book fair, not to mention I heard world famous cinematographer Michael Ballhaus dish about Scorsese, Fassbinder, Jack Nicholson and Joe Pesci. More, with pictorial proof and illustration, under the cut to protect your innocent eyes.

( Leipzig Book Fair in Sci Fi Technicolour )

Word to the wise: do by all means book a seat instead of just buying a ticket without reservation if you're travelling by train from Frankfurt to Munich. I did, and was very glad about it, as the train is currently crowded like hell with people standing in the aisles.

Which makes it look quite like the book fair itself on the weekend. I don't actually look much for books during the last two days of the fair, the public days, because it's that packed with people. Sometimes you can hardly move. So the weekend is when you meet friends at the fair, go to readings and debates, and wish other people good luck when they try to actually glimpse into a book or two.

One of the book presentations I attended was of a non-fiction book I had read some time ago, Rüdiger Safranski's book about Goethe & Schiller. One question he got was to account for the paradox of Schiller being the more socially progressive of the two (poet of freedom, some of the most famous speeches in German dramatic history, etc.) yet married into the nobility, whereas Goethe was the more conservative yet openly lived with and ultimately married a working-class woman, Christiane Vulpius, who was horribly snubbed by Schiller. (Goethe in his letters to Schiller always includes regards to the wife. Schiller in all his letters to Goethe never once mentions Christiane, not even in thank-you-I-had-a-great-time letters when he had been staying for two weeks in Goethe's house where she would have been his hostess.) Safranski not being wise to the ways of fandom did not bother to bring up the slash explanation but boringly and truthfully pointed out Schiller's wife was the goddaughter of Goethe's ex, the Baroness von Stein who was Christiane's number 1 enemy in Weimar and responsible for most of Weimar society cutting her for near two decades until Johanna Schopenhauer finally offered her a cup of tea. But! he added, suddenly going out of his professor of literature mode and into lighting up in happy fanboy mode instead, he had found a reference in one of Christiane's letters to Goethe from when she was on holidays and happened to be in the same Kurbad where Schiller had gone about two years before his death, and in that letter Christiane writes Schiller not only said hello but offered to row her over the lake in one of the little boats available for the guests, and then did so. "I was so happy when I found that," declared Mr. Safranski. "It was my balm of comfort." ("Mein Trostpflaster.") "I just couldn't stand the idea of Schiller having been horrible to Christiane till the end."

Moving on to the 21st century, Saturday was also when I listened to a presentation by three dissident Chinese writers, all three of whom are living in exile in other countries, and whose number included Bai Ling, one of the two writers whose invite/disinvite/invite caused such uproar and shameful embarassment in September. The others were a co-founder of the independent Chinese PEN and another writer; unfortunately, I have the programm in my suitcase, and I'm sitting in the train right now, so I can't look their names up. Not-the-PEN-founder seems to be a member of the Falun Gong, as he brought up not once but twice that they are the most persecuted of Chinese religions as they are "the most purely Chinese". (I have sympathy for anyone persecuted for their religion, but this singling out and unconditional praise of the Falun Gong made me distrustful of them instead, I have to admit.) All three are writing for an exile Chinese newspaper, The Epoch Times, and had a lot to say about how growing up with the system stays with you even once you've turned against it because of the words, the phrases you use. One of the writers, referencing the Cultural Revolution from the 60s but talking about the decades before and after as well, used an image that stuck with me: "Chinese culture," he said, "is like a beautifully coloured glass. It got smashed irrevocably. Now all we're left with are glass splinters. What the party does is put these splinters into a kalaidoscope, like the ones we use at children, and the image you look at is beautiful, too, in its own way, but it distorts and changes every time you want it to, and nothing is ever fixed." Switching from Chinese - which got translated (the translators were so the unsung heroes of this fair, always having to do three languages - Chinese, German and English) - into German for one sentence, Bai Ling interjected "Die Partei hat immer recht" and said that to understand the China of today we - the German audience, that is - should just think of the GDR, not of Chinese history.

All these speeches on part of the exile writers were very heartfelt and moving, but you know, there was one problem: they were basically preaching to the converted. There were Chinese attendants as well as German ones - actually the room was pretty packed, with all age groups represented - but the Chinese all seemed to be locals from Frankfurt. None from the Chinese delegation. And I don't think the German audience was labouring under the delusion that China is anything but a dictatorship, either. So attention was paid, but not from the people who would have been able to do something with these words.

Saturday evening I met a friend of shezan's, but arrived a bit early at his hotel and thus was sitting in the lobby for a while. Whereupon one businessman type sauntered towards me, looked me up and down in my Saturday outfit (because the fair is so crowded on Saturdays and Sundays, it's wise to wear the lightest things you can get away with instead of the trousers and jackets you wear for the rest of the weak, so in my case I was wearing a short knitted purple dress) and enquired: "Are you free?"

Note to self: now you can say you've been mistaken for a hooker at the Frankfurt Book Fair in your memoirs.

Today was mostly about the Friedenspreis, the peace award of the German book trade handed over in the Paulskirche. This year's recipient was Italian essayist, journalist and novelist Claudio Magris. The laudatory speech returned time and again to Magris' hometown Trieste as a symbol of European strife, European multiculturalism and European unity. Magris' own speech, which was riveting, managed to address patterns and injustices in past and present alike, starting with Italy once having exported fascism and now and more recently populism, that deadening of democracies. (Insert open loathing of Berlusconi here.) He pointed out that we did and do have a war after WWII in Europe, one we're in denial about and which involves organ trade, the camps for refuges, the way they're treated and often sent back, all the dead of illegal immigration and that wasn't counting Bosnia and currently our involvement in Afghanistan. Listening, I decided I needed to read one of his books now; this was a man who knew how to engage his audience on both an emotional and intellectual level.

Also present was nobel prize winner Herta Müller, which later at the celebratory lunch led to Gottfriend Honnefelder (remember, the head of the booktrade association) telling everyone that he had wanted to congratulate her in his own speech at the Paulskirche (there are always four: one by Honnefelder, one by the mayor of Frankfurt, one laudatory speech and one acceptance speech) but she had asked him not to, as this was Claudio Magris' big moment, but now we could congratulate her, yes? So everyone got up and cheered and toasted. Mind you, I bet most of the people present, including yours truly, hadn't read Müller's work, but never mind.

"So," said a lady at my table, "why do you think the Bildzeitung didn't have a headline saying "We won the Nobel prize"?
(Footnote: Bild is our biggest yellow press paper and prone to such embarassing headlines as "We are Pope" - back when Joseph Ratzinger was elected.)
Replied an ex Mr. Speaker of our parliament: "Because the Americans got there first?"

On that note, once I'm back in Munich, I must read all the delicious fanfic I saw tantalizingly referred to by other people on my list, as well as watch The Sarah Jane Adventures. And then I'll probably sleep like a stone. But truly, I would not miss the Frankfurt Book Fair for the world.

Update on the Book Fair Fail: the Frankfurt Book Fair proper doesn't start until next month - it's always an October event - but the advance symbosium (theme: "China and the world"), the debate to which two dissident authors (also originally planned as guests for the book fair itself) were first invited, then disinvited upon Chinese pressure, then invited again by PEN Germany took place this weekend, and PEN not only brought the two authors but gave them the time for two speeches as well. (Also, the mayor of Frankfurt, Petra Roth, had the opening speech in which she blasted the Book Fair organization for its lack of spine.) This was when two thirds of the official Chinese delegation left the room, including the former Chinese ambassador. Then current Book Fair director Jürgen Boos (aka the guy who had given in to pressure and disinvited the dissident authors) went after the Chinese and apologized. Whereupon the Chinese returned and declared they did not come here to be insulted by "lectures about democracy", and that the two dissidents could stay but were in no way speaking for the Chinese. Bei Ling, one of the two dissident authors, said the attitude was dissapointing and that there was not just one Chinese voice but many. More, in German, here. Net result: everyone, Chinese, dissidents and public alike, is pissed off at Boos. I can't say I pity him; I'm still too angry.

Something to do if one is angry: listen to Brecht, Weill, any combinaton or solo thereof, preferably interpreted by Lotte Lenya. I've recently aquired the 1930/31 film version of the Three Penny Opera. It's a weird hybrid, very early sound movie by Pabst, with long sequences evidently filmed as if for a silent film (for example Mack the Knife meeting Polly, or the big crowd scene wherein the beggars disrupt the coronation parade and confront the queen), and he doesn't use the new medium of sound for more than dialogue and of course the songs, with no background noises. Very eerie, and a contrast to Fritz Lang's near simultanous movies which use the possiblities of sound as part of the storytelling already - just think of how crucial whistling is for M - Eine Stadt sucht einen Mörder. However, this film features several of the original cast, among them Lotte Lenya as Jenny, plus Pabst was a good director, so it's still worth viewing. As for Lenya, she's one of those singers whose voice isn't beautiful - anything but - but it suits the material so well, and you can still sense her charisma, that later interpretations pale. So, here she is, the original Pirate Jenny (subtitled in English for non-German speakers):



More Brecht and Weill, because I'm still feeling cynical and angry. This is from the Brecht tribute staged in Rio de Janiero. Servio Tullio sings Das Lied von der menschlichen Unzulänglichkeit:



Back to Lenya, with the one song that should be familiar even if you haven't heard anything else from either Bert Brecht or Kurt Weill - Mack the Knife:

The Book Fair ended, as it always does, with a last highlight, the awarding of the Peace Prize of the German Book Trade in the Paulskirche, i.e. the church where we had that brief, aborted experiment with democracy in 1848, the year of failed hopes and failed revolutions in which a first parliamentary German constitution was drafted and promptly crushed. We got the second empire instead. So 1848 is one of the big what ifs in German history, and I always thought it was very fitting that the ceremony should take place there.

This year's recipient was Saul Friedländer, for his epic history of the Shoah. As was said in the ceremony: "Friedländer is one of the last historiographers to have witnessed and experienced the Holocaust - a genocide that was announced early on, planned openly, and carried out with machine-like precision. Friedlänger rejects the distanced approach often associated with the writing of history: he creates a space for incomprehensibility - the only possible reaction to such an unfathomable crime." He survived through being hidden away at a Catholic French school while his parents both died at Auschwitz. As did many other family members. So you can imagine Saul Friedländer accepting the award, coming here, was by no means taken for granted, especially since a couple of years ago, one of our more famous writers, Martin Walser, had created a big scandal in the very same church with the very same award when he held an infamous speech about how he was sick of hearing about the holocaust. There had been speculation ahead of time whether or not Saul Friedländer would mention this in his acceptance speech. He didn't; what he did instead was so poignant and so devastating. He didn't give a conventional speech at all. Instead, after making a joke about his French accent when speaking German, he read from letters written by his parents and those other dead family members, during the last years of their lives, going to France, trying for Switzerland, being sent back to France, always trying not to lose hope, the last letter written in that train going east and given the a Quaker woman at a railway station, thrown out of the window. I started to cry early on, and later once it was over and you could see the rest of the audience again it was obvious so had many of the others. There was no other response possible, I think. When I visited the house where Anne Frank and her family were hidden in Amsterdam, I had a bit of a similar experience when reading, in the exhibition, the letter of Otto Frank to one of his surviving siblings directly after the war was over and he was found in a camp, so fervently hoping that his children and wife were still alive. And you knew they weren't, just as you knew, listening to Saul Friedländer reading those letters, that all of them would be murdered. In the laudatory speech preceding Friedländer's, Wolfgang Frühwaldt - who is one of our most eminent professors for literature - closed with: "A prayer of praise for the creator of the sky and the earth, a Kaddish can also be said by children for their parents. (...) As I see it, Saul Friedländer's life's work is a type of Kaddish for his parents."

After the ceremony, we wandered over to the Frankfurter Hof where the reception was held. This being one where both the current and the former president of Germany attended, there was lots of security, but one got inside surprisingly smoothly. As it happened, I sat next to Friedländer's editor, and on my other side was someone I had encountered the year before, too, a judge from our supreme court. We were all still reeling from hearing the letters - in German, as they had been written, and in the voice of the son, and there is that ambiguity you encounter, the language of the victims is the language of the murderers and vice versa, and if you're German you always wonder at first whether you should use the language at all when talking to someone who lost so much - but after a while, a conversation started that consisted of more than "no matter how well one learns at school, it's different when -" "-Yes, it is". Said conversation turned to the supreme court decision mentioned in my last post. As it turned out, the jugde on our table wasn't one of those who had been involved in this particular decision because he has a different field of expertise, and this meant he could talk to us about it. Opinions at the table were as divided as they had been in among the judges (three of which had been issuing a minority report). "The Mephisto precedent was so simple in comparison," the judge said. "For one thing, it was already regarded as a certified classic, for another, Gründgens was already dead when Peter Gorski (Gründgens' adopted son) sued. But this woman is young, she has many years ahead of her, which means many years for the novel to be forbidden as well."

The editor, who had actually read the novel as opposed to the rest of us (except the judge) before it had to be withdrawn said that in his opinion, in this case the right of the individual to privacy superceded the freedom of artistic expression and that the court had decided correctly. "Because," he said, "Biller made the character so easily identifiable that you could find her address. Everyone who has read the book. Never mind artistic merit, that's going too far."

One of the managers for Weltbild, a major German book club, asked whether maybe if the offending passages could have been cut... "She's the main character," the editor said. Which left us with the uneasy consensus that we sympathized with the woman more than with Biller but still were troubled by the problem of precedent in court-ordered withdrawal of novels.

After the reception, most of the dignitaries hurried off to their hotels to pack and go back to their respective cities of origin. I'm in Osnabrück tomorrow, so going back to Munich would be superfluos (wrong direction), which means another night in Frankfurt. This meant I could go to one more event of the book fair, Sigrid Damm's reading of her new Goethe-related book, out barely three weeks. Said book, titled "Goethe's last journey", uses said last journey he made with his grandsons as a framing narration and offers a Goethe portrait, which, considering Goethe has been written about more than any other German poet ever, somehow still managed to come across as vibrant and sensitive and not just repeating the various approaches thousands had made before. It's a meditation on aging and reconciling oneself to one's mortality, Sigrid Damm's as well as Goethe's, and in the excerpts she read, you got great descriptions of his interactions with his grandsons (she unearthed such things as the kind of sweets he ordered for them from his hometown, Frankfurt, complete with wry affectionate quote) and great analysis of poetry such as Über allen Wipfeln herrscht Ruh (which has been called the most perfect poem in the German language and just might be). It's a non-fiction book written better than many a novel, and I got my own copy at once.

The reading didn't take place at the fair but in the Goethehaus, where J.W.G. was born, and I used the opportunity to go through the exhibition again. (Last time was over a decade ago.) There is a new section dealing with Faust, precedents, aftermaths and all, and I was very amused that that Marlowe fellow still isn't mentioned. It's the big English/German divide, of course, and not helped by the fact that Marlowe, as opposed to Shakespeare, never found a good German translator, nor Goethe an English one. And this considering one scene in Faust starts with him trying to translate logos. Come to think of it, though, that one ends with Mephisto showing up. Maybe translators thought this was a bad precedent?

This year's Frankfurt Book Fair, so far: sparkling. Which is the thing about Frankfurt. Leipzig is more intimate, more cozy, and arguably the readings are far better organized, both for the authors and the public - but Frankfurt has the glitz and the sheer quantity. There are literaly more new books in one spot than anywhere else in the world, from nations everywhere in the world. It always feels like Gershwin song should be in the air.

This year's feud: is between our two major book clubs, Weltbild and Bertelsmann. Bertelsmann traditionally hosts the first big reception of the book fair on Tuesday night, and this year, Weltbild opened a new outlet in nearby Wiesbaden on the same evening, inviting all the VIPs, with the consequence that they were torn between going to the Bertelsmann reception and going to the Weltbild one. Bertelsmann rallied by snagging Penelope Cruz as a guest at the last second (with the pretext that she as optioned the film rights for the novel "The Indian Princess" - that's the German name anyway - which Bertelsmann publishes), but nonetheless, it was emptier, and now the daggers are out.

Interesting (to me) books: "Pazific Exil"´, for example, which everybody and their dog had asked me about back in Los Angeles, when I hadn't read it yet. Takes place among the exiled writers in the 40s and 50s, the brothers Mann, my guy Feuchtwanger, Brecht, and as a special musical guest star Arnold Schönberg. (Sidenote: in the novel, the author claims Schönberg's son Ronnie doesn't speak German. Said author was like yours truly once a scholar at the Villa Aurora but must have missed out being invited at the Schönbergs, because Ronnie S. so does speak German, too. Complete with Austrian slang.) The sections I read were captivating enough but I can see the point of one reviewer who complaint that all the voices, with the exception of Alma Mahler-Werfel, sound identical, whether they're supposed to be Thomas Mann or Marta Feuchtwanger.

A must: Selected Letters of Ted Hughes, published by Faber & Faber. Not every writer, let alone every poet, writes readable letters, but Hughes did, and he had such a broad spectrum of interests that you get detailed thoughts on anything from Euripides to fishing. Inevitably, the sections which will be read the most will be the ones dealing with his marriage to Sylvia Plath and its aftermath. The Plath-relevant letters are indeed fascinating, both because they're written without the benefit of hindsight and because they make clear what most if not all biographies can't get across, how fascinated and entranced Hughes was by Plath as a poet from the start. (This is not self-evident; he was arguably the more accomplished poet when they met, as this was before Sylvia's poetical break-through.) His descriptions of her in letters to his sister, brother and friends describe her as a poet first, and later when they are already a couple there are always passages about what she's working on. In the few letters to Plath herself which survive, we always get ideas discussed as well as the matters of the day, and books, always books.

(He also defends Sylvia as a poet to others; the last letter in which he does that, written shortly before it would become entirely unnecessary due to her elevation to icon, he writes, regarding a friend's criticism of "Lady Lazarus" and "Daddy" - both of which were broadcast on radio during Plath's life time but not published in book form yet - as poems rich on autobiographical drama but not on art, and I'm quoting by memory since I had to leave the book at the stand: "You're wrong. There is no poet alive who doesn't wish that he or she had written such poems. Her voice is entirely unique.")

Regarding Sylvia the person, the most interesting quote not already in the biographies is probably in a letter to his sister Olwyn in which he tries to explain Sylvia's defense mechanisms to her - I'll buy the letters and quote directly, because the passage shouldn't be bungled by paraphrasing. Also in a letter to Olwyn, written immediately after Plath's suicide years later, you get the self accusation Plath's biographers have been longing for, along the lines of: "She asked me for help, as she has so often done, I was the only one who could have helped her and I didn't." This immediate reaction to her suicide changed, of course, though you get the impression that for the rest of his life, his opinion on all of the factors which drove her and what his part in them was kept changing since he kept struggling with it. He does argue from the start against what what was for a time a dominating literary opinion, that the poetry written during Plath's last few months - the one which made her immortal, the Ariel poems - was also a contributing factor; on the contrary, he argues that writing those poems was healing for her. What he does see contributing to her final downward spiral was the publication of The Bell Jar followed by critical indifference and the fact the book brought her first suicide attempt back to her full force.

One of the most arresting and surprising descriptions: of a bull fight in Spain during their honeymoon, alluded to in the poem You hated Spain. Because it's basically the anti Hemingway take. Hughes the naturalist wasn't sentimental about animals and had killed his share of fish and rabbits from boyhood onwards, but he saw the bullfight as something entirely without grandeur or fairness, and the description he gives makes its case far better than many an article on the subject.

There is also the awareness of aging in the later letters, when he writes about suddenly realizing that World War I, which for him was something he connected with his own life on a very personal level because his father was a veteran and shell-shocked, was for most people around him now something like the Boer War or the Crimean War, a historical event from the books.

Definitely a volume I'll aquire once the book fair is over, and review more properly then...