2023-10-21 11:15:38
The major international publishers have their exhibition stands in Hall 5: Harper Collins, Hachette, Gallimard, Farrar, Straus & Giroux. It always feels like a short visit to London, Paris or New York. This year there is a poem in the middle of it all: “The Diameter of the Bomb”.
It was written by the Israeli writer Yehuda Amichai and Ted Hughes translated it into English. Amichai, who was born as a German Jew in Würzburg in 1924, fled the Nazis and emigrated to Jerusalem in 1936, where he died in 2000, is considered one of Israel’s most important modern poets. The poem “The Diameter of the Bomb” is from 1976. It describes the effects a bomb has far beyond the explosion and the actual attack, how it remains, in consciousness, in the world. The poem hangs, printed in large white letters on a blue wall, at the stand of the Israel Institute of Hebrew Literature. It is empty, as if abandoned.
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If you go further, to the other side of the hall, at the La Fabrique publishing house, above books on Foucault, Marx and feminist theory of violence, as quickly printed out, there are three DIN A 4 sheets of paper: “In solidarity with Adiana Shibli” is written on one, on the next “Palestinians won’t be silenced”, next to it “Publishers against Genocide”. When asked, a young publishing employee says that they show solidarity with the Palestinian writer Adiana Shibli, that she was “cancelled” from the book fair, just as Palestinian voices are being “silenced” these days.
These words, which fall like catchphrases, “Shibli”, “cancel” and “solidarity” summarize what was discussed almost around the clock at the Frankfurt Book Fair this year, even if posters like these were only occasionally seen at the exhibition stands were to see: What does freedom of speech mean today in view of the horrors of Hamas?
Even before the opening of the book fair, there had been a dispute over the awarding of a literary prize: the organizer Litprom had decided to award a literary prize that is awarded annually to authors of translated literature from Africa, Asia, Latin America and the Arab world and that now goes to the Palestinian woman born in 1974 Author and essayist Adiana Shibli is not allowed to lend at the fair. “Due to the war started by Hamas, from which millions of people in Israel and Palestine are suffering,” the organizers said in a statement, it was decided to hold the awards ceremony at a later date. The awarding of the prize to Shibli was never in question; the allegations against Shibli, which is said to support the BDS movement, were “baseless”.
Several hundred writers protested against the decision in an open letter, including Nobel Prize winners Annie Ernaux, Olga Tokarczuk and Abdulrazak Gurnah. Some critics saw anti-Semitic clichés at work in Shibli’s novel “A Minor Matter”, which literalises the real rape and killing of a Palestinian girl by the Israeli army in 1949 and its effects on the present, while others saw the justified portrayal of the experienced reality of a Palestinian woman who criticize Israeli occupation policy. The fact that Hamas slaughtered civilians on October 7th at the location of the novel’s plot, today’s Kibbutz Nirim, was a “tragic coincidence,” said PEN Berlin, which strongly opposed the postponement of the award ceremony to Shibli pronounced. But these days, how much does the assessment of a text depend on its context?
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The Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek also imposed a kind of “analysis ban” at the opening, who ensured that the book fair was not opened with dry, well-meaning words about the power of books in the “Harmony” room, but with a real scandal. He condemns the attack by Hamas, Žižek began, but he observes that anyone who tries to analyze the complex background of the situation of the conflict is immediately suspected of supporting or justifying Hamas’ terrorism – which society does this fit into Ban on analysis? Karin Schmidt-Friedrichs, head of the German Book Trade Association, concluded the event with the sentence: “I am opening the 75th Frankfurt Book Fair by rejecting the word ‘but’.” She was referring to the well-known “but”. It was also echoed by Žižek, which is suitable for relativizing a statement.
What followed were days in which a “but” was discussed, but not a relativizing one. The German-Israeli Meron Mendel, who distanced himself from Žižek at several events, emphasized that the conflict could only be contextualized when there was no limiting “but” – why should Jews fight for the slaughter of Jews as such? be seen?
What happened on October 7th must stand on its own. Only then can we talk about further connections, including the failings of Israeli politics. The German-Israeli writer Tomer Dotan-Dreyfus formulated the basic idea: Until now, as a Jew, you knew that if things got “bad” in Berlin, London or Paris, you would be safe in Israel and could go there – this certainty is over. All Israel-themed events took place under security precautions.
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At times it was like an almost unbearable double reality, in which there were quiet, respectful debates on the exhibition grounds, while images of pro-Palestine demonstrations flashed through your feed on Twitter, of young Germans who called “Palestine” free of “German guilt”. wanted to see and by police officers who had to protect the Holocaust memorial in Berlin.
There were no relativizations of terror to be seen at the book fair; In contrast to the international art scene, terror does not seem to have been idealized anywhere as an expression of aesthetic radicalism. Is this a sign that the world of literature is still one that is conscious of differentiation and context? In any case, the book fair itself said right from the start that they felt for victims on both sides – but that they were “firmly on Israel’s side”.
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