Frankfurt Book Fair: Adania Shibli – A scandal that the fair doesn’t need

2023-10-12 15:15:56

Opinion Literature Prize

A scandal that the book fair doesn’t need

As of: 3:15 p.m. | Reading time: 2 minutes

Mara Delius, editor of the “Literarische Welt”

Source: Martin UK Lengemann/WELT

A Palestinian author is to be awarded a prize at the Frankfurt Book Fair – for a novel that uses anti-Semitic clichés. Why that would be an impossible signal.

How does the Frankfurt Book Fair position itself politically? In recent years, this has been a recurring theme when persecuted authors were guests or when it was discussed whether new right-wing publishers should be allowed to exhibit their programs. The director of the book fair, Juergen Boos, rightly always emphasized on these occasions that freedom of expression was constitutive of the essence of the event: “We are not just a trade fair, but we are convinced that we are passionate about the freedom of the word have to enter”.

Torsten Casimir, spokesman for the book fair, emphasized a few weeks ago that the fair is also a “democracy fair” and that the presence of this year’s peace prize winner Salman Rushdie once again gives the topic of freedom of expression a special “international visibility”.

also read

However, in view of Hamas’ terror against Israeli civilians, the question of the book fair’s neutral position arises again. When asked by the “Literary World”, the book fair stated: “We detest Hamas’ terror against Israel. Our condolences go out to the dead and the people whose relatives were victims of this excess of violence. We condemn the terror against Israel, and we condemn those who finance this terror and thereby make it possible.” The German Book Trade Association reacted similarly: “We deeply condemn Hamas’s terrorist attack on Israel.”

At the world’s largest book fair, which begins next week, there will be many events dealing with the war – which of them will take place or perhaps be canceled at short notice remains to be seen. What is certain is that the “LiBeraturpreis 2023” award goes to the Palestinian writer and essayist Adania Shibli is highly controversial. Shibli is to be awarded the 3,000 euro prize for her novel “A Minor Matter” (Berenberg Verlag), which goes to authors of translated literature from Africa, Asia, Latin America and the Arab world. There had already been protests beforehand. The novel, which is about the rape of a Bedouin girl by Israeli soldiers in 1949, deals with anti-Semitic clichés. One jury member left the jury in protest in the summer. The writer Maxim Biller criticized the book as an “unliterary piece of propaganda”.

“A Minor Matter” was also nominated for the National Book Award and the International Booker Prize. To award the prize at the book fair, barely two weeks after the worst massacre since the Holocaust, would not be a sign of cosmopolitan freedom of expression, but rather of German tactlessness.