2024-03-24 15:27:35
The four-day Leipzig Book Fair ended on Sunday with an increase in visitors. This year, according to the fair, a total of 283,000 visitors counted, an increase compared to 2023 (276,000). Thousands of young people also cavorted in the halls at the weekend as real manga characters. Soon we should no longer send literary critics to book fairs, but rather ethnologists who can tell us something about the costumes, roles and avatars of the animated worlds.
Because so far, adults have had a hard time with any manga skills. While some people think they are already established when they say “They are cosplayers”, others have long wanted to know the specific character names of the costumes in which their daughters or sons appear. In addition to manga (from Japan), manwahs (the counterpart from Korea) have long since found their way into the German fan scene.
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A work with the eloquent title “I’m just the supporting role, get me out of here” (Papertoons Verlag) reveals a lot about the fabulous world of Asian comics, which now occupies two of the five exhibition halls in Leipzig. When the “Manga-Comic-Con” opened its doors for the first time as an accompanying show to the Leipzig Book Fair in 2014, traditional book people marveled at it and laughed at it as a curiosity.
It has long been the main meeting point for young people, who even have free entry to the Carnival of Fantasy Cultures in Leipzig with the Federal Government’s culture pass. The book fair now even provides changing rooms for them, but continues to ask: “If possible, dress, style and apply make-up at home or in the hotel room.”
Federal President Frank-Walter Steinmeier also went on a state-sponsored tour of the trade fair on Thursday in more conventional costume, namely surrounded by a crowd of whispering speakers and security. In the afternoon you could see him making a pit stop at the S. Fischer trade fair stand, and in the evening you would yawn at his Sunday speech from his work “We”, published by Suhrkamp Verlag.
In the spirit of the Gaza war
The fact that the “we” of the book industry officials now often takes on (involuntary) cosplay qualities themselves was shown in a gesture at the opening of the book fair, when the festival group was supposed to collectively hold up signs with the slogan “Choose democracy: now” to, hoo, a To take a stand against the evil, evil poll numbers before the upcoming elections. What about Bertolt Brecht: “The people have lost their trust in the government. Wouldn’t it be easier if the government dissolved the people and elected another one?”
In terms of foreign policy, this book fair was dominated by the Gaza War. During their appearances, Chancellor Olaf Scholz and the Federal President each had to deal with Palestine activists who, in shouting and disruptive mode, directed “genocide” accusations at the Federal Republic and Israel. There was no dialogue.
Things became more reverent and also more anecdotal on Saturday evening when the historian and journalist Ilko-Sascha Kowalzcuk presented his book about the communist dictator Walter Ulbricht in the Contemporary History Forum, the Leipzig counterpart to the Bonn House of History. More precisely, the second 1000 pages of his two-volume biography (publisher CH Beck).
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With Walter “Nobody has the intention of building a wall” Ulbricht, the people of Leipzig have more than one historical score to settle. The “Goatee” who came from their city was the most powerful communist in German history, the epitome of the socialist apparatchik who ran the GDR as a satellite state loyal to Moscow until 1971. In Leipzig he had the Pauline Church blown up.
He alone? “It was more complicated,” emphasizes the historian, who ironically admits: “I demystify myths by bringing new ones into the world.” Kowalczuk, who was born in East Berlin in 1968 and made a name for himself in critical analysis of the GDR, comes in his humorous, nonchalant manner well received by the audience. He reminds once again how much of an archive revolution 1989 was and that as a historian one must, above all, examine the sources – in the case of the GDR, one could.
Margot and the Wolf
Twice as many people wanted to hear all of this as could fit in the hall. All wild about a 2000 page Ulbricht biography? No, Kowalczuk had the real Wolf Biermann with him as a sidekick. The songwriter even brought his guitar for “the Ilko” and played two songs at the end of the evening. But first he gave the anecdote: “Wolf, if you continue like this, we will become enemies. If you go with us, you will become the greatest poet in the GDR.” Original sound Margot Honecker, Minister for Public Education, who wanted to get the songwriter on track after Ulbricht’s death before he could be denaturalized in 1976. They either lock you up or lock you out: Biermann tells how he himself was initially in favor of building the wall, but then soon realized that “the GDR society of lies” was not viable.
Kowalczuk explains the failure of the SED dictatorship with the principle of the scientific worldview, according to whose own logic socialist state leaders make no mistakes could. Then finally Biermann picks up the guitar and plays “I’m tired of them”, his anger song from 1968. Later he sings the song “Encouragement”, “dedicated to Ilko”, a piece about the fact that misery often lasts longer than one’s own life, that historical justice often only occurs when one no longer experiences it oneself.
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