Back in Munich as of last night, and somewhat damaged, as I caught what's referred to as "The Book Fair cold", i.e. the inevitable result of spending a week in circulated air with millions of people. But never mind that - it was a thoroughly busy and splendid fair for me, with the Book Trade Peace Award yesterday given to Svetlana Alexejivich meaning it went out on a high note. I must confess I hadn't read anything of hers before, but I most certainly will now.

Svetlana Alexijevich, who is from Belarus, had a few scholarships abroad but always went back home and still lives there, despite the fact that she's no longer allowed to be published there, having run foul of the Belarus dictator. Her three most famous works, all non-fiction novels a la In Cold Blood, are (and I'm using the German titles translated into English here, so maybe the English titles are different) : "War has no female face" which dealt with the then completely unexplored part Soviet women played during WWII (this brought her the accusation of maligning the Great Patriotic War, and it couldn't get published until the onset of Perestroika in 1985), "Boys in Tin" about the Russian/Afghan war and specifically the soldiers coming back to a Soviet Union which no longer existed, having fought in a deeply unpopular war, and being thoroughly damaged, often suicidal. When there were quotes from this book in the speeches I was struck by how you could change "Russian" for "American" and "socialism" for "democracy" and have the exact same passage written today: "Kabul 1988. An Afghan hospital. A young Afghan woman, her child in her arms. I approach her and give the child a teddy bear. It takes it with its teeth. "Why does he take the teddy with his teeth?" I ask. The Afghan woman drops the thin cover in which she had wrapped her child, and I look at a small torso without any arms or legs. "That's what you Russians did."
"She doesn't understand," the Sovjet captain standing next to me says, "we brought them socialism."
"Go home and practice socialism there. Why did you come here?" says an old Afghan man who is missing a leg. (...) Then I am in a canteen. Troubled faces of our boys, who don't understand for what they're dying here. They reply angrily to me: Shoot or be shot, such questions as yours have to wait until after the war. If you shoot, you kill first; if you don't shoot, you get killed. All want to get home to their mothers. Some were made drunk with vodka, put in a plane, and in the same night they arried in Kabul. They cried, screamed, attacked the officers. Two committed suicide. They hung themselves in the restroom. Others volunteered. Children of village teachers, of doctors - they were educated to trust in their country... they will return home within a year, and the country which sent them out to kill will no longer exist."

This book brought her a lot of lawsuits for "slander of the Sovjet army", and more were to come when she wrote the definite book on Chernobyl, "Chernobyl: Chronicle of the Future": "The firemen who fought the fire during the first night all died. A nuclear reactor, and they were called as if to a normal fire; they were not given any protective suits. They each got radiactive poisoning over hundred times the lethal limit. The doctors did not let their wives to them. (...) In a thirty kilometres radius around the plant, thousands of people left their homes - forever. Early on nobody would believe that. Buses full of people and a quietness as if in a cemetery. Around the buses there were a lot of pets - dogs, cats. The pets were left. The humans didn't dare to look at them. 'The birds in the skies, the animals in the woods - we all betrayed them. Our beloved dog Sharik we left a note; 'Forgive us, Sharik.'"

These are all quotes from Svetlana Alexejevich's acceptance speech, and which, like the laudatory speech by Karl Schlögel, was full of such vivid detail going right under the skin. One of the most remarkable things about her: that all these interviews did not make her into a cynic or nihilist, on the contrary. That she still believes in reaching humans when she transcribes their voices.

Something else: usually the Book Trade Peace Award is given in the presence of the President. Only twice it wasn't, and today was the third time, which was why a few demonstrators were outside holding up pictures of Joachim Gauck saying "where are you?". Speculation from the guests was that yes, this was for political reasons. Instead of him, our equivalent of the Mr. Speaker in Parliament come, Norbert Lammert (ranking of German offices: President - who hasn't got political powers but represents the republic -, Chancellor, Mr. or Ms Speaker), and at the celebratory lunch afterwards, he thanked Svetlana Alexejevich for "exposing the so called lupenreine Demokraten as the autocrats and dictators they are". This was a pointed allusion to a phrase former Chancellor Gerhard Schröder had used when palling around with Vladimir Putin, whom he described as a "lupenreiner Demokrat" ("a democrat even if you use a microscope to look at him"), which is remembered as particularly shameful not just because, well, Putin, but because Schröder immediately after his tenure as Chancellor ended went to work for Gazprom, the Russian oil-and-gas giant.

Earlier during the Book Fair, I had chatted with Gert and Gisela Heidenreich, both writers, and she told me that back when Schröder said this she left the party (i.e. the SPD) even though she still considers herself a social democrat in her politics. Almost as depressing, they both said, is what's going on with the US right now; one of the oldest ongoing democracies self destructing, inwardly because of the crazy Tea Party nutters and outwardly because of the paranoia and disregard of anyone else's rights. After what happened to Ilja Trojanov, Gert Heidenreich was wondering whether he'll be refused entry the next time he has to attend a conference in the US as well, given he wrote as critical things as Trojanov did. And Guantanomo continues while nobody cares. He had another thing on his mind: during the last two years, he'd worked with director Edgar Reitz on the later's project Die andere Heimat, "The other Heimat" (we had a lengthy discussion of how Heimat is an untranslatable German term because it really is not at all the same as Fatherland/Vaterland), which had its premiere during the last weeks to raving reviews. Now Gert Heidenreich developed the story with Edgar Reitz, wrote a novella on which they then based the script, and is duly noted as co scriptwriter in the credits. During the first two showings of the movie, they were both attending. And then the glowing reviews started to drop in, and suddenly Edgar Reitz, who was also coming to the Book Fair, decided that all future appearances were to be of him alone, and wrote an email to Heidenreich's publisher accusing the later of "trying to cash in to my success" by promoting the novella which was published simultanously with the film release. This was bewildering the nth degree to Mr. Heidenreich because he'd thought they were friends (plus, of course, it had been their shared project from the start); at a guess, it might be because Edgar Reitz wants critics to see Die andere Heimat as the crowning of his autobiographical oeuvre (his tv series "Heimat" years ago became a modern classic), and sharing credit is inconvenient to the lonely auteur theory. Still, it's a shame and conduct unbecoming.

Books I browsed through which I want to read at a later point: Jung Changs new biography of the Empress Dowager Cixi, in which she reclaims her from evil caricatureness; Pat Conroy's "The Death of Santini", in which he dispenses with the fictional guises and writes straight autobiography about his dysfunctional family & himself. I had met Pat Conroy many years ago, and he'd been funny, moving and very kind to a shy young woman, i.e. yours truly, which I never forgot. Of his novels, I have some I love ("The Prince of Tides") and some I like ("Lords of Discipline"), and only one which I thought was a mess ("Beach Music"). He does get repetitive if you read all the books, true, but the majority of them still left a profound impression on me, and a first look at this new book, which is far slimmer than the weighty and messy "Beach music", left me with the impression he was back to form. Mind you, it also left me thinking once again that most fannish hurt/comfort dark fics have nothing on the Conroy home life, but, like Svetlana Alexjevich, he tries to give written form to the traumatic horrors that happened and by that reaches people. Which is what so many of us try and not that many manage.

Mind you, it'll be a while until I can get to those books, probably not until Christmas. Meanwhile, there is tv to catch up, and the book fair cold to cure. Till later!