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Berlin gets bookish

With Berlin's international literature festival starting on Wednesday, Daniel Miller makes sure everybody is on the same page.

Published: 23 September 2008 16:19 CEST
Berlin gets bookish
Photo: DPA

It’s well known that Berlin is town that likes its books, but fewer people are aware the German capital has been home to its very own literary festival for the past eight years. The annual event has quickly grown in importance and has carved out its own particular niche in the book world.

“Our festival is the most international out of any festival in the world,” says founder and director Ulrich Schreiber. “And we also are the biggest literary festival for children.”

A quick glance at the programme certainly suggests both these points are true. A large number of events starting on Wednesday at the Haus der Berliner Festspiele seem to begin at times in the morning in which most writers have not yet gone to bed. And more than fifty different nationalities appear to be represented, among the one hundred plus authors set to appear in Berlin over the next fortnight.

Two of those nationalities – Thailand and the USA – are held by Rattawut Lapcharoensap, a young short story writer currently based in Berlin on a DAAD cultural exchange fellowship. “Last year was the year where it meant I had spent half of life in each country,” says the chain-smoking, chess-playing 29-year-old, who readily agrees that he occupies an uncertain position between Thailand and America.

“The language I write in is English, and my work isn’t published in Thai, and so I have a pretty distant relationship to the literary culture there. At the same time, all of my relatives still live in Thailand, and many of them can’t even read English.”

Lapcharoensap’s appearance at this year’s festival – where he’ll be reading an extract from his novel in progress, as well as taking part in a panel discussion on young writers abroad – marks his second appearance in Berlin. “I attended the festival for the first time in 2006 just after my book came out,” he says. “I was pretty new to literary festivals then, and the Berlin one was the largest I’d been to. I loved it, I guess, though these literary junkets can sometimes be pretty strange.”

Asked as to whom he is particularly looking forward to seeing at this year’s edition Lapcharoensap names the British/Nigerian poet and novelist Helon Habila “and my friend Dinan Mengestu.”

Festival organizer Schreiber, meanwhile, says he is most looking forward to meeting some of the authors invited for this year’s special focus on Africa. “Last year, in April I was in Burkina Faso,” he says. “And I started to think about African literature, which has become much more internationally prominent. In the last 22 years, there have been four noble prize winners from Africa. Before that, there were none.”

Schreiber sees the enduring value of literature in teaching how “it is possible to learn how other people think and feel and live.” The large number of unpaid young volunteers who compose much of the festival’s labour force appears to support that this ideal is widely shared. But the success of the festival is also a testament to two other literary virtues: drive and ambition.

“Ten years ago, I went to see to the Poetenfest in Erlangen,” says Schreiber. “And I thought to myself: ‘Why isn’t there anything like that in Berlin?’”

He explains that for the next two years after that it was a fight for money. And then when it got off the ground in August 2001, the first festival drew only 6,000 visitors. But the next year 14,000 people showed up.

“And then three years ago we became part of the Festspiele, and received federal funding for the first time. Last year, 34,000 visitors came,” Schreiber says.

If you care to add yourself to that total this year, The Local has a few picks.

Selected Highlights

Wednesday September 24, 6:00 pm at Haus der Berliner Festspiele | Main Stage. French Canadian author Nancy Huston officially kicks-off proceeding with an opening speech entitled “Why Literary Lies are Better than Other Lies.”

Thursday September 25, 9:30 pm at Haus der Berliner Festspiele | Main Stage. Nuruddin Farah, Geert Mak, Tzvetan Todorov and Eliot Weinberger chew-over the meaning of Barack Obama in a panel discussion.

Monday September 29, 6:00 pm at Haus der Berliner Festspiele. “People see Lagos as a dangerous place. Almost as if it were a living thing, a beast that devours you.” With superstar architect Rem Koolhaas’ long-awaited book about Lagos delayed once again, Nigerian author Helon Habila’s discussion of his home city with Bauhaus researcher and urbanist Omar Akbar is probably the next best thing.

Thursday October 2, 8:00 pm at Ballhaus Ost Berlin writer and founder of the international SLAM!Revue Martin Jankowski and the rapper and slam poet Gauner moderate a night of slam poetry at the Ballhouse Ost, with DJ Paul America on the decks.

Sunday October 5, 7:00 pm at Haus der Berliner Festspiele | Main Stage

Frank Arnold, Margarita Broich, Leila Chamma, Tina Engel, Astrid Gorvin, Qassim Haddad, Jutta Lampe, Geno Lechner, Julia Malik, Chun Mei Tan, Friedhelm Ptok, Joachim Sartorius, Roland Schäfer, Nina West and others close out the festival by reading poems in memoriam of the Palestinian poet Mahmud Darwish who died in August this year.

HISTORY

‘Lost’ manuscript of pro-Nazi French author published 78 years later

A book by one of France's most celebrated and controversial literary figures arrives in bookstores this week, 78 years after the manuscript disappeared

Published: 4 May 2022 11:42 CEST
'Lost' manuscript of pro-Nazi French author published 78 years later

It is a rare thing when the story of a book’s publication is even more mysterious than the plot of the novel itself.

But that might be said of Guerre (War) by one of France’s most celebrated and controversial literary figures, Louis-Ferdinand Celine, which arrives in bookstores on Thursday, some 78 years after its manuscript disappeared.

Celine’s reputation has somehow survived the fact that he was one of France’s most eager collaborators with the Nazis.

Already a superstar thanks to his debut novel Journey to the End of the Night (1932), Celine became one of the most ardent anti-Semitic propagandists even before France’s occupation.

In June 1944, with the Allies advancing on Paris, the writer abandoned a pile of his manuscripts in his Montmartre apartment.

Celine feared rough treatment from authorities in liberated France, having spent the war carousing with the Gestapo, and giving up Jews and foreigners to the Nazi regime and publishing racist pamphlets about Jewish world conspiracies.

For decades, no one knew what happened to his papers, and he accused resistance fighters of burning them. But at some point in the 2000s, they ended up with retired journalist Jean-Pierre Thibaudat, who passed them – completely out of the blue – to Celine’s heirs last summer.

‘A miracle’
Despite the author’s history, reviews of the 150-page novel, published by Gallimard, have been unanimous in their praise.

“The end of a mystery, the discovery of a great text,” writes Le Point; a “miracle,” says Le Monde; “breathtaking,” gushes Journal du Dimanche.

Gallimard has yet to say whether the novel will be translated.

Like much of Celine’s work, Guerre is deeply autobiographical, recounting his experiences during World War I.

It opens with 20-year-old Brigadier Ferdinand finding himself miraculously alive after waking up on a Belgian battlefield, follows his treatment and hasty departure for England – all based on Celine’s real experiences.

His time across the Channel is the subject of another newly discovered novel, Londres (London), to be published this autumn.

If French reviewers seem reluctant to focus on Celine’s rampant World War II anti-Semitism, it is partly because his early writings (Guerre is thought to date from 1934) show little sign of it.

Journey to the End of the Night was a hit among progressives for its anti-war message, as well as a raw, slang-filled style that stuck two fingers up at bourgeois sensibilities.

Celine’s attitude to the Jews only revealed itself in 1937 with the publication of a pamphlet, Trifles for a Massacre, which set him on a new path of racial hatred and conspiracy-mongering.

He never back-tracked. After the war, he launched a campaign of Holocaust-denial and sought to muddy the waters around his own war-time exploits – allowing him to worm his way back into France without repercussions.

‘Divine surprise’
Many in the French literary scene seem keen to separate early and late Celine.

“These manuscripts come at the right time – they are a divine surprise – for Celine to become a writer again: the one who matters, from 1932 to 1936,” literary historian Philippe Roussin told AFP.

Other critics say the early Celine was just hiding his true feelings.

They highlight a quote that may explain the gap between his progressive novels and reactionary feelings: “Knowing what the reader wants, following fashions like a shopgirl, is the job of any writer who is very financially constrained,” Celine wrote to a friend.

Despite his descent into Nazism, he was one of the great chroniclers of the trauma of World War I and the malaise of the inter-war years.

An exhibition about the discovery of the manuscripts opens on Thursday at the Gallimard Gallery and includes the original, hand-written sheets of Guerre.

They end with a line that is typical of Celine: “I caught the war in my head. It is locked in my head.”

In the final years before his death in 1961, Celine endlessly bemoaned the loss of his manuscripts.

The exhibition has a quote from him on the wall: “They burned them, almost three manuscripts, the pest-purging vigilantes!”

This was one occasion – not the only one – where he was proved wrong.

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