2024-03-21 08:05:31
“Let them demonstrate,” murmurs a woman waiting in line to enter the ceremonial opening of the Leipzig Book Fair. “We cannot again preach the freedom of the word inside and become nervous outside.” Police in front of the Leipzig Gewandhaus approach four or five people demonstrating, presumably students. You have taken a stand against the event that is about to begin with the participation of the German Chancellor. A briefly visible poster claims, referring to the war in the Gaza Strip: “Israel and Germany are committing genocide.” A few activists from this scene must have made it among the invited guests. Because activists disrupt Chancellor Olaf Kanzler Scholz’s speech at the opening ceremony of the Leipzig Book Fair.
The German head of government, who is present in the Leipzig Gewandhaus with the representatives of this year’s host region, the outgoing Prime Minister of the Netherlands, Mark Rutte, and the Prime Minister of the Belgian region of Flanders, Jan Jambon, was shouted down at times. What the hecklers were saying was difficult for most people in the room to understand; according to eyewitnesses and earwitnesses placed closer, they were talking about “Blood on your hands”. The Chancellor initially tried to continue in the speech manuscript, but when that was not possible, he said with regard to the situation: “It is the power of words that brings us together here in Leipzig – not that of shouting.” After security forces had removed several individual activists scattered around the hall, the German head of government was able to continue his speech undisturbed after a few minutes.
“All of us here in Leipzig are brought together by the power of words – not shouts”
Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s speech at the opening of the Leipzig Book Fair was interrupted several times by demonstrators – apparently in protest against arms deliveries to Israel.
It had already been expected in advance that there might be demonstrations or scandals surrounding the conflict in the Middle East at the next major German cultural event after the Berlinale, and that quickly happened. But there was no scandal in Leipzig with a misleading speech on the open stage like with Slavoj Zizek at the last Frankfurt Book Fair, nor were there any people in the official program who made accusations of genocide against Israel while saying thank you and received applause from the audience at the Berlinale. None of that existed. But it became clear once again that there is a huge gap between the noble demands of a cultural event, including its intended messages (more on that below) and the unwanted events.
Award for philosopher Omri Boehm
The Israeli philosopher Omri Boehm, who accepted the Leipzig Book Prize for European Understanding for his book “Radical Universalism” that evening, briefly discussed the incident during Scholz’s speech before his actual acceptance speech. He said the disruptors had made a serious mistake by trying to make free speech impossible. However, the incident also shows that although disruptors can be removed from the hall, their concerns cannot be eliminated. With this, Boehm aimed at the core of his prepared acceptance speech, read out in German, which dealt with two facets of the Enlightenment. “For Kant, enlightenment is the freedom to think for yourself. For Lessing, it is the humanity that is expressed in the freedom of friendship.”
According to Boehm, in dark times there is a tendency to sacrifice the truth for friendship. With a view to the events of October 7, 2023, Böhm said that the Palestinian and Israeli sides had established their doctrines of “armed resistance” and the right to “self-defense.” In both positions, the public is obscured in the interests of enlightenment. With a view to the German audience and indirectly also with a view to the raison d’état of unconditional solidarity with Israel, Boehm said: “There can be no German-Jewish friendship if, in these dark times, there is no room for the difficult truths that are expressed in the name of Jewish-Palestinian friendship must be expressed. It is not because of friendship that the truth must be pushed aside, but on the contrary, hard truths must be brought to the fore because we should remain friends.”
Boehm’s speech was all about his utopia of radical universalism, which is derived from the philosopher Kant. Boehm wants to overcome every form of identity politics, ultimately including Jewish identity politics, which founded a Jewish state – especially after the Holocaust, as a safe place for Jews in the world.
Laudations and participation activities
The Israeli-French sociologist Eva Illouz had previously honored Boehm with Spinoza and Derrida in a clever but also somewhat academic and abstract eulogy. She praised Boehm for his idea of overcoming the identity politics that lead to divisions and for his “vision” of a supra-ethnic common state of Israelis and Palestinians, as set out in various books. The fact that this beautiful vision remains nothing other than a utopia as long as the current form of Palestinian politics is Hamas terror aimed at the destruction of the state of Israel remained unmentioned that evening.
Instead, even before the official ceremony began, the audience in the Leipzig Gewandhaus was asked by the new head of the book fair and the German Book Trade Association to take part in a childish, church-convention-like participation campaign in view of the European elections and the East German state elections this year . Small posters with the slogan “Vote for Democracy: Now” should be held up from every seat and cameras held so that the force of an entire room is translated into television images. Once again a sign to pat yourself on the back.
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This collective command had nothing to do with maturity in Kant’s sense; rather, many Leipzig residents who were still socialized as GDR citizens may have felt reminded of the cheering Persian choreographies of the SED or FDGB propaganda apparatus. The campaign was also reminiscent of 2016, when there was already a cheap poster-holding campaign with which the industry simulated political relevance – back then with the slogan “For the word and freedom”. The shouters and disruptors, no matter how much they are condemned for their political blindness, demonstrated more authentically in the activist gesture.
So the evening as a whole fell apart quite a bit between dull activist heckling here and unctuous opening speeches there, between empty industry messages on the one hand and utopian, spiritualized thought artistry on the other. Now a book fair would be the last place where you wouldn’t be allowed to have utopias. However, we have already learned in German class that Lessing’s ring parable in “Nathan the Wise” thinks that people are better tolerant creatures than they are in reality.
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