“Freedom is coming under pressure from both the left and the right”

2023-10-22 20:27:54

Salman Rushdie, who was presented with the Peace Prize of the German Book Trade in Frankfurt’s Paulskirche, immediately told a story and another. And he imagined what it would mean if the price of the Peace Prize was peace. Exactly one year for exactly one award winner, in this case: him. “That would be a reward that I would be more than happy to accept.”

He’s even thinking about writing a story about it: “The Man Who Received Peace as a Prize.” He told it right away, a great story, even if the end result is that the winners in the story would rather get a sausage or something like that again next year. Things are never easy, even the most wonderful things aren’t.

Advertisement | Scroll to continue reading

Daniel Kehlmann, who delivered a slightly flirtatious but perfect eulogy, compared the reactions to Rushdie’s situation in 1989 with the reactions to the situation in Ukraine today. In view of the fatwa against the “Satanic Verses”, they wanted “above all to have peace and quiet again and to maintain undisturbed trade relations with the theocracy of Iran” – “just as many contemporaries, the comparison does not seem to me to be entirely exaggerated, suggest today to the invaded Ukraine please cede territories and not bother the already all too kind world with excessive stubbornness. In the same way, Salman Rushdie was asked above all to remain silent and modest.” (Rushdie himself then pointed out that in the Ukraine war, for example, the word peace did not mean the same thing for both sides.)

It wasn’t just a joke on the sidelines – but also, there was a lot of laughter – that Kehlmann mentioned that he could only talk to Rushdie about the new series “Obi Wan Kenobi”. Because Rushdie was the only one of Kehlmann’s entire circle of acquaintances who had already seen her. No wonder. “Salman Rushdie’s novels are, to put it briefly and simply, about everything, i.e. about the colorful, fiery, confused, huge chaos that is the world.”

According to Rushdie’s curiosity and receptiveness, which has prophetic traits. “If something of importance happens out there, Salman will hear about it before the rest of us and, sometimes in obvious ways, sometimes in secret ways that only he can understand, he will transform it into art.”

Daniel Kehlmann: Rushdie is a “wise, curious, cheerful person”

This also affects him as a person: not only did he become very seriously ill with Covid and very early on (in March 2020). The fatwa against him was also part of that “intellectual virus that would only later be given the name of Islamic fundamentalism” – Rushdie made this into a symbolic figure for artistic freedom and, “in the Hegelian sense, a world-historical individual.”

For Kehlmann, Rushdie is also a “veritable Rushdie fictional character”. His characters, who often appear superheroic, are human beings, and Rushdie’s “fantasy” is “not escapism, but a method of showing us human nature in its wealth, its size and weakness, its frailty and exposure under an intensifying lens.” Rushdie was “a wise, curious, cheerful and kind person”.

But Rushdie wouldn’t be Rushdie if he hadn’t made it clear in his acceptance speech (see Ukraine) that peace is a complex concept in society – and that it often only comes with discord gradually. He himself, on the other hand, according to his first name (“Peaceful”), was “a very quiet, well-behaved, hard-working boy,” “peaceful by name, peaceful by nature. The trouble started later.”

For many years he was able to write the books “that came to my mind” unhindered. 21 times it was very worth it and gave him a good life. “With the remaining exception, namely the publication of my fourth novel,” he learned about the “power of lack of freedom.” “But that only made it all the more essential, important and indispensable to defend them.”

Rushdie on the “Internet and its perfidious ability to lie”

Nevertheless, things turned out badly. “We are living in a time that I never thought I would have to live through,” Rushdie said. Freedom is “under attack on all sides by reactionary, authoritarian, populist, demagogic, half-educated, narcissistic and careless voices.” There are even progressive voices that demand censorship that gives the appearance of being virtuous. “Freedom is coming under pressure from both the left and the right, from the young and the old. This has never happened before” – and is made even more complicated by the Internet and its perfidious ability to lie.

What to do? “Do with renewed vigor what we have always had to do: counter bad speech with better speech, counter false narratives with better ones, respond to hate with love and do not give up hope that the truth can prevail even in a time of lies.” This absolutely means “that we defend free speech even when it offends us, because otherwise we would not defend freedom of expression at all.”