Literaturehouse Europe ed. by Walter Grond and Beat Mazenauer

Literary trends 2015 Ed. by Walter Grond and Beat Mazenauer

All rights reserved by the Authors/ELiT

The Literaturhaus Europe is funded by the Creative Europe Programme of the European Union. For copyright information and credits for funding organizations and sponsors please refer to the appendix of this book.

Edition Rokfor Zürich/Berlin B3.115/18-12-2015

Konzeption: Rokfor Produktion: Gina Bucher Grafische Gestaltung: Rafael Koch Programmierung: Urs Hofer Gesamtherstellung: epubli, Berlin FOREWORD TRENDS IN EUROPEAN CONTEMPORARY LITERATURE

The virtual project «Literaturehouse Europe» invol- ves six institutions from Budapest, Hamburg, Krems, London, Ljubljana and Paris with the common aim of creating a European feuilleton, which focuses on topics in the field of literature, and exami- nes them beyond the limits of linguistic, cultural, cultural-technology as well as media implications. This Observatory of European Contemporary Litera- ture sets annual themes of interest and commissions international correspondents and writers to provi- de contributions on these topics; via the website www.literaturhauseuropa.eu it also publishes their blogs on various aspects of literature as well as literature in general. Quarterly dossiers give an in- sight into the various perspectives in the different countries, and lastly, every autumn a panel of experts and writers debates themes at the European Litera- ture Days symposium, which is held in the convivial atmosphere of Wachau.

The new series «Trends in European Contemporary Literature» summarizes the key texts and discussions from the current year and endeavours to compile in- formative overviews. Here, the focus is on a process of dialogue, debate and writing about literature, so- ciety, education and media technology. The Yearbook, published in the Rokfor Edition, defines the trends. The edition’s innovative concept is based on flexible book production thanks to an automated process enabling the text to be provided as a free download in PDF format, or for a modest fee as a haptic «book on demand». FOREWORD The first volume of «Trends in European Contem- porary Literature» includes texts, discussions and summaries featured in the Observatory from January to December 2015 on the following topics:

–The Migrants – how is European literature changing due to the increasing numbers of migrant writers from non-European cultures? The Scottish writer A.L. Kennedy appeals to artists and writers to show commitment for human dignity in the face of war and the global refugee trage- dy. The current deep-seated social changes demand greater awareness towards writers from other cul- tures. Their books make far-reaching social change comprehensible.

– Trends in contemporary literature in the English, German, French, Hungarian and Slovenian context? For several years there has been a notable trend for novels, which dispense with fiction, and treat facts like fiction or showcase autobiographical elements as a ‘reality show’. However, it is not easy to identify whether this heralds a new realism or a hyper-genre. Additionally, the striving for identity as homo poeticus and homo politicus, in particular, for writers from the former socialist countries represents a challenge. After the collapse of the Soviet Union writers grew to appreciate their freedom from the political sphere. However, the younger generations are developing a new understanding of engaged literature with no connection to debates from the post-war era.

– Innovations in the digital field Currently, the media sector and not the literary sector is the focus of most activity. Today, the industry FOREWORD leaders in the book and booksellers’ market are selling fewer ebooks than previously due to the more inflexible price determination, lack of offers and greater access difficulties. However, a constant factor is access to literary content via electronic media and social media networks – especially for young readers circles. Presently, important innovations are ongoing in the area of ebook sales, ebook lending and ebook platforms in small countries like Slovenia.

Walter Grond Artistic Director ELIT Literaturehouse Europe

INHALT 1. The Migrants ...... 13 A.L. Kennedy: The Migrants...... 15 Ilma Rakusa: The Migrants and European Literature ...... 24 Posts from the «Observatory» (1) ...... 27 Talk with Jamal Mahjoub ...... 31 Najem Wali: On Exile and Home ...... 36 Posts from the «Observatory» (2) ...... 40 Iman Humaydan: Migration, Identity and the Literary Imagination ...... 51 Herta Müller: Homesickness for Future ...... 55 2. Trends in European contemporary literature . . . 61 Pierre Alféri: Non sequitur. The garbled story of presence ...... 62 World Novel – Talk with Patrick Deville ...... 76 Word and Image - Talk with Marguerite Abouet and Yvan Alagbé...... 81 Posts from the «Observatory» (3) ...... 92 Beat Mazenauer: Trends no Trends ...... 121 3. Innovations in the digital field ...... 123 Szilard Borbely: About Change and Digital Oblivion...... 124 About Writing and Reading ...... 127 About Libraries and Archives ...... 136 About e-books ...... 145 Dirk Rumberg: Innovations in the Digital Field. . . . 155 Appendix ELiT Literature House Europe ...... 161 Authors and editors...... 162 Thanks ...... 166

11

1. THE MIGRANTS

The title theme for the European Literature Days 2015 was «The Migrants».

At the first European Literature Days in 2009, Jürgen Ritte, a literary scholar at the Sorbonne Paris, gave two emphatic responses in answer to the question «Is there a European literature?» – «No and yes. Yes. Of course there is – there are shared lines of heritage. No, it has always been an export-import undertaking, like Europe and its culture in general. It’s a fruitful melange. A formidable machinery that assimilates everything from Chinese noodles, Japanese prints and South American plants, and has made everything, which it encounters, its own.»

In 2015,the Observatory of European Contemporary Literature poses the question about European literature from a socio- political, cultural and literary perspective. How does European contemporary literature change with the growing migration of writers from non-European cultures?

The focus is on the migrants. Which languages and which cultural understanding do they leave their native country with, how do they arrive somewhere else and learn a language and culture that are foreign to them, and in turn how do they change the language and culture of the country in which they continue to live?

To approach and clarify this issue we must consider writers for whom this tension-ridden area is particularly relevant. The purpose is to trace migrants in Europe – no matter whether they change the focal point of their lives inside Europe or whether they hail from countries outside Europe. A myriad of questions emerges: were they already writers upon leaving their country of origin, or did they first begin writing after their migration? What language do they write in? How did they learn the new language? Are the topics featured in their texts rooted in the culture of their native country or in their new home? Where is the main area of interest for their work? Are they perceived in their new home as writers who belong, or more as migrants and outsiders? How does their literary language alter by living in-between two cultures? How do they change and enrich the language?

13 The commission for the keynote lecture for the European Literature Days 2015 was awarded to the Scottish writer, A.L. Kennedy.

14 A.L.KENNEDY:THEMIGRANTS

Opening Lecture of the European Literature Days 2015, Schloss Spitz, 23.10.2015

When I first wrote this lecture a summary of my argument could have been – when art fails, there is cruelty, because cruelty in humans is caused by a lack of imagination. There are not enough enough human beings who are ill in the appropriate kinds of ways to individually create epidemic levels of cruelty. They can do harm. Of course. But to do great harm, cruel societies, cultures of cruelty have to be created – either by accident or design, usually both – so that they can recruit otherwise nornal human beings to be cruel, even though they might not be under other circumstances.

That is to say – when art fails, failure of imagination follows and thereafter cruelty thrives.

Arts practitioners might reply that they are oppressed by the cruel who very reasonably seek to avoid the possible beneficial effects of art escaping into the wider community. This is true.

But it is also true that failure of the arts, of artists, helps the cruel amongst us triumph and begin to oppress us all, even in relatively free societies – including – and perhaps initially, those who are communicators.

My talk today will still deal with this area.

But between my first draft and my last a photograh of a small, dead boy made it to headlines of many newspapers which had, only hours before, been pouring out hatred at refugees as a moral, cultural, biological, and spiritual threat. As David Cameron put it – «a swarm of people».

When people are in a swarm, they aren’t people. They are both of an alien species and a danger.

When words put them in a swarm, they don’t receive the real world’s help.

Here was a picture of a boy, who looked like many other little European boy. Boys like beaches and sand and the sea

15 – only this little boy in Western-style dress was dead and face down. He was at once familiar – a boy’s body at rest – and horribly changed – a lifeless body, face down, caught in a moment of helpless return to the material. We could easily imagine him as human and alive and not swarming. He developed a name – Aylan Kurdi and stopped being part of a swarm. The others who died in his boat – including his brother – were brought a little closer to not swarming. His parents developed names and they stopped swarming. These people came to be regarded as people. They were imagined as human. The imagination of the public understood little kids and beaches, cradling little bodies, their limbs heavy with tiredness, not death. That imagination swung towards no longer regarding the human beings camped at Calais in miserable conditions and occasionally being crushed or drowned or smothered trying to reach the UK as people who might have been kids and played, kids who weren’t necessarily born to be an existential threat.

Our media may or may not have been permitted this change of tone because of public disgust at increasingly repellent coverage, online petitions and the like. Or else because the UK and other Western European goverments – having been unable to wish away the humanitarian crisis they helped create and to hide its human impact behind a screen of more and less racist abuse – had decided to change tack. Perhaps so many coutries with so many arms to sell could persuade us that bringing additional war to Syria would help stop people fleeing the war in Syria, while also happening to make a number of arms manufacturers a great deal of money. Perhaps, in fact, a little dead kid could make us want to blow up other little kids whose names we would never know and who we would never see, lying down and little and dead. If our imaginations were focussed on strident and powerful (if quite vague) solutions and not on children scattered in pieces, or on fire and if we could imagine that other, still alive kids, might one day play on their own beaches in their homelands – or else in happy sand (don’t muslim kids enjoy sand, anyway, haven’t we heard that somehow...?) then money could be made. We could imagine people (perhaps kids) thanking us for blowing up some of the people who were blowing them up in such a way that everything turned

16 out well in the end. You’ll be familiar with imaginings of this kind in the run-up to the invasion of Iraq.

In the UK, echoes of World War Two tend to be aroused. Even though our modern involvement in conflicts have been much less successful and have lacked an ardent desire for an end to cruelty, brought about with the minimum cruelty. In WWII there was an amount of agonised thinking about how we could defeat undemocratic forces and Total War without becomein undemocratic and embracing Total War. There was even an amount of blood shed to preserve artistic and cultural heritage where possible. And leaders could imagine that war should be militarily successful, rather than profitable – that aiming for an undending version of the reverse would be a terrible mistake. These are things we have forgotten to imagine since, but like to think we can conjure up with flags and parades and the repetition of the word HERO.

So, at the time of writing, the swarm is no longer quite the swarm it was. The public imagination is allowed to think of it as a necessary evil that could cause us to unleash another necessary evil or – ideally – casued Russia to become embroiled in evil and leave us out of it with hands as clean as we can manage. The ambient hatred of the Other has changed focus. The media around us (which are increasingly distrtusted and ignored and therefore increasingly strident and toxic) spend time worrying a little about VW exhaust emissions, rather more about David Beckham’s marriage and very much more about the strangely beige and gentle threat of Jeremy Corbyn – a candidate the media didn’t back and whose existance they find perplexing. The massive displacement of human beings from their homes all across Europe and the Middle East is rarely examined in anything like depth. The humanity of refugees, emigrants, or for that matter David Beckham and Jeremy Corbyn, the humanity of our responses is allowed or encouraged to fade

Imagination is, on all sides, apparently failing. And when it fails, it fails us all. What do we artists do now? Because we must be responsive, surely – we must somehow be guardians of imagination, of wider thought, of culture. What have we done wrong? What did we forget? What can we do now?

17 True art is not an indulgence, but a fundamental defence of humanity. We seem condemned to forget, to learn and to forget this truth. Each time we do, some of us die. Those defined as Others go first. The strangers, the migrants, those forced into desperate motion by cascading cruelties: we ignore them to death, torment them to confirm our own prejudices. Dominant regimes around the world may simply execute whole families by remote control. Nonetheless, all those people – the harmed, the running and the dead – they are us. Harming others recoils upon us. Morally, creatively, environmentally, literally, ignoring this fact means that we have entered into a murder-suicide pact with ourselves.

Let us consider the idea of the artist as a kind of eternal, voluntary migrant from the far-off territories of the engaged mind, the superior imagination. What use is that in these dark times? How do we save lives? How do we render lives secure? Is that even what an artist wishes to do?

I would argue that any artist practicing their art at a high level of technical skill and realisation will be defending human beings. The effect of art is inherently beneficial, unless it is actively shaped to a malign agenda – and that agenda will usually damage the effectiveness of the art. Because fully-functional art is about the irreplaceability of the human experience and it communality, it helps save us all. But we probably no longer live in a time when simply practicing our art is enough. All over the world – and even countries which see themselves as harbouring free expression and democracy – artistic expression is on the retreat and inhumanity at every level is apparently increasing. This is, in part, a falsehood produced by a media industry addicted to shock and illusion, but certainly worldwide conflict, pandemic disease, imposed poverty and debt are all producing their predictable results – despair, rage, death, violence, intellectual struggle and bewilderment, nihilism.

Speaking as a writer, I am used – perhaps too used – to our role as someone occupying a moral high ground, supposedly seeing clearly and then speaking wisely on behalf of our societies, our species. Powerful and thoughtful writing are, of course, hugely beneficial. They give rise to new imaginings, better futures, the framing of laws. They sustain us in our

18 solitude. And new technologies are joining together the well-disposed peoples of the world as never before. We can discover each other’s pains faster than ever. We can supersede old and corrupted journalistic models. We can write to the fullest extent of our abilities in order to show ourselves the depth of our beauty, the irreplaceable gift of each life. But this may not be enough any more.

I feel we need to rediscover and restate our full potential as artists, our roles in shaping and creating cultures and the debt we own to those cultures which still harbour us, which allow us our louder-than-average-voices. If we know what we truly are – we can fully be what we are.

Mass culture in Europe and around the world is increasingly addicted to wealth and loathing and its incessant prioritisation and promotion. Shoddy, debased and debasing propaganda overwhelms by dint of its sheer, grinding, global repetition. And yet, for generations we have been able to identify the precursors of catastrophic violence in human societies, of violence against groups and individuals. We know that strict control and suppression of humanising art, the control of manifest joys, the rationing of shared pleasures – these all mark the beginning of a process which ends in hell.

The minimisation and silencing of art from individuals and groups classified as «Other» combines with and compliments mass media attacks on those groups. Real life migrants – rather than we voluntary outcasts – are easy targets. In the UK, those who have been evicted from their homelands by the consequences of our economic and military policies are now blamed for their homelessness. To paraphrase Colin Powell – we broke it but we don’t want to fix it. Within many societies, the only response to pain and grief is a condemnation of its victims. In the UK, our summer headlines framed a crisis which saw utterly desperate human beings even trying to swim the English Channel as a torment for delayed British holiday makers. Radio phone-ins played up the threat of illegal immigrants numbering in their hundreds as a horde that would overwhelm our whole culture. The same culture that has spent decades expelling art from its discourse and from its financial blessing, has embraced loathing. Theresa May, Britain’s controversial Home Secretary,

19 alarmed the Insititute of Directors and surprised the Uk’s Migration Advisory Committee by using her address to this October’s Conservative Party Conference to deny the positive effects of immigration and repeat a number of allegations about job-stealing, healthcare clogging immigrants which simply aren’t true. Hoping to shape our imaginations into a state of fear from which she could then save us.

But history teaches us that our greatest wrongs, crimes against humanity and genocide, arise from cultures where hatred has become a part of the air citizens breathe. When imagination fails, a culture fails, a society fails, a nation fails and then – perhaps – later there will be lawyers, some attempt to establish truth, guilt, reconciliation. Establishing what is termed «intent to destroy» when we try to prosecute individuals for crimes against humanity and genocide is often hugely difficult precisely because of the Political pronounce- ments, media activity and propaganda that shape and then dominate sick cultures. In a hate-filled culture, a nation’s sense of self becomes grounded on those it despises. True citizenship becomes a narrower and narrower concept – and outwith its safety death stalks ever closer.

Clearly, all interested parties inclduing writers and artists must act in the UK and elsewhere. And we are attempting to organise, to rediscover the faith in ourselves as a species and as workers for the survival of that species. But we are pressured by a raft of new negative forces. We know that around the world press freedoms are being smothered. Attacks may be verbal, legal, physical, financial, subtle or overt. The effect is always chilling, silencing. Even in relatively «free» nations slashed rates of pay, collapsed print media, demands for free content and the toxic effects of the so-called War on Terror mean that writers are censored, or self-censor. Some are simply silenced by exhaustion. But I will say again that without artists and perhaps writers in particular, human beings are easier to destroy, first in effigy, then in part, then as a totality. Groups and individuals trust their immortality to their cultural creations – removing access to their dignity and presence in the world makes it easier to destroy them. We «Honorary Others» must respond now as never before – not least because a threat to one group really is eventually a threat to all.

20 Real-world migrants are now among a growing number of stridently defined «Others». At a global level we’re seeing a decline or removal of rights for women, workers, the disabled, those with a mental illness, the poor and the imprisoned. Information from expensive sources like investigative jour- nalism has collapsed. Gossip and controversy corrupts the public discourse while internet communities form coral reefs of solipsistic myth and confirmation. Sharpening redefinitions of loyalty and identity are bringing about a conflict between sovereign states and corporate states. Old-style nationalisms of loathing and exclusion are condemned by corporate media who borrow and promote their agendas. Meanwhile, nationa- lism as an expression of non-corporate identity, cultural choice and personal diversity may offer a reclamation of citizens rights and a resurgence of cultural expression.

What’s happening culturally and politically in Scotland at the moment arises from a cultural uplift in the 1980’s and 90’s and it offers a positive example of alternative and challenging expression bringing about non-violent change. The idea of multiculturalism is close to the heart of that project in interesting ways that refresh some like myself, used to the old sectarian fault lines, based on centuries-old religious and political differences. There has been an attempt to expand an idea of national identity to truly include simple, voluntary residence and that hasn’t harmed Scotland’s sense of self, quite the reverse. London is a remarkably successful blending of multiple cultures and this has given it remarkabel resilience. Ther are many examples of united cultures full of difference that succeed. In a globa; cultural landscape within which the inaccuracies of «Zero Dark Thirty» can justify torture, or we can watch online executions in jump suits of competing colours, or see the Merkelstreichelt offer hopeless sympathy needs all the positive examples it can get.

To reference the UK, while – for example – working class communities in Glasgow fight to keep adopted immigrant families from arbitrary deportation, our media rant about «hard-workers» and «spongers», about endless alien threats. A government beset by hideous sex scandals and doggedly pursuing a social and economic agenda best suited to an invading power has sought to distract us from the pains

21 they cause us, by blaming them on Others. Our new Inde- pendent Press Standards Organisation can currently induce apologies (in small print) when errors of fact have occurred. Most attacks are framed in fact-free outbursts of rage. Over the last two decades in the UK mainstream media articles have repeatedly linked migrants to disease and all manner of crime. Zeid Ra’ad Al Hussein, UN Commissioner for Human Rights recently characterised Europe as having «a nasty underbelly of racism» which skews our response to genuine human need. He made particular reference to the UK and our self-styled commentator, Katie Hopkins. Like a number of similar figures, Hopkins seeks to generate outrage in order to get attention, website «clicks». She has a background in PR and the military and rose to fame on a TV reality show. This is an almost perfect path to prominence in ma- ny unwary and fading democracies. Research, facts, quality writing – they require funding, effort, ability. Confirming of readers’ prejudices is easier. UK surveys repeatedly show that responders massively over-estimate numbers of fraudu- lent benefit claims and immigrant «Others» – this error is substantially a mass media creation. It is a nightmare of alien rapacisouness, created by the media’s massimagination. Mr. Al Hussein highlighted Hopkins’ description of migrants «spreading like norovirus on a cruise ship». She called them «cockroaches» – echoing Rwanda’s Radio Mille Collines and its exhortations to genocide.

Commercialised hate on a global scale means it’s no surprise that trafficking people for gain, using them as slaves, as product, is – like warfare – a growing business. It grosses around $150 billion. (Slaves, like oil, are valued in dollars) The industry affects more than 20 million people. Not cockroaches. People.

And, beyond punishing migrants, the UK government removes support from those with special needs and mental health difficulties, the homeless, poor, old, young, sick... Each of us is sullied by some aspect of this cruelty. An institutionally racist police force, an under-funded legal system and a prison industry geared to increase re-offending and profits hide some of the consequences while increasing others. As in so many fading democracies, manifestations of mercy rely on

22 groups and individuals having internalised values other than those in the ascendant.

But in a world of Avaaz, aid volunteers, and charity crowd- funding, a world where 15 million marched against a war in Iraq on behalf of strangers who couldn’t, there are alte- rative models for humanity. As writers and artists we have experienced the fact that art is stronger that propaganda, that love is stronger and more sustainable than hate, that self-expression can mean more than self-indulgence. We have values. This dark time can teach us about light. We have the capacity to offer a vast variety and depth of human information. We can make dreams to lead mankind forward and expressions of individuality that can make many free. Without those dreams, we face only nightmares. We must do better.

What you do next, make next, write next, create next is up you – it has to be up to you. But without you, we are all past saving. Let us, together, imagine the future – if we don’t, it will happen without us and may kill us along the way.

23 ILMARAKUSA:THEMIGRANTSANDEUROPEAN LITERATURE

Rosie Goldsmith: Ilma Rakusa, you epitomize a European writer both as regards your biography and the multiple languages, which you speak, and as regards your work as a writer, translator and teacher. From this European perspective how did you respond to A.L. Kennedy’s lecture? Ilma Rakusa: First of all, I would like to say that I agree with every one of A.L. Kennedy’s statements. I’m very impressed by what she has to say on this subject; one can’t improve on this. I would like to quote a phrase of the Russian poet Marina Tsvetaeva, who was herself an exile; she emigrated with her family after the Russian Revolution first to Czechoslovakia and then to France. She first lived in Prague during the 1920s, then in Paris and corresponded with Rainer Maria Rilke. In one of her letters in 1925 she wrote in German to Rilke, «Every poet is a migrant.» And in a poem in Russian she wrote, «All poets are Jews.» She died in 1941 when she committed suicide after the Germans marched into Russia. Rosie Goldsmith: Is that the writer’s role personally also to regard oneself as a migrant? Ilma Rakusa: Many do so in the metaphorical sense as well. I believe our task is actually to concentrate exactly on what Alison said, and to discuss this issue in our writing – in other words, to describe destinies with empathy and fantasy, not merely when it’s about migrants, but about all individuals, but also to give each person a face. What is so difficult nowadays is that we always only hear numbers, worrying numbers – for most people for the time being these are incomprehensible numbers about refugees who are currently arriving in Europe, yet numbers are not reality. Reality is comprised of destinies, individual destinies. We must create faces; we must talk about details and about backgrounds. We must pose questions, yet we must do so with love. These points were all mentioned in Allison’s talk. I think writers are generally good at this, and that is also their metier. Writers have a few more chances to express their ideas and get across their attitude through writing a little more

24 vociferously, and perhaps to reach out to a few more people. So a lot more responsibility is already associated with this especially now. Three days ago in Vienna I gave a talk about the Serbian-Hungarian and Jewish writer, Danilo Kiš, at the Jewish Museum. Sadly, he is a writer who already died in 1989 before the outbreak of the Yugoslavian war. Danilo Kiš never wanted to be homo politicus – he always advocated being homo poeticus, yet he said in Yugoslavia – back then this what it was still called – we can do no other; we have had so many problems in the past and in the present. The writer inevitably becomes homo politicus as well; and in many essays, pleas and interviews before 1973 he already warned about nationalism in Yugoslavia. He didn’t survive to see the outbreak of the Yugoslavian war and the break-up of the country. He died in October 1989, but he sensed it. He really was a writer from head to toe; his father perished in Auschwitz as a Hungarian Jew, his mother was Montenegrin. He focused on the Holocaust in his books and on Stalinism in «A Tomb for Boris Davidovich». I consider him as one of the most important, most meaningful writers of the second half of the twentieth century. Well, now, in relation to a writer this conflict between homo poeticus and homo politicus is occasionally a conflict. Today, once again we’re in a situation in which one cannot withdraw from this question and in which, I believe, we must take a stance as writers.

In my own way,personally and verbally as well as in my work, I try to warn of a reality that is also incredibly important in the current situation, that is, nationalism. I’m half Hungarian and I am frequently in Hungary. I love my Hungarian colleagues, writer colleagues and friends. Orban’s politics is scandalous. Many Hungarians are suffering because of it. Orban isn’t the only one in Europe. An aggressive type of nationalism is on the rise; it originates from outside, from Russia or Turkey. It dominates in several Eastern European countries and is gaining ground with radical left-wing and right-wing parties across the EU.

This, i.e. aggressive nationalism, demarcation and inner delibe- ralization are tangible threats for the West. Where does this come from? Fear is stoked up and fear gives extremely bad counsel. Especially now, the last thing that we should do is to rush headlong into panic-stricken fear. These are ancient

25 clichés that unfortunately Europe has been confronted with all too often, and yet they are setting a precedent again and are even popular, indeed almost socially acceptable, you see? Well, where should this all lead to.

We have to build bridges to people who are fleeing to our countries. We have to show understanding in both directions and I think this is the really big task over the longer term – for this process to succeed, to avoid something else happening, namely, a society, as it were a parallel society emerging in which these people then live, a kind of segregation or ghettoization. This is highly problematic in itself and, of course, could lead to increased problems. Then, it vindicates precisely those people who fuel these fears, these right-wing parties and so on.

26 POSTS FROM THE «OBSERVATORY» (1)

STRUGGLINGWITHPARALLELWORLDS by László Szabolcs – Oct 22, 2015

I managed to arrive to Austria from Budapest quite unevent- fully, the trains were on time, running smoothly, passengers around me chatting in several languages, as if nothing could ever disturb the calm and quiet normalcy of a borderless Europe. Yet if the European Literature Days in 2015 would have been held just over a month ago, it would have been an entirely different experience altogether. In September, the general– and outright shameful– confusion and cynicism of governments and transnational institutions over the refugee crisis gave rise to a completely different scenario which see- med to belong to a parallel universe. People were forbidden to enter Keleti railway station, trains were stopped altogether, and the border was closed. Hegyeshalom, this small border town that had been regarded as the gateway to the West became, once again, the sad omen for the edge of the possible world. The contrast is so striking that one begins to question whether the two situations belong to the same moral, social, and cultural reality. Is this the same Europe?

As we were passing through the infamous border town, I couldn’t help but recall a short story by Imre Kertész («Jegyz˝okönyv»/The Minutes of Meeting) which describes how the narrator was forced by the border guards to get off the train bound to Vienna because he was carrying an amount of money which exceeded the legal limit. For Kertész– and later, for Péter Esterházy, who quotes the story when writing about a similar experience– such a micro event signifies that the bureaucratic and technocratic essence of past or future regimes will constantly cause fear and generate aggression toward the defenseless individual. For a long while, I was certain that these warnings were simply well- meaning cautionary tales from an older generation that had been marked by a dictatorship, and that in fact «history»– perceived as the grim tale of another century– was mostly over and done with. My present was defined by progressive values, freedom of movement, fluid and plural identities, and a spirit of interculturality. But, seeing the police close the giant gates of Keleti station (not to mention hearing and reading

27 the shocking frenzy of xenophobic reactions all around) was a wake-up call; one had to realize that history was back indeed. Moreover, it reappeared with a cruel and unusual sarcasm: when the Hungarian authorities faked a re-opening of the station, the first train– which the refugees hoped to be heading to Austria, yet instead took them to the close vicinity of overcrowded refugee camps– was (perhaps, accidentally?) decorated with commemorative images of the 1989 Pan-European Picnic, the foundational event of free border crossing in the region...

Such unforeseen, almost unbelievable, but typical and troubling paradoxes; and the moral, social, and cultural incompatibility of parallel realities which define our everyday lives are truly the stuff of literature, and only through the possibilities of literature can we address them. By upholding the story of progressive values, freedom of movement, fluid and plural identities, and the spirit of interculturality– and in the same time reflecting on the cruel sarcasm of a grim history unfolding before our eyes. After the first discussion and round of reading of the European Literature Days 2015 with A.L. Kennedy, Anna Kim, Jamal Mahjoub, and Atiq Rahimi in the Klangraum of the Minorites Church in Krems, I genuinely feels to be in the right place to witness and engage in such an intellectual and artistic challenge.

***

THE AWKWARD SUBJECT OF COMMITMENT by Peter Zimmermann – Oct 23, 2015

All over the world (at least I think so) people enjoy talking about the weather. They mainly do so because grumbling about the weather is a constant, and there is no fear of any consequences. In any case the weather does what it will whether you like it or not. That’s why it’s ideal for examining the causes of your personal emotional condition. The weather knows no limits, it cannot be manipulated or controlled and it’s temperamental. So it’s not surprising that it affects personal moods. Today, it makes you happy. Tomorrow, you make it responsible for your depressive frame of mind. The weather is this damned homeless companion that you have to accommodate because it’s stronger than you are! Nobody, not

28 even the Austrian Minister for the Interior or the Hungarian Prime Minister has the power to call the weather to order, to hold it or ask for identity and detain it. But the Minister for the Interior dreams of a ‘Fortress Europe’ and the Prime Minister has «quasi» (to cite Victor Orbán) declared martial law.

What do you feel threatened by? Who is threatening to occupy the continent? And exactly what or who is it im- portant to defend? Of course, the war rhetoric refers to the refugees who are arriving in Europe across the so-called Balkan route to claim their right to asylum in what are presumed safer and rich countries, particularly in Germany, England and Scandinavia. In the light of the large number of people who are fleeing – a number incidentally that is not surprising for political analysts – it would be necessary to act in a coordinated, pan-European way. You can’t just wish the people away; they’re here now and should be treated like human beings. Nevertheless, there is no coordination and no plans. Never before was it so obvious that there isn’t even a policy any longer, that is, in the sense of acting on the basis of values. I don’t even want to mention ideals. We’ve already sensed it: politics is a placebo that produces place- bos: security, prosperity and justice. Now we see that it’s not about any certainties or facts here but about assertions or rather marketing feelings. It’s about feeling secure, feeling wealthy and feeling a sense of justice. Since real political tasks cannot be resolved with any of this, the politicians take refuge in strong emotions – the idea that we are in a war. Foreignness is flooding the familiar. We’re no longer masters in our own house. Home must remain home, so that’s why we need a ‹Fortress Europe›. By the way, the Nazis put this message into circulation to call for the defence of areas that they had occupied during the Second World War. That’s also a way of gauging how politics and morality no (longer) share anything in common.

In her opening lecture A.L. Kennedy also referred to precisely this emotionalized language in Great Britain that reveals the nature of politics in all its helplessness and irresponsibility: refugees are cockroaches,for example. This comparison would suggest that mass destruction could be justifiable. In less aggressive diction refugees are described as a swarm, as

29 a mass that is intimidating all the same, sans brain, sans face, but voracious and difficult to stop like a plague of locusts. This image also justifies a violent approach. That is the response from Europe’s elites to the consequences of a war with – viewed historically – no less European participation. From this starting point Kennedy aims to fathom out how writers then have to behave towards this situation. Must he/she take a stance? In the light of crisis situations this question is often posed and the answers given are exclusively the wrong ones. Every human individual, including a writer as well, is entitled to show commitment for a cause that seems to him or her right and true. Every writer is entitled, as a corrective of politics (or non-politics), to be concerned about moral issues, to educate, to make things visible, to expose political rhetoric in its emptiness and dubiousness and to construct counter-models. Yet he or she is not obliged to do so. I regard it as fatal to oblige literature to be useful for civil society. This forces writers into a logic of utilization from which they should actually have emancipated themselves – unless they define themselves as part of this logic. When Swedish writer David Lagercrantz adds to his late fellow compatriot Stieg Larsson’s millennium trilogy by penning a fourth and probably even a fifth volume, then he does so in full knowledge that this is a purely commercial undertaking. That corresponds to the logic of economic utilization. When A.L. Kennedy claims to take a stance and in her books, essays and newspaper commentaries to alert the audience to the traps of pseudo-politics, she does justice to her personal standards of a writer’s profession, although she also conforms to the logic of moral utilization. Anyone who withdraws from these types of logic gently falls under suspicion of entering into a common pact with those who want to barricade themselves behind the walls of the fortress. The quiet individual just accepts the noisy ones. I regard it as a quality of art in general that it withdraws from all kinds of calculability and knows no limits, like the weather, – it can’t be manipulated and controlled. We shouldn’t desire anything from art; we should find in it what we feel is true and right. Entirely of its own accord, without any signposts or any user manual. (Translated by Suzanne Kirkbright)

30 TALK WITH JAMAL MAHJOUB

Alexandra Buchler: Jamal Mahjoub is a Sudanese British writer. He divides his writing between what he described to me as literary novels and crime novels. Yesterday he presented his book called ‘In The Hour of Signs’; which is set in 19th Century Sudan, and the subject of it is the Mahdist insurrection. I was reminded of my childhood as a reader because I first encountered this topic through a young adult novel by the Polish author Sienkiewicz, it was one of my favorite. It is a about two young friends, a boy, a Polish boy and an English girl who are actually kidnapped by the Mahdists, it is a great adventure.Jamal,I would be interested to know what made you choose the subject of that book on the Madhist insurrection in the 19th Century?

Jamal Mahjoub: The reason I wrote it was simply. My first novel was about a young man who travels to Sudan from Britain, who doesn’t know anything about his father’s country and feels that a part of his identity is there. That led me to questioning what Sudan was and that led me to going back to the 1950s and the moment of independence and that led me further back to the 19th Century which was really the beginning of the creating of the modern State of Sudan. This was at this very dramatic moment when the Mahdi emerged and you had this confrontation between these two types of fanaticism in a way, you know, this belief in religion. And so it was one thing led into another.

When I began writing I was aware that there were two strands that I wanted to write, there were two areas that I wanted to write. I wanted to write about my own life in the present but – and at this point I was living in London – I also wanted to write about Sudan and that part of my heritage and which is where I grew up. So – oddly enough – the novels that were published were the novels about Sudan. For every novel that I wrote and published, another novel was written but was never published and so that unpublished novels were really a sort of exploring my existence in Britain as a migrant. I found and assumed that I knew Britain and that a part of my heritage belonged there, is like the reverse of my character in the novel. I discovered that I was a complete outsider and that there was a great deal, there was

31 a complete blank space there that I really needed to learn and it took me, I don’t know, probably about ten years to sort of figure this out and in that time I was writing novels and short stories about that experience but they remained in a kind of shadow land, they never came out.

Alexandra Buchler: You started writing crime novels a couple of years ago. They are set in Cairo; I find this very interesting because sometimes it is said that crime writing in our time has replaced what the 19th Century novel did. It tells us about society.

Jamal Mahjoub: The crime writing comes out of again two things, probably an interesting crime fiction going back to my childhood. My grandmother on my mother’s side was a fanatic about crime fiction and she used to weirdly enough send me books by post from England which were way ahead of me. So I would get these Agatha Christie books wrapped up in brown paper and string arriving in Khartoum and in time I read a lot. And so that was one thing, that I wanted to write about this and the other was simply that I wanted to continue the kind of diversity that I wanted to have in my writing. I wanted the writing to cover this vast universe of diversity that I saw around me. And one strand, the literally novels was simply not enough. So it is a kind of a way of multiplying a multiplicity of identity. I felt that – and this goes back to something that was said early – that you are never really appreciated; I don’t think that I am appreciated as a British writer. I don’t think that I am appreciated as a Sudanese writer; I am kind of in between two or three stools. And it is very difficult for people to place me, you know. And so you end up in a kind of twilight zone which for me the only way out of that is to increase the complexity or the diversity of my writing. So the crime writing is really in that sense a way of trying to expand the space that I occupy. The crime series is written under another name, Parker Bilal, which is again adopting another identity in the sense that Parker, the name is made up of two parts; Bilal is the name from my father’s side, great grandfather and Parker is my mother’s maiden name from the English side. So it is kind of adopting another space. I wanted to write about Egypt because in the 1990s my parents left Sudan for political reasons. My father was working for a newspaper that was

32 closed down my Omar Al Bashir and the whole revolution of national salvation, whatever. And they moved to Cairo along with a lot of Sudanese and I was fascinated by this Sudanese exile life in Cairo, and I was also fascinated by Cairo itself as a city. So I envisaged a kind of epic novel that would incorporate all of these things and of course it never happened and in time it gradually became transformed into; or metamorphosed into this idea of a series of crime novels taking place in Cairo with an exile Sudanese ex police inspector who lives in Cairo and who makes a living helping people with their problems.

Alexandra Buchler: So they are set in the Sudanese exile community...?

Jamal Mahjoub: They are set in Cairo in whatever, the Egyptian environment. The grand master plan is ten novels and my idea is that I would go up to the revolutions or the Arab Uprising, or the Arab Spring, whatever you want to call it. I mean it has really been an amazing ten years with everything, all the terrible things that have happened which have transformed the world. All of those things have some kind of impact on the political situation in the Middle East and in Egypt. So each novel takes a year, there is a progression through it and so we gradually see the buildup of the same, of a group of characters moving towards that moment.

Alexandra Buchler: What do you think about migrant litera- ture?

Jamal Mahjoub: If we look at the United States P {margin- bottom: 0.21cm;}– I am not saying that it is perfect – that model is based on the idea that everybody is basically a migrant and therefore migrant literature is what literature is. In Europe I think we have to get beyond the idea of exoticizing the migrant and exoticizing migrant literature and beginning to accept it as being a part of main literature. Whether we have gone within a living memory, within less than a hundred years from the position where London was the center of an empire that stretched around the world to the point where that empire has somehow imploded backwards into Britain, we now have a situation which should be an

33 enrichment of what British literature is. But if you look at British publishing, the critics, the whole literally world it is largely made up, very largely made up, over 90 percent made up of people who do not have that kind of background. The whole context of the discussion, of the discourse eliminates that whole world. What do we mean by that when we say homeland? It is a kind of distancing things and saying well okay that’s some kind of Arabian nights place where there is this homeland where nice things grow and so on. We need to get beyond that somehow and we need to get it to the point where this literature is seen as a genuine contribution to what current literary culture is. There is this idea of a kind of universal humanity.

László Szabolcs: There was a debate some 20, 30 years ago because, and all of the topics we talk about seem to be familiar from that postcolonial literature and postcolonial theory. Samaraj Adi wrote about imaginary homelands. He wrote about translated men and women and then we have Homi Bhabha who theorized the «Third Space» which you called the twilight zone. So we have a conceptual background and we had debates. Nonetheless you still say that it had no impact in Britain. How comes that? We learnt postcolonial theory in Romania, we learnt it in Hungary and yet it did not have this kind of impact. What could European Literature learn from these theories, from these approaches, from the early writings of Samaraj Adi or Homi Bhabha or Hanif Kureishi etc. etera?

Jamal Mahjoub: These subjects have been discussed for a long time but I think it has been discussed within a very specialized zone which is. We are talking about a particular group of people. I was a postcolonial writer, but there was a point at which post colonialism vanished and what remained was a kind of interest in sort of global feminist issues and the rest of it was kind of forgotten and there was sort of sense in a way that it was no longer of importance. I remember reading a review in the TLS; I think it was a about Jhumpa Lahiri and it was sort of saying, what needs to happen is that these writers have to get there exotic past and start to write about the here and the now. So there was a debate, there has been a lot written and a lot talked about and a lot of theorizing done but it remained within a very closed sort

34 of circle, it didn’t spread out into mainstream literary culture and I think it is still a kind of distance. What European literature can learn from that whole postcolo- nial discussion, is a lot I suppose. It really was quite a unique set of circumstances. Writers like Hanif Kureishi and a lot of other people came out of it. And Hanif Kureishi came out of a very very specific multicultural background. I mean he was growing up in South London or whatever and worshipping David Bowie. I mean there is this a kind of contradiction which is when you look back on it, it seems quite ahead of its time and now we see it in so many other places. So yes, I think that there is a lot to learn from them.

35 NAJEMWALI:ONEXILEANDHOME

ANATTEMPTTODEFINEEXILE – 25. Juni 2015

Often, writers in exile are faced with the question why they left their country and whether ultimately this wouldn’t lead to a loss of their memories, to their forgetting those private and cherished places where they’ve lived for years. Do their works not then lose the warmth and familiarity of those who were still living in the country, and do their opinions not lose the same measure of authenticity? It’s certainly not an exaggeration to state that since the last century no writer has got around these sorts of questions, entirely regardless of which nationality he may be and whatever the reasons for his exile. How many creative artists had to tolerate the criticism that they had betrayed their native country because they left it – from Dante to Joseph Conrad up to Joyce, Márquez, Kundera and Vargas Llosa. And regardless of what are allegedly the intended answers of the respective inquirers in each case – incidentally, they’re usually more interested in politics than literature – at the end of the day they assess the writer not on the basis of his work, but his residence or creative home. This very restricted view then entices the many who look on writers in exile with suspicion anyway to reach a naive conclusion: that the latter must inevitably find it difficult to write about their home countries, since it’s virtually impossible to work through historical events adequately in a novel because this requires, among other things, an intellectual and psychological maturing process on location. And they obviously lack this. For these and other equally naive reasons, it’s perhaps better if the writer in question presently makes do with writing about exile.

In this case the critics evade the really crucial question whether purely on the grounds of having left his country a writer automatically loses the ability to remember the «there» and to write about this based on his imagination? Is it therefore unavoidable for him really still to write about exile? I want to answer this question quite simply and directly. No. Not at all. Beautiful writing per se represents a kind of exile, even if the writer is living in the «home», which is in any case a term used more in politics than the world of

36 culture. Ultimately, a writer’s home is precisely his language, his being at home is the world that he creates of it, like the home of nomads is always where they settle. There is no strong relationship between the place, where I sit while I am writing, and my creative world of imagination that has no specific place and no limits.

***

ANYONEWHODOESN’TFEELGOODSHOULDGO – July 23, 2015

One of the magnificent quotes from Nobel Prize Laureate Mario Vargas Llosa about writers and exile is, «Anyone who doesn’t feel good, where he is, should go!» This statement becomes even more powerful when you consider that the Peruvian writer’s life is entirely permeated by politics. One of his works is entitled «A Fish in the Water». Here he describes how he felt about his state when his strong political commitment was taking up most of his time, so it took the «water» of literature away from him until he began to snap for air like a fish on dry land. Back then, for five long years he didn’t compose a single line of literature while he was involved in his electoral campaign for the Peruvian President’s office. Ultimately, this wasn’t successful and Llosa recognized that he could only be successful as a writer, that he could be of so much more use to his country and humanity regardless of where he lived or whether he voluntarily decided to take up residence in Spain and decided to adopt Spanish citizenship. For him literature is the air, which he needs to breathe, regardless of where this is written. Instead, what matters for him is the purity of this air that is his condition for creative work. What is the importance of a work, which doesn’t inhale the breath of freedom, and has emerged in the unfree shadow of a dictator or social taboos or serving a confessionalist-racist regime? Does this kind of work benefit anyone at all; does it contribute something to a country’s culture and to humanity?

Mario Vargas Llosa knew that he would never have been able to write «The Time of the Hero»,«Conversation in the Cathedral» and «The Green House» if back then he had not lived in exile in Paris. Similarly, Gabriel Garcia Márquez, who

37 received several threats after his return from a long period of exile, knew that ultimately he would again be forced to leave his country, Colombia, as he not only lacked the necessary peace for writing there, but he couldn’t even live in peace. So the motto was: go back into exile! Which he also did. Márquez went back to Mexico City where he then died. He was not the first who sought his country outside of it. Before him James Joyce sought his Dublin, which he hated to death, elsewhere. Fanatics naturally accused Joyce of betrayal, but Joyce, Márquez or later Llosa and others who went into exile did their country a service by doing so, since they could now really write what wasn’t possible from inside. Their aesthetic and creative value is measured by the text of their works, not their place of residence at the time of composing this or that work. What value is there if a creative mind remains in his so-called «home», if he cannot write the text here that he has in mind? A creative artist who goes away to write freely and to be able to speak with an uplifted voice has much more influence than one who «courageously» has to assert his opinion underground or one who is alive, yet whose mouth and hands are tied. So it is completely irrelevant where the writer’s «geographical» exile is located.

***

EXILEANDTHEBURDENOFHOMEONUS – Oct 5, 2015

It is right, of course, that many writers and artists are «geographically» in exile. Yet in my view, back «home» they had already gone into inner exile since they became aware of the pain in the country where they were born and lived, or better still let’s say: since they felt a constant ache in their mind and soul because of the experience of the state’s injustice to the people; since they also strictly rejected the social tyranny accompanying the terror of the state’s force and the latter being used as a justification for destroying everything that is beautiful. When sheer survival becomes the main content of life in a state, then all that is beautiful in this land becomes painful and the land itself becomes exile. To state this quite unequivocally: exile knows no limits, passionate yearning cannot be measured in terms of distance – it lives within you and is fatal. The sense of

38 being a stranger – inner exile – begins when one feels lonely and abandoned, seeking a firm foothold on solid ground and this ground is pulled from beneath one’s feet. The feeling of being a stranger begins when the heart begins to wail a lament. Exile is much greater than external borders. It destroys the friendly association with the world, and with others. In this way, exile first begins «there» at the moment when one becomes aware of one’s creative energy or pain. «Geographical», outer exile is then only its logical, though tragic consequence. By adopting this explanatory model it is then only apt to assert that every form of creative writing is ultimately a creative achievement from within the confines of «exile», the eternal exile of mankind and man’s strangeness «here» and «there».

When I studied German literature in the 1980s at Hamburg University, at first I focused on special interest topics in German «exile literature», that is, those writers who left the country in their dozens after the takeover by the Nazis and Hitler in 1933. I learned in the process that you can count the novels, which deal with «geographical» exile, on the fingers of one hand. The same applies for novels written in other languages, or at least for those novels, which I’m now reading in their original language, primarily in German and Spanish. Most truly great literary works were created in exile and are by no means about this «geographical» exile, but rather about the idea of man’s eternal inner exile, about his social alienation because those who engage in creative activities are in league with what is absent. Their heroes embody a general human language that overcomes limits and they present the narrow ideas of headstrong nationalists in all their ridiculous dimensions – maybe because they have matured and grown up by breaking away from the seemingly so rigid definitions of national cultural identity.

(Translated from German by Suzanne Kirkbright)

39 POSTS FROM THE «OBSERVATORY» (2)

FROM MIGRANT LITERATURE TO MIGRANT LITERATURE by Lena Gorelik – July 2, 2015

For the first novel that I wrote, they loved me – slightly for the novel and slightly for my story. I was twenty-three. I first arrived in Germany when I was eleven and I couldn’t speak a word of this language. Now I wrote a novel about an eleven-year-old girl who arrives in Germany without speaking a word of this language. They liked the story. And the novel was naturally not based on my own story.

I had to leave Germany to write the second novel – to escape both this story about myself as well as myself; I went to Israel where nobody knew me. I travelled a lot and drifted along more than actually doing anything. At Christmas,which I didn’t celebrate that year, I wrote most of the second novel that was hanging and floating over me like a great, dark cloud. I didn’t like it while I was writing it, and nor did I like it later on. It was set in Israel, at least partly.

Because I didn’t like the second novel, I didn’t write a third. Instead I wrote three books, which I only called books, one of them was even a political book. None of them caused me any particular trouble and I was always still myself. And they loved my story the same as before.

The next novel was perhaps in reality the second; I took years to write it, which wasn’t usual, and I was extremely scrupulous and careful to distance myself from myself while writing. I was careful to note whether the questions still absorbed me. Whether they were still directed at the girl who once, when she was eleven, came to Germany, without being able to speak a word of this language, and only writing novels. They said it was migrant literature and then they also said that we drew on the wealth of experience of migration and the treasure of a second language, and in this case they were right.

The novel, which I recently finished, is among other things about someone who fled to Germany before the civil war in Yugoslavia. I have never been in Yugoslavia. And I was never in any civil war. And I’m curious: is that still migrant

40 literature? When I’m creating things that draw on a wealth of experience of a foreign migration, which occurred in my head, and a second language, which I don’t really speak? Simply because I myself am a migrant?

(Translated by Suzanne Kirkbright)

***

WRONGANDRIGHT–RIGHTORWRONG? by Anna Kim – Sept 24, 2015

1 — On 5 July the following article appeared in all German- speaking newspapers:

Turkish nationalists attack ‘wrong’ Chinese

In Istanbul, Turkish nationalists attacked a group of Korean tourists during a protest against the treatment of the Uyghurs in China – they mistook the group for Chinese. The police intervened with tear gas...

I hardly find this report absurd, even though it is quite absurd. In fact, I’m familiar with the situation – not in this extreme form, yet in a milder way: I am constantly mistaken for a Chinese woman. ‘Constantly’ is perhaps a slight exaggeration: in six out of ten cases, I’m considered Chinese; in 3.8 out of ten cases as a Japanese woman, and very occasionally the person who addressed me is delighted that he guessed my ‘nationality’ correctly. Although... is that ‘right’? No, I rebuke the poor person. Actually, I was only born in South Korea; I grew up in Austria and so I’m Austrian. Oh no. I already notice how he starts to squint. Now, he’s trying to see something that’s invisible. He is trying to detect the European element in my genealogy; he looks me up and down from head to toe. Oh well, she is tall, much taller than your average Asian woman. He beams. He is pleased to have found something. Her body language is also different. She moves... differently. But Austrian is too obvious; he cannot articulate this definition. Austro-Korean, that’s more like it... And we’re already haggling. I insist on being Austrian; he insists on seeing what I am. We’re haggling about

41 the composition of my personal identity. What is genuinely Korean about me and what is maybe more Austrian. He finally gives his judgement: it’s right – she’s a genuine Korean, but a ‘wrong’ Austrian.

2 — Can a wrong Austrian produce right Austrian literature? I haven’t escaped this question so far. It seems to be a genuine «questionable case» (Fragefalle), or a «trap» question (Fallenfrage).

The trap is always set up in the same way: whenever I’m invited to give a reading, initially plenty of time is devoted to explaining why I write in German – that is: why I don’t write in Korean. Then, some nice quotations are presented from Wikipedia and my family’s «migrant story» is told chapter and verse. Born in South Korea. Father visiting professor in Germany. And so on. After the reading the listener can create his own picture of who or what I am, by asking me questions, so my biography then dominates the subsequent discussion. On the one hand, this is naturally due to the fact that the majority of the audience hasn’t read my books; maybe people’s opinion is that they wouldn’t offer enough material for discussions, and I wouldn’t like to rule out this option. On the other hand, however, I cannot help feeling that in the course of the reading it was more my person than my texts that was introduced in connection with my knowledge of German. The trap has snapped shut. «Exotic writer’s bonus» is how some of my colleagues put it, and they’re even envious of my background,which supposedly automatically gets me more attention. I have to contradict this: «exotic writer’s bonus» – no way! «Exotic writer’s minus»! If as an «exotic» writer you don’t comply with the rules of the literary business, – if you don’t write about your ‘exotic’ background and how you came to enjoy an «exotic’s life», how an exotic’s daily routine feels, what you have to go through as a lonesome ‘exotic’ – you’re not even half as interesting as a «non-exotic» writer. You don’t make the grade. A good «exotic» writer is only someone, who fulfils his role as an «exotic», and writes migrant literature. So can a wrong Austrian produce the right Austrian literature? I fear the answer to that is: no. Not yet.

42 3 — Finally, I would like to speculate on three (almost) non-polemical (non-partisan) thoughts:

A – There have always been writers who work in a lingua franca. The most famous of them and the names most frequently mentioned are Joseph Conrad, Vladimir Nabokov and Samuel Beckett. It is less well known that writers from Greenland almost exclusively write in Danish. So what happens, if Greenland seeks (total) independence? Are these writers then migrant literati? After all, they’re not writing in their native language and mostly don’t live in their native country (though most, if not all of them would presumably say Danish is their native language, and Denmark is their homeland. However, as I know from personal experience, biology outdoes culture).

B – My husband is American and he’s lived for three years in Berlin. An American friend, a so-called Asian American, recently said: he wasn’t a migrant, but she and I were. Refugees, asylum seekers, people from Africa, Asia and the Middle East are migrants. In some newspapers the Balkans have become migrant countries. Europeans are not migrants, they are EU citizens and Americans are in any case Ameri- cans. That probably answers why the works of Conrad, Nabokov and Beckett do not count as part of migrant literature.

C – In the current debate about integration, there is growing criticism of the behaviour of migrants who do not integrate, that is: those who don’t want to learn the language of their host country, who are not interested in foreign customs and who only make friends with «their own kind». I understand the criticism, and in my view it’s also justified. So why does the literature business operate on the basis of disintegration? The writers who are supposedly writing in a foreign language – and I’d also like to dispute that; it may not be their native language, yet it doesn’t mean by a long shot that it’s a foreign language! – have fully integrated in their «host country». But if they publish a book, they are ‘disintegrated’, along with their book.

(Translated by Suzanne Kirkbright)

***

43 MY EXPERIENCE OF MIGRATION WAS PROLONGED by Ilma Rakusa – July 13, 2015

My experience of migration was prolonged: from my birth- place Rimavská Sobota, the journey led to Budapest, then to Ljubljana and onwards to the divided city of Trieste and in January 1951 to Zurich. I was five years old. My baggage contained three languages: Hungarian, Slovenian and Italian. At school, I soon learned the fourth language, German, and also picked up the local dialect Schwyzerdütsch (Swiss Ger- man). But this wasn’t important for my emotional equilibrium, while standard or High German rapidly won the day: as the language of the books that I avidly devoured.

Reading became my passion because I didn’t really feel at home in ultra Protestant Zurich and without the sea. On the other hand, in the parallel world of literature there were discoveries to make – whether with Winnetou, Nils Holgers- son or Aladin. One day, writing – naturally in German – was added to the reading. I was long since engaging in conversations with myself in this language that dominated my life and thinking. Not Zurich, but the German language became my home. That is true until today, and there is something reassuring about it. Admittedly, I know the import- ance of the other languages that live with me. I generally speak Hungarian with children and animals – an emotional reaction. My father’s language, Slovenian, smoothed the path to other Slavic languages like Russian and Serbo-Croatian that I translate from. All eight languages, which I speak, have their own significance, their special temperature and specific connotations. However, I am only fluent in all registers and nuances of one language which is why this is the only suitable language for my writing, even if I sometimes would like to enrich and support it with other linguistic experiences. Basically, I have in mind a polyphonic German – an idiom that transports the colours and sounds of my native languages.

And my inner compass always points to the East – towards my home. As a Slavicist, translator and publisher I have made bridging gaps my vocation and the heroes in my books are migrants between East and West. That has nothing to do with trauma, but with an attitude to life that combines

44 longing and cosmopolitanism, remembrance and expectations for the future.

(Translated by Suzanne Kirkbright)

***

WRITINGINTRANSIENTPLACES by Iman Humaydan – Mai 28, 2015

This is the first time that I’ve finished writing a novel since I’ve been living in France. I believed that writing outside of my country would increase my feelings of being no place. But now I am able to say that writing itself can become a home. It occupies the place of home and accompanies my wakefulness while moving through so many transient places; I inhabit writing when I am between one train or airplane and the next. I live today in a place of shrinking dreams, in streets that don’t look like me, in places that make me question if I’d ever be able to carve the letters of my language in their stones. But I find myself drawing circles in the air and writing on the surface of the rivers’ waters. These places are intractable. Both intractable and attractive, I don’t know if I prefer to remain outside them or go right inside. If I go in, I’ll narrate the seductive fullness of remaining on the margins – that is to say, I’ll always stay on the outside to some degree. These are migrating people’s places, in which writing looks like nothing but itself, and in which travel and movement change words. I write what all my senses capture on my daily hunt in these new places. I write my transformation and the transformation of my language. I also write while longing for home and I meet other people who live placelessness, just like me, and who write it in another language.

In all my moving around, I have learned how to lighten my load. Travelling has forced me to trick myself into giving up everything I think I need. Giving things up is a means of persevering.

I travel light. I keep my language; I stay attached to it and make it something ever present. It’s in my suitcase and my body, my memory, my papers and my books. It’s in a song

45 whose opening lines stick in my head whenever I hear it sung.

Somehow writing is able to continue on out of place – it strolls through the corridors of Twitter and Facebook. It can capture transient memories on virtual walls. It’s the life of someone living in a world that is not the one they came from. It also migrates between two worlds, two places, two histories, two cultures – indeed between multiple places and multiple worlds. Its very place is inbetweenness.

His place has no sides and no corners; it’s open to every possibility.

And at this moment, there’s no place left to inhabit except language. Language itself becomes places to live in. As a «foreign writer», I divide myself in these places, without moving. I furnish these places of language with my senses... I see them, listen to them, and touch them through writing.

***

EMIGRANTSINHUNGARIANLITERATURE by Ágnes Orzóy – Nov 23, 2015

Leave the place that is not good for you. Those who are leaving are right to do so. And they will regret it, just like those who are staying. (Endre Kukorelly)

These months, Europe is experiencing the biggest wave of migrants since World War II. In Hungary, the issue exploded in the hot summer of 2015,with thousands of migrants arriving in the country daily. While the media image of Hungary sunk to an all-time low, this development brought out the best and the worst instincts in locals, deeply disturbed by images of exhausted families living in tents at Budapest’s Keleti Railway Station and stalwart young men marching through border villages. Most of the migrants do not want to say in Hungary, however – their intention is to continue toward more affluent Western and Northern European countries.

Both for historical and economic reasons,Hungary has certainly not been a popular target for immigrants in the last few centuries. According to 2014 figures, migrants make up less

46 than two per cent of the country’s population. For over a hundred years, our problem has typically been emigration rather than immigration, with only a few considerable waves of immigration. Even at those times, however, Hungarians were not confronted with people coming from distant cultures as the immigrants were mostly ethnic Hungarians from neighboring countries – mostly from Romania, but also from Slovakia, Ukraine, Croatia and Slovenia. In this blog entry, I have collected some Hungarian writers and poets whose oeuvre was influenced by the experience of living between two (or more) worlds.

The great wave of emigration that started in the 1870s and lasted up to World War I is documented in a recent novel by Imre Oravecz, a major poet and novelist. Oravecz had spent years in the US in the 1970s, travelling back and forth between the US and Hungary, before eventually returning to settle in his native village. In 2012, he published Californian Quail, a novel about his grandparents who emigrated to America around the turn of the century. The life of this generation of emigrants – about 1.5 million Hungarians, mostly young agricultural and industrial workers – has not really been part of the national memory, except for the mere fact of their absence, present in a well-known, powerful line by Attila József: «s kitántorgott Amerikába másfél millió emberünk» (roughly translated as «and one and a half million of our people staggered to America»). Oravecz did extensive research about the life of Hungarian communities of workers on oil rigs in Toledo, Ohio and Southern California, who left Hungary with the intention to make some money and return. Many of them, however, including Oravecz’s grandparents, eventually decided not to return to their homeland, as the world they had left behind was lost forever, ravaged by World War I and the Treaty of Trianon that ended the war, in which Hungary lost roughly two-thirds of its pre-war territory and one-third of its population.

When the initial hope for a better future after World War II was quickly disproved by the Soviet occupation and the Communist takeover, a number of Hungarians chose emigration, among them Sándor Márai (1900–1989), one of the most successful writers of the pre-war period. With an astonishing clairvoyance, Márai foresaw that Communist

47 power would entail a complete loss not only of freedom of speech but of freedom of silence as well. He decided to leave the country, and lived the remaining 41 years of his life mostly in the US, yet hovering in the void. A non-person for official Hungary, a writer without an audience in America, Márai continued to write in Hungarian, and published a number of books, including his diaries and Memoir of Hungary, a fine account of the years 1945–48, including his decision to leave the country. He committed suicide in San Diego in 1989, and did not live to see his renascence in Hungary and his international success after the translation of Embers.

If the summer of 2015 was an all-time low in the international image of Hungary, the autumn of 1956 was certainly the highest ever. The Hungarian revolution was regarded as the fight for freedom of a tiny nation against a tyrannical empire, and Hungarian emigrants were seen as heroes – the gorgeous, dauntless Hungarian freedom fighter on the cover of Time Magazine was voted as Man of the Year. As the new Hungarian government, headed by János Kádár, officially declared the events to be a counter-revolution, writers who emigrated in 1956 were punished by damnatio memoriae in their homeland, similarly to Márai and others who had fled from Communism. Victor Határ, George Faludy, János Nyíri or György Ferdinandy never really became part of the Hungarian canon, although they continued to write in Hungarian (Ferdinandy wrote in French and Spanish as well, while Nyíri wrote mostly in English and French), and two of them returned to their homeland – Faludy lived the last two decades of his life in Hungary, Ferdinandy moved back in 2010.

As none of the writers mentioned above switched languages, they could not be integrated into the literature of their chosen countries. Agota Kristof, however, who fled to Switzerland in 1956 with her husband and young child, wrote in French, a language that she learnt as an adult, and that she claimed she never managed to learn perfectly. Her case is especially interesting as the success of her Trilogy – narrated by a set of twin brothers living in symbiosis during the war, then separated by the division of Europe – is due not least to the eerie, fragmented language in which it was written.

48 Some writers who emigrated from Hungary in 1956 and became successful in their chosen countries have played a mediating role, translating and disseminating Hungarian literature. Two poets living in the UK should especially be mentioned here: George Szirtes, the T.S. Eliot Prize- winning British poet, the translator of Sándor Márai and László Krasznahorkai; and George Gömöri, who has translated several volumes of poems by Miklós Radnóti and György Petri, in collaboration with British poet Clive Wilmer.

The first decade and a half of the new millennium has seen a new wave of emigration. In the intoxicating years of the regime change, most young people believed that once the Communists are toppled,Hungary would catch up fast with its Western neighbors. This did not happen,however,for a variety of reasons, including the resurfacing of major traumas and antagonisms within the society that had been suppressed during the Kádár era, as well as the economic crisis of 2008, the repercussions of which hit Hungary extremely hard. Hundreds of thousands of Hungarians, many of them young and well-educated, left the country, mostly to Western Europe, especially the UK, Germany and Austria.

As opposed to those who emigrated in the previous waves, the writers of this new generation mostly create in the language of their chosen countries – some of them very successfully so, like Terézia Mora, who left the country in 1990 for personal rather than political reasons. Mora, who writes in German, has garnered such prestigious awards as the Ingeborg Bachmann Prize and the German Book Prize. Her books revolve around the experience of being between two worlds: the stories in her collection entitled «Seltsame Materie»take place in a village on the Austro-Hungarian border, whereas her novel «Das Ungeheuer»takes the reader on a journey through Eastern Europe. Mora keeps close ties with contemporary Hungarian literature; she has translated a number of books (by Örkény and Esterházy, among others) into German.

Another Hungarian who has won the Deutscher Buchpreis is Melinda Nadj Abonji, who emigrated to Switzerland from the province of Vojvodina in Serbia which has a large population of ethnic Hungarians. Her novel «Tauben fliegen

49 auf» recounts the experience of a family of immigrants in Switzerland, whose identity is further complicated by the fact that they arrived in the country from a minority status.

50 IMAN HUMAYDAN: MIGRATION, IDENTITY AND THE LITERARY IMAGINATION

«We are all migrants... Writers are migrants.» This is how the Scottish writer Alison Louise Kennedy ended her opening remarks at the seventh annual European Literature Days Festival in Spitz, Austria. These words were a primary focus of discussion throughout the festival. There were discussions about the identity of literature and migrant writing in Europe, especially in its relationship to writers’ new locations.

Amidst Europe’s explosion of migrants and refugees, this subject is connected to the nightmares of the second decade of the third millennium. What can literature do? How does it reflect reality? What is the role of literature today? Or can a writer simply say, «I write literature, create art, use imagination, I have no connection to what’s going on right now...»?

A.L. Kennedy’s words made me think about the «committed literature» of the 1970s, that became paired in our minds with the ideological systems which collapsed, beginning with the fall of the Berlin Wall, to the erosion of the Soviet Union, to the failed regimes in the Arab world. But what Kennedy is talking about is deeply different and current. Her language gives individuals and their own initiatives space in the face of the widespread public frustration that permeates art and culture. This gives literature a role that has no relationship to the system, but rather allows it to stand as a critic of rampant globalization that has increased poverty, unemployment, shifting wars, political and humanitarian refugees.

But through these larger themes, many questions about the novel itself came to me and they need answers. Is the novel today a sociological microcosm of marginalized communities in the world? Does it directly display – even if through writing – the violence happening in these communities that history doesn’t witness? Is it there to satisfy curiosity about lives in these communities for readers sitting in in the world’s centres of power? Or is a novel’s readership and place tied to its literary and artistic merits beyond where it came from and the language it is written in?

51 LANGUAGE

History is made in different languages. The issue of language is also at the heart of conversations about migration and writing. Europe has dozens of languages and the question re- mains if we can say that there is such a thing as a European literature? I don’t understand why there’s such insistence on fixing a description of literature or identity: European literature, world literature, Asian literature or whatever other word we use? It’s Literature before anything else and this is where its importance resides: in its humanism and how close it is to the tragedies of individuals in their existence, dreams and fears. Needless to say the debate about Euro- pean literature does not include the works of Arab writers who became Europeans and live in Europe if they still write in their language.

To immigrate to Europe at a young age, live in a country not your own, and write in your mother tongue is problematic. It raises questions about the relationship between writers, places, and communities. It also brings up writers’ visions of themselves and their roles. Many Arab writers have found a kind of balance: I am a political (or non-political) refugee,I write in my language and I write my memories. I am not a European writer.

Writers migrate from one European country to another and live there not wanting to always be presented as refugees. Perhaps this is more pronounced in the case of writers who try to write in the languages of their new countries, since many around the world find another homeland in the languages of their host countries and bring that new language to their creative works (like Milan Kundera and Atiq Rahimi). Of course language is the primary player in the field of literature and its world. What language do we write in? What do we write about? For whom? But isn’t the most important thing this writing shapes a reflection of humanity, amidst violence and faced with the commodification of creativity?

WRITING AND MIGRATION

After my conversation with the Afghan French writer Atiq Rahimi, and the screening of his film, «The Stone of Patience»,

52 I found exciting possibilities in his description of the migrant writer from one country to a totally different one culturally. He said, «Je suis empaillé, I am stuffed.» This is an ironic reference to children’s toys. I understand this to mean, «Perhaps I am both at the same time.» Rahimi added, «I am not a political refugee but a cultural refugee.» Perhaps these words and his desire to distance himself from politics make Rahimi the opposite of what he intended. Does culture lead to politics or the reverse? In any case, it is difficult to separate between the two.

Similarly, there are migrant writers who travel to Europe having been coerced to leave their countries and writers who travel in order to discover new places, have new experiences and write about them. It’s the people coming from countries that experience daily violence who lose in their victimhood any human support from the world. This leads writers to then revaluate the values of the world around them. They begin to rebuild their world from scratch, having lost confidence in any notion or laws of human rights. We can walk down the street in any Arab capital, to experience for one day what a Palestinian or Syrian or Iraqi lives. This can lead us to realize what the word cruelty means, but also indeed to realize that such surreal cruelty is beyond the current European imagination. What does it mean then to write about migration? For refugee writers, writing about migration means learning how to deal with conflict but in another language. And to dream of a peace that is missing.

Globalization was able to advance global wars through mirco-local means. But it won’t always succeed in keeping these wars far from the centres of power. The weakest are influenced by this and strongest will bear its consequences. In France, no one can forget Charlie Hebdo and the recent attacks. In Germany, Austria and other European countries waves of refugees and people fleeing violence, about whom the world remains silent, are arriving daily on its soil.

On my final day in Spitz, I walked from the hotel to the ancient castle where we had our roundtables and conversati- ons. The leaves on the trees were changing, putting on their beautiful fall colours. I felt they changed each day. Slowly the sounds of the birds warbling were less a song of summer.

53 Morning there is calm. You need only to open your window to touch the branches where the birds sleep at night. But they fly away quickly in the early morning hours.

In this calm... the image of thousands of Syrians in little tents under the snow in the Lebanese mountains comes to my mind. And through the words of A.L. Kennedy there is a second image, the little boy who drowned and whose body they found on the seashore. We must extricate ourselves from the fiction of silence and indifference. We must speak up.

54 HERTA MÜLLER: HOMESICKNESS FOR FUTURE

Acceptance speech for the award of the Heinrich Böll Prize 2015For decades in Eastern Europe besides the common repressive regimes there was a visible, shared weariness of repression and paternalism due to dictatorship. And there was also a shared, hidden desire – the desire to escape. I know people who lived their lives for years with a projection of the possibility for escape. They thought of escape every day and oriented their life towards it. For example, at university they focused on Oriental Studies for years to just to apply at some later date perhaps for an official trip to Japan – and then, when this opportune moment arose, at the first transit point in the first airport in the West, they interrupted the trip to claim asylum. Others became specialists in technical drawing because this profession involved the skill of surveying. Word got around that the terrain was sometimes surveyed close to the border. So some people chose their profession as the chance of the potential opportunity for escape – and the profession stuck and never suited them and half their life they felt tricked by their illusion because the prospect of escape never came. You can say that thousands of people spent half of their lives in the conditional tense of escape. In this complete wall-to-wall misery the hidden thought of escape was a mixture of despair and hope. From this time I know that there are collective and individual reasons for escape, thus general and personal reasons. These are equally strong. But the general causes need no reinforce- ment whatsoever from personal ones to make escape a reality when it finally becomes possible. The general, omnipresent cause is sufficient, the collective hopelessness and bitterness. It grew in everyone’s minds. And it is an obsession, a cause anyway because it suggests: it’s better anyway than here in any other place. This conclusion had been taken for gran- ted over the decades in Eastern Europe. It was ubiquitous. Today once again people make their escape based on this conclusion. Total resignation underlies this conclusion. This is why it’s so absurd when the refugees, who are arriving now in our country, are described as an invasion or as an avalanche. Es- cape has nothing to do with aggression. Escape is defensive

55 in every detail that it comprises. It was always a puzzle to me when the generally existing, silent, courageous thought of escape became the wild and risky, profoundly political attempt at escape. For there was a crucial point at which the quite ordinary, tolerant, inconspi- cuous, resigned and politically passive individual risked his or her entire existence and escaped at any cost. Because the Romanian borders were closed, they were death zones. At the Hungarian border, soldiers shooting and trained dogs tore refugees to shreds. And at the Yugoslavian border there were boats in the Danube that hunted down swimming refugees and ripped them to pieces with the boats›propellers. The chances of survival weren’t even fifty-fifty; the end of every escape was open to fatality. Nevertheless, over the years hundreds of thousands fled in secret and often all alone. The bullets, the dogs, the boats›propellers didn’t frighten anybody away.

I worked in an engineering factory and time and again one morning an otherwise punctual, reliable worker didn’t turn up for work any longer – and then he didn’t ever come back. A few days later we heard he had escaped. It was quite rare to hear a few months later, off the record, that he had sent a message from Munich, Paris or Toronto. Very often, however, he had disappeared from the face of the earth and remained so for ever. He had arrived nowhere. Although none of us had seen his intention to escape, nobody was surprised if one day his colleague at work escaped. And nobody was shocked when he was killed. A gentle whisper of pity was enough for the colleagues. This pity was even tinged with a hint of envy, although the escapee was dead. Bitter envy which was personally hurtful. It was by no means schadenfreude, but a kind of admiration. Like a medal of sorrow for the daring act of fleeing. Afterwards, he was never mentioned again. It would have been frivolous to remember his death in conversation. It would have been half self-betrayal because you yourself also harboured the thought of escape. You had to stay calm inside the mind; escape was in the conditional tense, the hope of the better, personal opportunity. And that worked best through silence. What do people do before an escape? Some went to the fortune teller. They wanted to fathom out their chances by arranging cards or reading coffee grounds. They wanted to

56 predict chance, perhaps even to exert a gracious influence on destiny.

I had one friend who was a seamstress and fortune teller. I let her make my clothes. But once I happened to be trying things on when a client came to have his fortune told. She trusted me; we had known each other for ages. She hid me in the room and ushered him to the kitchen table. The door of the room was only pulled to – I was allowed to listen in. Yes, it was about escape. Fortune telling must be credible, the main thing was the text of the fortune teller, the coffee grounds alone weren’t enough. And the text was poetry. It went something like this:

«Here I see two feet, that’s you. And there where you are is something green. It doesn’t start here and also doesn’t finish here. It is big. Look, now I see your back very small, it is growing into your back. Don’t go there. Don’t go into the cornfield, into the tobacco or turnip field. And don’t walk over the grass; don’t run into the green space. Here, I see a long neck; it’s a swan and you are arriving at a sparkling river.» The seamstress paused, sighed and asked, «Can you swim? That’s the Danube.» His voice was too soft. I didn’t understand his answer.

While listening I thought how beautiful these surreal pictures are. The aesthetic beauty of language stays with everyone – even more so the less the person has to do with language. Without being accustomed to the beauty of language, its impact is the greatest. But how can telling lies be so beautiful? I asked myself. But that was too simple because the seamstress painted the pictures with her eyes in the coffee grounds; she deciphered them and believed herself in what she was telling there. It was invented, but not a lie. And this aesthetic beauty of language became a dimension that defined the place of escape. The suggestions became concrete instructions in the mind, maps of the escape, plans with methods, times and geographical data. The aesthetic beauty of language was translated into the deed.

Of course, a few weeks later I asked the seamstress whether she knew anything about the man, whether his escape was a success. She said he was lucky; he was now in Canada.

57 In his lectures on poetics, Heinrich Böll once referred very briefly to the «search for an inhabitable language». After the war in a country where not only the houses were bombed, for Böll, this phrase probably implied something quite concrete. But he doesn’t add a single additional word of explanation for us about what it is. It remains in suspense and the cryptic element makes this expression so metaphorical and strong. So convincing and paradigmatic. You can use it how you like. Translating the beauty of language into action can be «inhabitable language», especially when making an escape. One puts trust in language to go away from home, to arrive somewhere in a foreign place where anyway it can only be better than back home. And from Böll one quickly attunes with Jorge Semprun, who states that not language as such is home, but what is spoken. Hence, the content of speech can be «inhabitable language».

I associate «inhabitable language» with escape because Böll also asks young students whether they can ever make the country, which they have taken over from the war generation in a tormented condition, a «state for which one will feel homesickness». For Böll that was a utopia. Because he doubted this. Because «between 1933 and 1939, everything that up until then one could call ‹Germany› in some form, perished, or was forced to go abroad». He wrote that in 1960 in a letter to Jenny Aloni, who had escaped in 1939 from Paderborn to Palestine, and with whom Böll maintained a lifelong friendship.

Böll also doubted this because after the war only the expul- sion of Germans from the East was regarded as «expulsion from home». In 1973, Böll wrote that the «word expulsion from one’s native land (Heimatvertreibung) attains another, better meaning if one determines its beginning in 1933». Yet to this very day this has not happened; unfortunately, nobody listened to Heinrich Böll. In the landscape of German commemoration there is still nowhere which puts on the agenda this initial expulsion of hundreds of thousands of peo- ple from Nazi Germany. That highlights the great misfortune of flight and exile. The endless routes to Mexico, Shanghai, New Zealand or Argentina. The desperation at the borders, the good and bad cases of pure chance, the desolation of nerves that are permanently broken. In 1974 in his PEN

58 speech in Jerusalem Böll said the «German word misery» was a «forebear of the word foreign». The émigrés never knew whether they could afford their homesickness both for political as well as psychological reasons. Nobody called them back. Yet post-war Germany would have urgently needed their experience and personal integrity.

Yet in spite of this perhaps contemporary Germany became a ‹homesick or nostalgic home›. Not only for those of us who live here. Also for people who have to escape dictatorship and war. They feel homesickness for peace and security. And because Germany can offer them that they are homesick for Germany. In their thousands they have the same homesick- ness that East Europeans of my age still know well even without war – homesickness for future.

When I travelled by train from Timisoara to Bucharest for a while the tracks ran really close to the Danube. You could see across to Yugoslavia. And when this part of the journey began everybody in every carriage gradually stood up. Without reason, without saying a word everyone stood up, absolutely everyone; they walked along the aisle and looked across the border towards Yugoslavia. Young and old, and even policemen and soldiers in uniform were standing among them. It was a silence like hypnosis. Like a revelation everyone knew what the other person was thinking now. Silence and watching; eyes like slanting mirrors. The seagull or swallow in the sky, they were flying around one’s neck. And when the train pulled away from the Danube everyone returned to their carriage again without a word. Everyone sat down again and talked again about some subject from beforehand – as if the interruption from the sparkle of the Danube had not happened.

I was always a little lightheaded from this hypnosis in the aisle; I had a queasy feeling when I imagined what it would be like if everyone could unexpectedly escape from the train. Mass exodus happened all that time, but in secret, independently of each other in individual, concealed actions.

And it was not only like this in Romania. Nobody has counted how many people escaped from East European dictatorships, day by day. When the Soviet tanks also came to Budapest

59 in 1956 and 1968 to Prague well over 200,000 Hungarians and 400,000 Czechs fled to the West. That’s why it annoys me immensely that the East European countries today act as if escape were not part of their history. Especially the «ramblers», who aren’t embarrassed to shout for Putin in Dresden should know that. When it built the wall the GDR certainly set a cynical memorial for escape.

I believe that when the pull of total despair captures a country the mass psychosis of escape emerges. This is the case in Syria and Eritrea. And the pull never ends when the despair subsides, the murdering acts of the dictator, war and the apocalypse of Islamic terror. War is a political enemy and refugees in wars are politically persecuted and every single one of them needs protection. This protection cannot be limited merely because so many need it.

Before the escape expectations of the future are not real. And after the escape they also remain changeable. Anyway the arrival is perceived as rescue. Rescue is a tired word. But everything about it is better than life at home with barrel bombs in the streets. Heinrich Böll was in the war and he wrote, «Most people died young, and dying isn’t easy when one is young: there is a small, official deception in the words ‹killed› or ‹fallen›; in these words there is a pretence of a suddenness of death that is only granted to a very few. The dying become silent in a way that resembles disdain; they also easily shiver because the macabre majesty that comes upon them is cold.» Until now there was homesickness for future, but after the arrival the future clings to the skin. Future sounds like shelter, but it is deceiving. For future is abstract and shelter is concrete. Beneath the soles of the feet shelter is a real place. But the future is an unreal time unknown to itself. The present never stops, and one drags around the past. Who knows, perhaps the future starts when the first calm sets in after the escape.

(Translated by Suzanne Kirkbright)

(The spoken text applies)

60 2. TRENDS IN EUROPEAN CONTEMPORARY LITERATURE

In 2015 the Observatory for European Contemporary Litera- ture focused on the German, English and French as well as Slovenian and Hungarian linguistic areas. The key themes related to trends in the literature market, debates concerning the national literary marketplace as well as social and political framework conditions for writers in the individual countries.

Which functions does literature have in the different coun- tries? Which current debates are relevant at present? How are major European events highlighted in different literatures? What is the position regarding freedom of speech? Where do writers experience repression?

As a collaborative project with the Erich Fried Tage at the Literaturhaus Wien, the French writer, Pierre Alféri, was commissioned to write about one aspect of the theme «Facts and Fiction. Literary Reportages». Under the headline theme of «Facts and Fiction» the international literature festival Erich Fried Tage 2015 presented the genre of literary reportage in its most diverse forms and formats:

«Reportage literature enjoys a long and illustrious tradition – starting with the Greek historian Herodotus and his accounts of nations in antiquity up until Mark Twain’s travel reports as well as, in the last century, the stylistically influential reportages of Egon Erwin Kisch, Joseph Roth and Ryszard Kapu´sci´nski. In the US, against the backdrop of two world wars the genre was newly defined as new journalism,– Truman Capote, Hunter S. Thompson and Tom Wolfe are regarded as its most important representatives. War-like conflicts, global movements of refugees, political persecution and state surveillance, natural catastrophes and epidemics have made the genre acutely relevant in recent years.»

Link: http://www.erichfriedtage.com/

61 PIERREALFÉRI:NONSEQUITUR.THEGARBLED STORY OF PRESENCE

IN BRIEF.

Our attention is torn between different tasks and multiple activities, divided between duplicate screens, diverted by the incessant allures of commercialism and while our focus disintegrates in the to and fro of urban life it is increasingly difficult for us to concentrate on literary subjects, even if they have a narrative quality. If one casts sly looks at the readers in the underground, one might think that the only impact is the addiction of suspense and immersion in chill realities promised by English-speaking and Scandinavian crime stories. That would be to overlook the new styles of reading and portable media that make handbags rather lightweight. On notebooks, tablets, ebook readers and smartphones the latest fashion is for micro-narratives – for «flash fiction» and «twitte- rature». This material is circulated on websites (such as the German-speaking www.kurzgeschichten-stories.de) and online journals and newsletters; it is the focus of competitions and exchanged among a semi-public community (with a daily mail- shot to subscribers, for example, at «365tomorrows: A New Flash of Science Fiction Every Day») and ranges across all genres from fable to science fiction. These extremely conci- se forms are optimized for new formats of text communication like 140 characters for tweets, SMS texts, emails and blogs. Some critics, especially in Latin America, even identify here «the characteristic form of literature for the 21st century». Yet are they on these grounds the new literary forms as such? What are their role models? What is their heritage? What does their success tell us about today’s expectations of a narrative? And about what an incident is for us? About what is worthy of narration? Do these extremely short stories and their «fast finish» styles offer narrative techniques a chance of renewal that corresponds to the current digital revolution? Or are they only the dust into which well-thumbed forms of narrative fiction degenerate, their worst clichés, meaningless trivial literature whose unavoidable destiny is self-destruction like time-limited messages on Snapchat? These are the sorts of questions that I would like to invite us to think about today.

62 If literature had to disappear one day, crushed by its striving for the concise form, its history would form a strange loop. This is because it also began with extreme brevity – with succinctness, set in stone. The short-lived micro-narratives that circulate on social networks are evidence of the comfort of our portable keyboards and the speed of inconsequential distribution on the Internet. The conciseness of inscriptions passed down through the centuries, which epigraphs gather together, reveals the precise opposite, namely, the painstaking technique of stone engraving with the hammer and chisel, the sacred weight lent to every word, the belief in the superhuman perpetuity of what is written in contrast with the influence of time and usage. Keeping it brief never amounted to writing a minimum. In a dedication, motto or epitaph, in a maxim or an oracle the focus was on ellipsis, concentration, tempo and elegance. In other words, it was about a dynamic economy of meaning where the inner tension gives the decisive note. The Latin «brevitas» is a virtue of discourse for which Quintilian even provides a concise definition: «Not saying less or more than is required». This is the counterpart of «copia» or «fullness» – that speaker’s device, which can be used at any time, to spin a story to compile a series of examples and platitudes. Erasmus’ extravagant annotated commentary of proverbs in «Adagia» aimed to provide a scholarly example of both. «Brevitas» works wonders when it is used in sarcasm, in attacks on authors of epigrams, yet it is also used among the best historians among whom the aptly named Tacitus ranked highly. Nevertheless, it is also useful even for narrators of stories in the context of morals, in the judgement, sentence or oracle: brevity is the soul of wit.

In fact, the forms of brevity owe most of their success to traditions of wisdom and later to the moralists. Compact, perfected rules stimulate the fantasy and are conveyed in an unbiased fashion.

Do to others, as you would have them do. Slow and steady wins the race.

The oral tradition is a mode of conservation and proverbs such as those like «immense depth of thought in popular phrases, hollowed out by generations of ants» (Baudelaire

63 in his short fragment «Rockets») often appear dull to us, like pebble stones that are too heavily worn, scarcely any less like platitudes than old proverbs about the weather. However, it suffices to apply them in a realistic situation and to coat them with our saliva to recognize one of the core elements in them that Jakobson calls the «grammar of poesy» – parallelism with all its asymmetrical effects – and to see how every word deploys the broad spectrum of meanings and connotations that have been deposited in them. The history of the pithy observation is long. It spans from the Greek «gnome» (gn[U+1E53]me)¯ to Latin «sententia», from the apophthgems of great men and characteristics of the moralist to the personal maxim of Chamfort, the philosophical fragment of the Romantics and the Nietzschean aphorism. Of course, contradictory forces are at work during this long history. Polysemy, the adaptability of the proverb and maxim, which are suitable for many purposes, was stifled by reactionary religious morals, when they were ready to merge in a collection of doctrines that is subject to a divine authority. In the «Wisdom of Sirach», in the «Imitation of Jesus Christ» or the Surahs of the Quran, the sentences become laws; their composition fossilizes and their reading becomes a duty. Playing is no longer required; learning is done by heart and by reciting.

However, the sclerotic freezing of meaning is rather the exception than the rule. The conciseness of successfully crafted phrases and their diversity tend to push moral thinking more in the other direction, towards interpretive opening and akin to old wives’ tales and the ethics of the moralists. A phantom doctrine is suspended over collections of maxims or ideas and their outlines are blurred. Long before Plato and Aristotle, the Greeks exchanged expressions of flexible and cautious wisdom, which observed opportunity and fortune, – «kairos» and «tyche». And long after the establishment of monotheistic dogmas, the scholarly disorder of the moralists’ maxims appealed to every reader’s sharp-sightedness and his or her fantasy. Their dispersion was a counterbalance to the intolerant universality of each individual, as if the principles were as abundant as the cases. The collections of these concise forms, for instance, by La Rochefoucault, Vauvenargues or Joubert, give everybody the option of finding his own way through them. Their morality is the morality of a flexible,

64 revisable guideline for behaviour in the world. As is the case in large sections of Chinese aphoristic thinking, it brings into play never-ending casuistry and an art of combination that is sensitive to «the extravagant nature of individually different human beings», as Chamfort states in the «Incipit» of his «Maxims and Thoughts». And he conceded, «What I learned I no longer know; the little I still know, I guessed.» In the realm of ethics and philosophy, concise forms seem rather to correspond to far strewn thinking that is configured like an island group. Their concentration, the high and memorable span of their train of thought is often concentrated playfully in the final words. This is referred to as a «point». The sophisticated aesthetics and ethics of the Renaissance period set great store by this. Moreover, the «point», this principle of thorough reasoning, in which Baltasar Gracian sees the art of genius itself, actually coincides with a tension of meaning that is skilfully applied, albeit in point form to the provisional. There is always a certain ambiguity involved in this case.

INCIDENT. (ÉVÉNEMENT)

This excursion far from contemporary narrative fiction was no detour. In particular, when stated in succinct terms, it implies something analogous to the «point». «Micro ficti- ons», which incorporate just a few lines or even only several words, endeavour in the overwhelming majority of cases to emphasize the incident or event that they report. They do so by adding an ironic or paradoxical nuance. A narrative point, which is no longer a «word figure», but a temporal and causal «thought figure» corresponds to the rhetorical point of the sentences. Today my telephone is faulty, my ankle is broken and I have a stiff neck. Today I stepped on my cat while going downstairs. VDM [a micro narrative «FMyLife» on the app «Vie De Merde» («Life Sucks»)]

The moon was rising when the blue steel monster started to rock and swung his long pincers high above him. He destroyed several skyscrapers and buildings. A fire broke out. The city turned a purple-red colour; it was beautiful like a sunset. Another idealist who wants to snatch the moon, I thought. (Prix Pépin d’Or 2009).

The websites and journals dedicated to the shortest stories prefer to cite Félix Fénéon and his «Nouvelles en trois lignes»

65 or Hemingway’s famous short six-word story, For Sale, Baby Shoes, Never Worn.

Unfortunately, neither narratives in the «twitterature» nor the six-word stories, which were available for me to browse on their official websites, are ever on the same level as these ad- mittedly modest examples. As these mini-short stories aim to conclude at all costs on an inventive note, they rush towards their ending that swallows everything. In the minimal space available to breathe, the meagre writing style is reduced to an art of the punchline that rapidly becomes tedious. Re- gardless of the comments from enthusiastic managers of the websites committed to these narrative miniatures, texts rarely appear, which a reputable publisher would publish and really successful texts are even scarcer. An experienced writer can certainly draw something from the drastically compact space. For example, Bruce Sterling, who writes for the science fiction anthology magazine «Wired»:

It cost too much, staying human.

However, these «new short forms» seem to me in the first place a sort of refuge for light and childish illusions, slightly naive fiction and clumsy jokes that would not be acceptable elsewhere.

The effects of the «short turn» in narrative fiction are thus not comparable with those of «brevitas» and the moral regis- ter. Often, they are even their caricatures. The micro fictions, which are entirely obsessed with the «point», generally suc- cumb to a simple punchline. The risk in this case is that a joke is the only memorable thing. In the best cases, on a small scale they integrate the classic narrative patterns of the short story and anecdote. The short-short» story, which is also known as «flash fiction» (or also «smokelong story») and only spans one or two pages is incidentally a short novella or short story or anecdote that already existed at least since the early 20th century. These two genres, which are generally widely respected, were defined in aesthetic terms and recently also statistically on the basis of their treatment of the incident (l’événement). The novella, which was mentioned by Boccaccio, thought through by Goethe and dismantled by Robert Petsch, narrates a single incident

66 through a series of different scenes. The anecdote, originally justified by the renown of its protagonist, nowadays refers to every treatment of an incident in a single scene. The narrative challenge for the related short forms lies in main- taining the probability («probabilitas») of a plot sequence on a reduced scale. The associated disadvantages, that is, for deploying any word art, as Poe correctly explained, are compensated for by the unity of attention and thus by the impression of a quasi-simultaneity of all elements.

Yet which «unique incident» is actually meant here? What deserves to be narrated, even if this is only in three lines? Our old narrative traditions – in literature just as elsewhere – set out substantial restrictions for the domain of the incident. In this context, the incident concerns a human action, which is preferably extraordinary; it is always uplifting in some way and mostly overcomes obstacles. In the basic arrangement emerging from this restriction the beginning creates an expectation that only the ending will fulfil. It poses a question whose answer it postpones. After two-thirds of the narrative a test or contradiction produces a disruption of the balance, an upset or a turning point (Wendepunkt). This central peripety – the decisive incident, the only one in the case of the short story or anecdote – leads to the resolution of the conflict due to the success (and more rarely the failure) of the hero. Actually, this scheme can be identified everywhere, as idiot-proof as it may be – and scholars of storytelling count thirty-six versions of it, divided into three, five or seven episodes, which can be altered in genres of conflict- and basic behavioural patterns. Although all literary narratives, which are worthwhile reading, deviate from this scheme, if they don’t entirely turn their back on it, it continues to structure the vast majority of published narratives whether short or long. The underlying conception of the incident merits further questioning more than the detail of its construction that merely interests screenplay authors. Hence, there is a human, unusual and instructive action, yet for peripety and resolution to occur, it must precisely follow the laws of causality and the linear continuity of time. The incident is just another element in the iron chain of causes and effects that merely stands out a little more. The narrative «point», which ultimately embellishes it, is a material irony that has settled in it: a boomerang – whoever digs a hole for others will fall into it

67 himself – or an unintended effect, a reversal of roles or a counterproductive act.

Our flash fictions, short stories or anecdotes are overwhel- mingly based on precisely this non-reflected concept of the incident, this overvaluation of human action and this laboured causalism. Rather than demanding experiments, its brevity generally exposes the old frame better than ambitious novels that allow the stereotyping of their narrative logic to be slightly overlooked due to the duplication of sub-plots. The perplexity arising from the punchline of the short stories published on flourishing websites over the past ten years is probably due to its mechanical aspect: the «point» of these stories is too blunt.

ASSASSINATION.

Félix Fénéon’s «Nouvelles en trois lignes» on the other hand aroused hopes of something entirely different and in the gap that they made in the narrative prose they opened up a view of something entirely different. This was to be nothing less than a new narrative art, and brevity was to be the lever, or as his friend Mallarmé also expressed it, its «explosion». Indeed, this concerned an «explosive» element from which something follows that I will call an «anarchistic caesura» in the history of the short story. In 1892, after banal clashes between activists and police officers in Clichy a first wave of assassinations shocked Europe. The bomber and anarchist Ravachol was arrested and was guillotined in July of the same year. The following year it was Vaillant’s turn; he committed a bomb attack on the French Chamber of Deputies. One year later a nineteen-year-old Italian anarchist stabbed and murdered the French President, Marie François Sadi Carnot, because he had not pardoned Vaillant. (The weapon’s handle was red and black.) As is widely known, it was this era – which drew to a close as the police stopped the Bonnot Gang in 1913 – that led to the emergence of an embodiment of the devil, which lost nothing of its phantasmal aura, namely that of «terrorists». However, it is less well known that anarchism was fashionable at that time with a section of the literati and artist milieu – the same circles from which the avant-garde emerged in the 20th century. As diverse writers as Oscar Wilde, Maurice Maeterlinck, Paul Verlaine, Octave

68 Mirbeau, Émile Zola and even the barely progressive Frédéric Mistral openly announced their support for this. The anarchist magazine «La Révolte» attracted prestigious writers at the very moment when Laurent Tailhade wrote a commentary in his supplement about the attack on the French Chamber of Deputies and entitled this with the famous phrase, «Who cares about the victim, if the gesture [of the violent act] is beautiful»? Although this literary fashion did not last long, in his chapter on the «Poetics of the Bomb» in his remarkable book «Fictions de l’anarchisme» Uri Eisenzweig convincingly explained how the intellectuals did not give way «in spite of», but «because» of the murderous assassination attempts. In fact, this was never stronger than at the culmination of the attacks around March 1892. How can this be explained?

Sympathy for anarchism was even more pronounced when it went hand in hand with aesthetic decisions. Fénéon invented the shortest story anew by treating the fait divers, the incident that was reported in the papers under the «sundry events» or «filler» reports, like a meteor, like a small unforeseeable and inconsequential explosion. The «Nouvelles en trois lignes» or «news in three lines» column published in the newspaper Le Matin, contains genuine miracles of «emaciated prose».

- The insolent soldier Aristide Catel with the 151st regiment aped the gestures of Corporal Rochesani. The military council of Châlons sentenced him to two years in prison!

The conciseness stimulates his inventiveness in expressive punctuation and rhythm.

- As the Lemoine from Asnières got into arrears with payments, the landlord dismantled the stairs: the fall of the children, – several metres.

The fait divers becomes a social hieroglyph: a striking, figural sign that remains enigmatic.

A young woman jumped from Saint-Cloud Bridge into the Seine. She regretted being fished out again and didn’t give her name.

The symbolists were aficionados of the «fait divers» or «sun- dry» reports. Like Roland Barthes a century later, they read

69 in them «signs whose meaning remains uncertain, [...] rich in causal deviations». André Gide inherited this fascination when he wrote legal chronicles or even Robert Musil with the arbitrary literary beginning of «The Man Without Qualities». Yet it is Mallarmé who supplies the key to this fascination in his «Grands faits divers» (1897). He declares scandalously, «Let us go straight to the future assassination», since the assassination like the «fait divers» seems to occur outside of causality like an absolute event. It happens somewhere and sometime, arbitrarily. Its murderous violence destroys it – he confesses his pity for the «maimed onlookers», yet he praises the light of epiphany, the non-causal brightness that a bomb casts over the city. In a reversal of perspectives, which one may call idealist, the implacable rejection of social laws, which anarchist assassination expresses, is for him merely the picture of rejecting aesthetic conventions that are the basis of their practice. For the author of concise prose, which he was too, this rejection is precisely one of causalist, he- roic or naturalist narration aimed at morality; a rejection of representation both in art and politics and of what he calls «redactions». Enough of the novelist mimesis, of these linear narratives and the leaked descriptions that have a whiff of history and geography lessons! More space for the incident (l’événement), the pure incident!

NO STORY.

My hypothesis is that the new art of the short story, which was borne of this violent incision (or this C-section) of anarchist terrorism, is an art of the «non sequitur» – an art of narration of events without any cause and without any final purpose. Fénéon’s work was merely the embryo of this. To release oneself simultaneously from every aetiological belief and every moral intention will always be determined by a risk, almost insanity. It means a veto of every story. «There are no stories. There have never been stories. There are only situations, having neither head nor tail; without beginning, middle or end.» Jean Epstein’s dictum has been appropriated by all, or almost all 20th century avant-gardists in art. All of them, or almost all, were against the novel. This didn’t especially disturb the novel, like a weeble toy, it is always ready to begin with another lurch forwards. Yet the avant-gardists were at least mistrusting of long, continuous

70 narratives because they were better than society as a whole at judging the traumatic and powerless nature of historical experience that was peculiar to the 20th century from the second decade when an assassination heralded a catastrophe. Teleology, the light at the end of the tunnel fades, when the replay of an event is no longer concerned with the transmission of a useful experience. «Experience», wrote Walter Benjamin in 1933, «has been devalued and that in a generation which in 1914–18 had one of the most monstrous experiences of world history.»

Although they look like fables there is nothing less uplifting than Kafka’s short stories, perhaps with the exception of Walser’s «Berlin Stories»,which Benjamin instantly understood as convalescent, indeed, post-traumatic. There is nothing less like a novel, insofar as one does not suspend it, as he later attempted, than the «Epiphanies» written by Joyce in the early 20th century to narrate the emergence of a consciousness in the violent chain of a simultaneous stream of feelings and thoughts. The absence of any kind of final purpose even became a demand in Beckett’s «Stories and Texts for Nothing» and his late short prose writings. These new-fangled short forms unify seemingly contradictory qualities from the viewpoint of meaning, which Barthes identified in the haiku and its narrative cousin, which he calls the «incident». They are immediately clear, but they also suspend «meaning» in the elevated sense of significative importance and final purpose. By emphasizing the ridiculous aspect of their content, they complete an epoché, a suspension of anticipated meaning. According to Barthes they are anti- allegorical forms.

It is not enough to erase purposefulness above the event to expose it. One must again short-circuit the partial or contorted causality that, in giving it the appearance of necessity, instils in us the illusion that it was predictable. Charles-Albert Cingrias’s drifting off, digression, indeed even going astray serves to do so just as much as those practices of his idiosyncratic predecessors, the advocates of long walks and meandering discussions with unknown persons: Dorothy Wordsworth and Thomas de Quincey. Each «Air du mois» that covered a few pages and that Cingria entrusted to the «Nouvelle Revue Française» anticipated narrative logic.

71 He jumped – often on a bicycle – from one hour, one subject, one incident to another with amazing grace and simplicity. Sometimes the real incident of the narrative happened outside, in the hiatus between two sentences, and one only experienced it afterwards, following an emergency stop. Antonio Pizzuto achieved the causal drives of language itself much more artfully, more acrobatically and ostentatiously from his hyper-concentrated, most concise prose that he devoted himself to at the end of his life. From his «Pagelle» and «Paginette» of a single piece conjugations, articles and conjugated verbs progressively disappeared and made space for an explosive stage on which objects, persons and actions collide with each other and from one another on an equal footing.

These accelerations, concentrations, clever interruptions are perhaps the «future assassination» divined by Mallarmé. In contrast to the anarchist bombs, they didn’t arouse any attention; many individuals in the literary field know nothing about their existence. They only reported events that were hardly memorable. The canary died in his cage. A boy gave his neighbour a persimmon fruit. It rained for three days without stopping. In Soseki’s «prose haikus» or later in Kawabata’s «Palm-of-the-Hand Stories» the event, which has no moral or causal importance whatsoever, was no longer even embellished with the ornament of the extraordinary or important. For it happens in everyday life. It is hidden. It passes by incognito, like everything that happens in life, except in the eyes of a few novelists like Emmanuel Bove or Henry Green who really show curiosity for small, banal incidents. At first sight they appear disappointing, though they are perhaps the invaluable secret of the everyday, of what Georges Perec called the «infra-ordinary». Something miniscule, inconspicuous and ridiculous, something that is not perceived or only unclearly – something has happened. An event that belongs to everybody and nobody and which all have in common.

However, one must say that these silent explosions have had effects on the best popular writers of short fiction since the 1950s. In Salinger’s texts with all his chance encounters with children. In Carver, in his sad marriage scenes. In Brautigan when «In Watermelon Sugar» he masses together

72 miniscule peripeties thanks to this random and sticky binding agent. These are rare and already old examples. Not so long ago in an underrated book Michelle Grangaud joined together several hundred shattering micro-events, gestures that became a «gesture», an epos of the everyday. However, that remained an isolated case.

The extremely sparse emergence of these narratives, which are not unscrambled and not resolved particularly in the genre of contemporary «flash fiction» leads me to conclude with two questions. The first is a slightly angst-ridden question: where are today’s short stories? Where are the «concise» texts that accept this challenge of the bare event,of the event disrobed of its old heroic prestige and reproduced beyond any fatal linking and any moral lesson? It will not have escaped you: the more precisely that the idea of «today’s short story» is composed, the more the difference is minimized with the prose poem. True, it can and is no longer admissible as an allegorical work like the prose poems «Treasurer of the Night» («Gaspard de la Nuit») or «Paris Spleen» («Le Spleen de Paris»). Above all, it would still be a narrative, even if this must be a betrayal of Maurice Blanchot, who ended his last story with the words, «A story? No. No stories. Never again.» However, I believe that the essential genre distinction between the shortest story and the prose poem is basically ineffective and even damaging for poetry as well as for the narrative. Some fledgling magazines like «Double Room», which are actively working for its elimination, produce texts that are more stimulating than all «smokelong stories» and perfect their plot and punchline in vain. Today’s short stories tend to be found more in the unspecific, hybrid and broken forms than in the polished miniature novels that are trimmed to a specific text length for social networks.

My second and final question relates to the chain, the series of these shortest stories – the «fix-up», as they say on «flash fiction» websites. This is obviously less serious. Creating a book, compiling an anthology is by no means of crucial importance. By definition abundant media forms are suited for conciseness. Posted, thrown on the Internet, co-aligned in magazines, read aloud in less time than it takes to smoke a cigarette, they can assert their lightness to ensure the «evanescent thoughtfulness» that according to one expert

73 is typical for readers in the underground. Nevertheless, their assembly can equally produce a new form, or rather a new experience. The juxtaposition of autonomous short stories results in an unsystematic complexity that inspires imagination and thought. The collections of classic short stories promise a genre of symbolic or thematic unity. But other collections can sketch a landscape, a fresco, a mosaic, a puzzle, a more or less close-meshed web, a constellation, a fractal or net-like structure; ultimately, the map of a world in which incidents happen everywhere without cancelling it, a world in which suspense has withdrawn behind suspension or leaving things in suspense. Exactly one hundred and fifty years ago somebody had a precise premonition of the paradox of such tortuous fantasies, namely, Baudelaire in his dedication in «Paris Spleen»:

«My dear friend, I send you here a little work of which no one could say that it has neither head nor tail, because, on the contrary, everything in it is both head and tail, alternately and reciprocally. Please consider what fine advantages this combination offers to all of us, to you, to me, and to the reader. We can cut wherever we like – me, my reverie, you, the manuscript, and the reader, his reading; for I don’t tie the impatient reader up in the endless thread of a superfluous plot. Pull out one of the vertebrae, and the two halves of this tortuous fantasy will rejoin themselves painlessly. Chop it up into numerous fragments, and you’ll find that each one can live on its own. In the hopes that some of these stumps will be lively enough to please and amuse you, I dedicate the entire serpent to you.»

(Charles Baudelaire, Paris Spleen and La Fanfarlo, translated by Raymond N. Mackenzie, Indianapolis 2008, p. 3).

Original contribution c Pierre Alféri, 2015

Lecture of Pierre Alféri(Paris). The keynote lecture of the International Literature Festival Erich Fried 2015 on the theme of «Facts and Fiction. Literary Reportages», 6 to 11 October 2015, was commissioned as a cooperative initiative of the Internationale Erich Fried Gesellschaft/Literaturhaus Vienna und ELit Literaturehouse

74 Europa/ELit Literaturhaus Europa. The text will be released online (in English) in the Observatory for European contempo- rary literature, as well as in print form in the October Festival special edition of the literary magazine «kolik» (in German).

75 WORLD NOVEL – TALK WITH PATRICK DEVILLE

Jürgen Ritte: With your novel «Pura Vida» something started that was intended as a global project. After your books, which were set in Africa and Asia, will an Australian and also a North American novel emerge?

Patrick Deville: By the end of last year I had published five novels. The publisher Éditions de Minuit stood for the Nouveau Roman, for works of 20th century experimental literature. After these five I suggested to a different publisher, Éditions du Seuil, an expansive and longer-term project... and now I’m about halfway through finishing this project. The main title will probably be «sic transit gloria mundi et caetera desunt».

This project focuses on four trilogies which means I’m working on twelve novels. In other words, I’ve devised a kind of timetable that I’ve been working on for about twenty years. Together with my publisher I’ve developed a plan that leaves about another fifteen years to run.

This project involves travelling around the world twice to different areas and writing fictionless novels; the novels are sometimes adventure novels, yet without fiction. Five have been published to date. All these titles end in «a». In brief, there are various kinds of minor constraints such as this one, however, ultimately it’s also not that difficult to find a title ending in «a». These fictionless novels are studies of geographical regions from 1860 until today. The first of this series called «Pura Vida» begins in Central America: Guatemala, Honduras, Belize, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Costa Rica, Panama and Venezuela. And Cuba! Of course, because the history of this region cannot be written without referring to Cuban history. So it all starts in 1860 with the death sentence and execution of an adventurer from the USA – i.e. the USA don’t exist yet – in 1860, he is shot on a beach in Honduras and the story continues until 2002. The present time in this book is 2002; so it covers one-and-a-half centuries of this Central American history. The following «Equatoria» is an equatorial expedition across Africa, from the Atlantic Ocean to the Indian Ocean, from São Tomé and Príncipe to Zanzibar. This initial route went from West to East and at the

76 end from «Equatoria» to Zanzibar. The novel is «Kampuchéa» and is about the region in Burma, Thailand, Laos, yet also in particular Cambodia because I also witnessed the first trials of the Khmer Rouge that began in 2009. Then comes «Peste et Choléra» which ends in modern-day Vietnam on the Pacific Coast. The counterpart is «Capulco», the last recently published part, dealing with one-and-a-half centuries of Mexican history until February 2014.

Jürgen Ritte: You referred to adventure novels, fictionless novels. This term made me extremely curious. If one refers to the «novel», the reference is also to the «imaginary», yet also to «invention». Yet that’s precisely one criticism levelled at novels that they sometimes overdo this. So what can one imagine by the concept of the fictionless novel?

Patrick Deville: Of course, that’s a simplification! The purpose is to emphasize that all characters, all locations, all dates, all events can be verified. However, of course there is also a narrator, and what really distinguishes the novel, is the language, the form, the formatting on just a few pages, because these are relatively short novels, i.e. 220 pages for every one-and-a-half centuries. What then makes it a novel is precisely what ultimately interests me about this method of working, namely, that I can make use of all literary genres. These books consist of relatively short chapters, which all have one subtitle, and make it possible for me to switch from one chapter to the next or from one literary genre to another. In other words, they contain biographies, narratives from life, historical reports, reportages, since I conducted interviews and sometimes I need a press badge; yet they also feature travel reports because mainly I don’t write about places that I haven’t been to. So I travel absolutely everywhere. The books also contain studies about the press as well as – and that involves plenty of trips to the library – many writers, great writers from the past, but also those who are still alive today. No matter where, I’m starting to read literature everywhere and to meet the relevant writers. So this contains all these literary genres, including autobiography, as there is also a first person narrator who is aging. This means that the writer who accompanies the Sandinistas in the 20th century is naturally much younger in the report, yet it concerns the same narrator who later on during the Khmer

77 Rouge trial meets Trotsky’s grandson in Mexico to talk to him about the murder of his grandfather. So there is also an autobiographical element about this as well as something of the political essay. Consequently, it includes all these literary genres and the only term that encompasses all these literary genres is the novel.

Jürgen Ritte: You mentioned the year 1860 which runs through the novels as a golden thread. Why 1860?

B: It could also have been 59 or 61, but in the year 1860 something happened. Now, I know this year all around the globe as though I had experienced it myself. That’s the moment when for the first time all peoples, all civilizations were in contact with each other and when... when no events happen any more without any global effects. We’re talking about the second industrial revolution. At this point in time primarily England, France and Germany are in competition with each other. It begins quite horribly and in a capitalist way with the idea that come what may the entire planet must be Europeanized, yet without Europe existing at all in European literature. The English are convinced that the entire planet must be British; the French that it must be French and the Germans that it must be German. At the same time there are movements like Saint-Simonianism in France with this «pre-Socialist» idea of making all the planet’s resources count for something so that everyone in the world can profit from the development of the sciences, technology and medicine. This is therefore what is meant with «Peste et Choléra», the book, which I dedicated to Louis Pasteur and his school. 1860 is the year in which Pasteur scaled the glacier in Chamonix, taking pure air samples and proving that there is no spontaneous generation, that’s the birth of bacteriology. 1860 is also the year that the French and English troops, united for the first time, conquer China and have to accept a severe defeat, instead of celebrating victory and the plunder of the summer palace – in London and Paris they’re happy to forget this, but not in Peking. Because history is long, and so is that year and this is particularly important when Ferdinand de Lesseps developed the Suez canal that, in turn, is the moment when the planet moves closer at one fell swoop and of course this changes everything. In 1860, the first passenger steamers are also built with iron hulls and

78 they navigate the Suez. Of course, this means that the planet suddenly becomes very small and this influences all events. And you see «Pura Vida» ends with the execution of William Walker on a beach in Honduras. William Walker’s intention of conquering Central America and building a transatlantic canal in Nicaragua was the reintroduction of slavery. If he had won, the whole history of the 20th century would have looked entirely different. The people in the southern states would have taken Central America and California with them. 1860 is the year when Lincoln was elected and also the start of this civil war in the United States. After William Walker’s defeat, France lets Lesseps develop the transoceanic canal in Egypt and encounters resistance from Great Britain and the United States, so France gives up and instead puts Maximilian of Austria on the throne in Mexico. The fact that in Central America the canal was moved to Panama has historical, not technical or geographical reasons. Maximilian of Austria, Emperor Maximiliano of Mexico, means another failure, since as you know in 1867 he was shot by Benito Juàrez’ men. At this time, France gives up Mexico, founding Cochinchina and Saigon instead, since in 1860 the French researcher Henri Mouhot also discovers or rediscovers the Temple of Angkor. The history of South-East Asia unfolds from the discovery of Angkor Temple to the trials of the Khmer Rouge starting in 2009. It’s a straight line; sometimes it’s drawn with the best intentions, at other times with the worst, yet it’s an absolutely straight and terrible line leading to the Khmer Rouge.

Jürgen Ritte: 1860 is therefore the emblem of what could be called a first globalization. It’s also the image of an unhappy globalization. The title «Sic transit gloria mundi» seems to be coloured by philosophical pessimism?

Patrick Deville: No, I’m not a pessimist. I’m absolutely not a ‘declinist’ and not a pessimist; you can’t write, if you’re pessimistic. Yet one must also be clear-sighted, of course, all of this is terrible. The 20th century was the most terrible time, and we’re confronted again with horrendous situations. Starting from 1860 the century is initially quite novelistic when the three nations – never spelled out in so many ways – take the decision to start colonization. Because the atlases are incomplete, there are these very nice individual stories of researchers and explorers. Although in retrospect everywhere

79 they lead to the catastrophe of colonization and then to both world wars, to the wars of decolonization, to the Cold War and the dreadful consequences of the Cold War in several of the world’s locations, up to the end of the 20th century and today’s reconfiguration which is... well, different. 1860 is a good moment to look through the telescope and to take a look at today and to determine any parallels. What particularly interests me are the revolutionary dreams, the utopias, that is, working for a better future for the world and its peoples. And there are revolutions that are oriented towards the future as well as the past, and one can also read our planet in this way. For example, young men who led the Sandanistas’ revolution risked their lives and died for Nicaragua’s freedom. On the other side we have the Khmer Rouge, their revolution for the return to simplicity. The Khmer Rouge wanted to return to the 12th century to the heyday of Angkor civilization and so they destroyed everything that was between the 12th and 20th centuries. Of course, on the one hand that included cars, books, libraries, tin cans, and on the other hand also schools, hospitals, and everything that didn’t exist in the 12th century. In fact, within four years from a quarter to a third of the population perished. And today with Daesh in the Middle East there is also the urge for revolution and with the Islamic Caliphate for the return to purity and everything that stands between these two has to be destroyed. The point is to understand where all of this comes from. The borders of the Middle East are colonial borders between France and England. The borders between Lebanon, Syria and Iraq are inherited colonial borders from the European mandates.

80 WORDANDIMAGE-TALKWITHMARGUERITE ABOUET AND YVAN ALAGBÉ

Christian Gasser: I begin with a question to Yvan Alagbé. The older of the two books, which we have selected, is entitled «Nègre Jaune». This was first published in 1995. It’s a very complex story set in France. For you, at the age of 24, it was quite natural to concentrate in your comics on the subjects of migration and exclusion. That’s something which was extremely rare back then. How did this need arise to write about the immigrant scene in France?

Yvan Alagbé: That all happened more by chance. At the time we were working on a magazine, which I edited together with a friend, Olivier Marboeuf, with whom I had founded a small publishing house. Then, something happened in my social circle and I had the idea of processing it in the form of a comic. It wasn’t autobiographical; it wasn’t about my biography, but there were true stories happening around me. The book, which I had just finished beforehand, was slightly surrealist and poetical with totally white figures, as white as paper, and then came what was going on around me, and that inspired me to «Nègre Jaune».

There was an influence from the film world,Rainer Fassbinder. Based on what was happening around me, I felt like doing something similar in the comic book genre. So it’s the interplay of various things that happened then. The cultural milieu in France in general is not really influenced by its cultural and ethnic diversity. So Olivier, whose mother is French and father was from the Antilles, and I wanted to tell the story about – well our – universe that we didn’t find in books. When «Nègre Jaune» was finally published the concept of sans-papiers wasn’t even current.

Christian Gasser: How did things – let’s say unfold – for you Marguerite Abouet? Was it natural for you to develop a graphic novel that is set in Africa and tells the story of your culture?

Marguerite Abouet: In the beginning I did it to please. I arrived in France aged twelve and I had left a very lively district in Africa. Now, I lived in Paris on the sixth floor

81 and didn’t know my neighbours. They were all white and I wanted them to open their door to me and I can say to them that I’m totally normal and nice and that they can live together very well with me. So I began to tell stories about my country, about the people who live in my country, and I needed to emphasize that we’re the same as the people in Paris. Don’t be afraid of me; I speak French, even if I had a thick accent back then! I loved sausage baguettes, in France especially. My mother had said to me: don’t cry, in France you’ll be able to eat sausage baguettes, your favourite dish.I thought that all French people are white, almost naked and well, I was very disappointed when I arrived in Paris. So I told the story about a happy land, totally normal people in Africa...

Christian Gasser: When you say tell the story, do you mean literally verbally or already in the form of telling a written story?

Marguerite Abouet: Verbally, in the first instance, because I had no claim whatsoever to be published. Writing is not a passion; it’s more a therapy for me. Incidentally, what I write is very nostalgic. I come from a country or at least a family in which people told each other stories; they didn’t read stories aloud to us. My parents never held a book in their hands... that’s not part of our culture. But I had a maternal grandfather who invited us to his house every two months during the long holidays; there were about thirty grandchildren waddling through the village with our parents. They were rid of us for two months and back then our villages still had no electricity, no running water and also no television. And this grandfather gathered us around the fire – it’s a massive cliché, but I’m sticking to it. Our grandfather was our television; he told us stories, tales in which people and animals live together, and in the end there was always a moral to make us better... This grandfather taught me how to tell stories and I’m grateful to him for this. When I arrived in France and only saw white faces, I wondered: Will you like me? So I told stories, for instance, that I chased lions in the forest with my grandfather, and I showed them my snake bites...

82 Christian Gasser: In «Aya» it’s about the normal life of three teenagers who are fourteen years old and live their daily lives, which is certainly comparable with the daily routine for young European teenagers with all their loves, disappointments and dreams of the life ahead of them. For you was this a consciously chosen way of communicating to your readers in France a different image of Africa?

Marguerite Abouet: The tendency is to dehumanize all immigrants... My dictum is that these people were born there somewhere; they lived there and now they are migrants for good or bad reasons. At least, it was important for me to say that these people arrive as human beings.

Christian Gasser: «Aya» is set in the 1970s and not in today’s Africa. Why did you need this distance? Couldn’t you narrate these stories in Africa today because the Ivory Coast has changed so much over the past 40 years?

Marguerite Abouet: Nostalgia has a role to play. And then, yes, you have to say that back then the Ivorians didn’t need a visa to come to France. We had this freedom to come over. Ivory Coast was a country that was thriving, where there was compulsory education with good healthcare and the great crisis only happened in the 1980s and 1990s. From this time onwards the borders were closed.

In «Aya» I was really juggling massively because even if I set these stories in the late 1970s, all these themes that I set up are still current today and the language is Ivorian slang. That’s Africanized French with humour – that’s how the young people, who invented it, describe it.

Christian Gasser: And in «Aya» why do you avoid politics about the big, important questions?

Marguerite Abouet: No, I don’t avoid them... «Aya» is a fiction or auto-fiction even because this area is my birthplace, and I know the residents, so it’s a fairly exact version of their stories. There was a time in their works when African writers only told facts about all these problems in Africa and then it was still about... Africa’s in a bad way, a very bad way and there are no solutions. My parents live there, my friends, I have brothers and it’s not true that the whole of

83 Africa wants to come to Europe. And I wanted to say that. I love this country; I have my life here, but as an immigrant these images of Africa disturbed me. They have betrayed my country and the population that goes about daily life here. I’m not pessimistic because I come from a country where one... laughs about everything, even about what isn’t funny. The people live; the people are happy and I don’t know how you tell sad stories. But I’m making a political statement with «Aya». Because I’m talking about education and female emancipation, about immigration...

Christian Gasser: Ivan Alagbé, how much personal experience is in your work?

Yvan Alagbé: No matter what story I’m telling I’m always ab- solutely involved in it because it’s what interests me. When narrating stories, of course, then it’s also about experiencing a different reality. I’ve never had the idea of making something about myself. I prefer trying to put myself in other people’s position and to try to approach them from within. So he’s part of me, indeed, he’s... everywhere; he’s included in all the figures, for example, like Flaubert and Madame Bovary. When reading «Nègre Jaune» some people recognized me again in the male main protagonist, but I can equally identify with him and with his girlfriend who incidentally possibly emerged from real persons... and also from experience with my own girlfriends, so all of this is a mixture, there are no real dividing lines.

Christian Gasser: That means it’s highly complex, even in the book «L’école de la misère» there are different narrative levels, plenty of possible ways of reading it. In «L’école de la misère», in particular, the relationship between a white woman and an African man is the focal point as well as the parents’ colonialist past. How do you develop this style of narrative and how do you find the language or rather the right tone to deal with this kind of complex problem?

Yvan Alagbé: My mother is French and my father African. That makes it a story that I already carry within me. My mother had me very... I don’t know... on my parent’s wedding photos there are my grandmother, my mother’s sisters, my other grandmother, but not my grandfather. And well, that

84 never shocked me, but the fact that my grandfather wasn’t there is because he didn’t agree with this marriage and with the fact that his daughter married a black man... That was something that he couldn’t accept. On the other hand, he accepted us, i.e. I never had any problems with him and that didn’t necessarily taken on a dramatic dimension. So I always felt happy in my mother’s family. But it wasn’t automatic and that was difficult for my mother. And that’s simply a story that is very present within me, and I would say is also very present in reality. These various levels are what get very close to me. I’m not an immigrant. I was born in France. My father on the other hand was an immigrant. I don’t see myself from this perspective. But I try to approach these subjects with the tools of fiction, an artistic creation. When one reflects that actually these are fairly complex things, for example, the figure of Claire, a young white woman who has fallen in love with an illegal African immigrant who has no identity papers. In «L’école de la misère» she finds out that her grandparents, that is, her grandfather spent... part of his youth in Africa and so she finds out by chance that she has a much older connection to Africa then she thought. A really existing person e.g. inspired me to this – my ex-girlfriend. She experienced that; one day she had to make a decision... because her family rejected her, then to find out later that in her family there were members with this connection. So things come quite naturally... it happened in exactly the same way in «Nègre Jaune» where there is also one protagonist, an Algerian who had decided to be on the side of the French, so of course he was totally rejected by the Algerians who wanted independence. His actual tragedy was that he was equally rejected by France and was dropped. Then he comes into contact with illegal African immigrants, until one day he says I’m also black. I’ll try to join in with them. So he opens himself to a kind of panorama of colonial history... it’s something that’s very strongly anchored in French reality. It’s just the way it is.

Christian Gasser: Marguerite Abouet emphasizes that she would like to be entertained, she wants to be liked and that she’s an optimist. On the other hand, your narratives tend to be more difficult, even morbid in some way.

85 Yvan Alagbé: To borrow Patrick Deville’s words... we don’t have the right to be pessimistic. No, I’m not at all pessimistic. How often have people told me that what I’m doing has nothing to do with a comic because comics are there to entertain. For me it’s the other way around. What I really want is to work on this kind of subject. But I don’t find that morbid or pessimistic. Books are just not real life, so you can afford to explore something...

Marguerite Abouet: I didn’t say that the point is for me to be entertained. I said I began to tell stories to be liked. But «Aya» doesn’t necessarily have anything to do with it; it’s about representing modern, urban African everyday life.

Christian Gasser: I would very much like to talk about your personal experience as an immigrant because one of the most touching volumes of «Aya» is the arrival. It’s about the arrival of one of Aya’s friends in Paris. The homosexual hairdresser, Innocent, resembles Michael Jackson. Although you’re not a hairdresser part of your personal experience is reflected in this character. You mentioned the Pasqua Laws... You entered France without a visa and suddenly needed a residence permit to be allowed to stay. You became so to speak sans-papiers.

Marguerite Abouet: Exactly, I became a person sans-papiers.I arrived in Paris, was sent into the 7th class and so continued my schooling entirely normally. I didn’t even feel myself to be foreign; I had this language and actually it is very important. Being foreign isn’t a question of the colour of one’s skin; it was about sharing the French language – it was enough for me to be French. Now, after the Abitur I had to enrol at university and then I was stopped by the French administration because they asked me: but do you have a residence permit? Until then, that had never concerned me. I said, «No», and they replied, «Then you’re illegal.» This famous Pasqua law had no decree and no clause was designed for us – the children who arrived as minors. So they couldn’t regulate us, yet nor could we be given identity papers. We only had the right to be in France; we couldn’t enrol, and we couldn’t work either... back then black labour was in high demand, so I worked illegally a lot. I was an au pair, I read aloud to old people. So I did everything, but

86 I couldn’t enrol at university. That was the moment when I said to myself that I come from somewhere else.

So I think the famous question arises: why do you leave your country? In the hope of a better life or out of curiosity? In my book I wanted to show that not everyone comes only because he or she... because back home there is poverty or war... Innocent lives in France because he says to himself: for me the white people have the freedom primarily to be allowed to be homosexual. While in Africa that’s taboo. But in France at least at that time it was just as difficult to be homosexual. So Innocent, you could say, is my Candide who is similar to me, because Aya isn’t like me; she’s too perfect. She’s almost too good to be true. I’m not Aya; on the other hand I’m Innocent. Michael Jackson emerges because I was a fan of Michael Jackson. I danced; I can dance like him, that’s why I definitely wanted him to be like Michael Jackson. At least, there is something of Innocent in me. I arrived in France very unhappy because I didn’t want to go to France. I think I’m the only immigrant who didn’t ask for this, at least not to come to France. I was torn from this country against my will – this beloved country, torn away from this family and in the beginning I had to talk myself into everything being super great. Innocent arrives and of course the French are very, very nice. Everything’s going well and he uses the escalator. All Africans stumble on these escalators... And they get lost in the Paris Metro because they spend their time finding the right way. Then Innocent also arrives with this African culture where one meets older people respectfully... we call them all the old woman or the old man... and he notices that here you don’t call the old people old people, but that this is more derogatory, so he somehow discovers another culture. He has to get involved with it all... Taking it optimistically because he says to himself: I’m in this country. And again there’s this concept of immigrant, integration – I don’t especially like any of this. Integration is a concept that I don’t like, but I really like acceptance because people accept each other. People are not obliged to like each other, but at least to respect and accept each other. So Innocent does everything to be accepted.

Christian Gasser: It’s also interesting that «Aya» was pu- blished in French. It was also published in the Ivory Coast.

87 There’s a whole story connecting you with the Ivory Coast that led to founding this library in Africa...

Marguerite Abouet: So «Aya» to tell the short anecdote was published in France and at the book signings only white people stood in line and waited for a dedication – I already found that really alarming. The illustrator of «Aya» was a white man and so only white people waited in the queue. Then mixed couples gradually turned up and then towards the end people with different skin colours. And one day I was signing in Abidjan and it was just the same – only expats were standing in the queue. I told myself – it can’t be true, after all, I’m in Africa and only expats are coming because the book is expensive and those who could afford it were expats, or perhaps even Ivorian children who attended French schools. I was already slightly frustrated, so I returned to Paris and met Gallimard and said to them that we had to do something... it’s actually very strange telling such a positive story about Africa without the Africans being able to buy it. So we created a reasonably priced paperback format for Francophone Africa. And suddenly «Aya» had a massive presence in Africa, but it wasn’t enough because parents came to me and complained that 4,000 francs, 4,500 francs were still a lot of money... and 4,000 francs... how much is that – that’s eight Euros – that’s a lot, and we can’t give this to our children as gifts. Then I said to myself, if I can’t gift «Aya» to every African household then I can simply set up libraries where all kinds of books,not only «Aya» are available to these children. So I established the club «Livres pour tous» and now two large libraries in the Ivory Coast. They are youth libraries and aimed at age groups from nursery to the Abitur and they are located in the simple workers’ districts. And it’s unbelievable what’s happening there because there are plenty of supervised activities, about 1,600 children are enrolled here and I have two others in Dakar. And my aim is to open even more in other African countries.

Christian Gasser: To conclude I would like to ask about the means of expression, the comic. Marguerite Abouet, you wanted to become a writer and today you write your own television series, you’re also working on a film project. What could this facilitate for you for all these stories, what did it achieve for you to describe this kind of story that you wanted

88 to tell? What would, e.g. the short story, novels or even a film not have been able to offer? What was so to speak the advantage or the bonus of the comic?

Marguerite Abouet: Well, first of all, I find it appeals to all generations. The comic is something that you read with your child, then the child reads it alone, then the book matures, at least the comic. At the outset I wanted to tell my story to the children, but anyone who says child of course also says parents because the parents are the ones who read the stories to their children at the start. Plus, the pictures are very impressive. And because I really wanted to show everyday life of the Africans, by using pictures you can show that they have cars, that they have nice houses, that they don’t all wear clothes like Kirikou. Personally, I needed the picture and I found that the comic is a very interesting medium because it makes it possible to describe exactly. It also interested me because I think that if I had written a novel, then this novel would have gone under in a flood of other novels and the pictures are what make the comic instantly attractive.

Christian Gasser: How are you working to create these pictures, or rather, who do you guarantee that these pictures, which you wanted to show, are also exactly as you intended. Just now you mentioned that your illustrator was white. He isn’t African...

Marguerite Abouet: Yes, exactly, he’s not African.

Christian Gasser: How do you work with him to create this African world?

Marguerite Abouet: Well, first, I took him with me to Africa... I think the Yopugoun commune is so special; it’s a cosmo- politan district where there are already immigrants from the Ivory Coast and thanks to its immigrants from the Dimitrov countries this country developed. And Senegalese, Cameroo- nians and all kinds of people were living in this district. My illustrator had to experience the atmosphere personally because there’s something here that is very different from other African cities... In Abidjan at least there are all these made-up females, so he had to sit among these made-up females and drink beer and to experience flirting from all

89 these young girls... he did a really good job of capturing them in pictures. Exactly, he really had to be influenced, at least by this heat... I always have a notebook with me when I work, I don’t just write... I do the first division, so I already translate what I want to narrate into pictures; I define the background scene in each case and I take plenty of pho- tos. Because everything that Clément illustrates is based on genuine background scenes and we use a lot of photos as models. Incidentally, I work in cafés. I like working in the Metro – it’s a source of inspiration for me. In Paris there’s a Metro line that runs from the Mairie de Montreuil right across Paris as far as Pont de Sèvres... Mairie de Montreuil is a workers’ district where you encounter the whole world, then around the République and Oberkampf area there is the Bobo district, and the further you travel on this line, number 9, towards the last stop the more bourgeois people you’ll see. I only travel on this Metro line and I only travel to work, to write with this line. I sit down and let things take their course. You see this mix of the population, a mother from Mali alongside a woman wearing a fur – that’s brilliant and the stories emerge within me; I need these people to be able to write. The novels of this world are more solitary, more cerebral... loneliness, no,... for me at least this noise is very important.

Christian Gasser: Ivan Alagbé, you also have several talents, and you’re interested in different forms of literature and art. Why specifically the comic?

Yvan Alagbé: Well, first of all, because it all began with that. I read the first comic before I read novels or essays, before I went to the cinema or got interested in painting. Actually that does play a central role. I already drew as a child. First, I copied characters that I liked, and at some point I started to devise scenes or to draw the same figure several times, I wanted to develop something further, so that’s really my natural means of expression. I never asked myself the question whether I should do something else. On the one hand, I wouldn’t have the self-confidence to sit down and write, and to create a book that only consists of words – incidentally, the same also applies for images. I have never done illustrations or painting. I don’t do any illustrations. I don’t draw, or virtually not at all, apart from narrative

90 intentions. For me, it’s a medium that’s simply very close, very close to reality. If you see us here today, good, then there’s a body, there are discussions and the comic makes it possible for you just to add something extra to everything... the text in the comic isn’t necessarily the language. It can also be a thought; it can be a lot of things. In any case I find it’s a means that you can do lots with. For me it’s rather the other forms that are slightly restricted. So for me it’s totally natural to do this; it’s a very complete form and for me it’s at least the same as it always was. For me it’s the language, yes, it’s a language... a natural language... when you learn to read it you learn it with images and text, so there’s already the connection there between the two. And also from a historical viewpoint, long before people could print things and had the capacities to print lots of pictures... the association of picture and text is very old. Painting a picture and also narrating a story to match this is something that we’ve already been doing as long as people can remember. And the connection between language, so literature and reality and what we see is inscribed in language. And for me the comic simply makes all this possible. Then, in the very extensive inside you naturally still find this and that and also other forms. You can do an incredible amount of things and that’s what interests me about the comic. That’s also the reason why I don’t necessarily see the comic as something that you have to fill with content. That’s done a lot today. People create graphic reportage, that’s right, it’s very practical. You can save numerous pages, descriptions that even if they’re very exact you don’t really understand well, that’s why you create an illustration.

When I’m reading, reading a novel, or when I’m reading a comic where there’s no text, but only pictures, then for me that’s... well... I don’t think at all that the comic is a special form of literature, but actually it’s more the opposite.

(Translated by Suzanne Kirkbright)

91 POSTS FROM THE «OBSERVATORY» (3)

WAY AHEAD OF POLITICS: LITERARYBRIDGEBETWEENBELGRADEANDPRISTINA by Saša Ilic – Nov 29, 2015

With a thirty-year delay, on 25th August 2015 the Prime Ministers of Serbia and Kosovo signed four agreements in Brussels, as part of the Brussels negotiations on normalization of the relationship between Belgrade and Pristina. Namely, the following agreements were signed – on Association of Serbian municipalities in Kosovo, on telecommunications, on power supply systems, as well as on the bridge over Ibar in the divided town of Mitrovica. The bridge is a border rather than a link, representing communication breakdown between Albanian and Serbian communities in Kosovo. We have yet to see if these agreements will bridge the existing gap, but a much more stable bridge between Serbia and Kosovo had already been built some time ago, before political negotiations became part of the Brussels agenda.

The fabrication of negative stereotypes between Serbs and Albanians has a long history. In Serbia, it dates back to 1844 and Ilija Garašanin’s «confidential» document which shaped both Serbian domestic and foreign policies in the 19th century, through to Vasa Cubrilovi´c’sˇ memorandum in 1944 for resolving «The Problem of Minorities in the New Yugoslavia», all the way to the Serbian Academy of Arts and Science’s Memorandum in 1986. It’s worth mentioning that the author of 19th century programme was the then Minister of Internal Affairs, and that the Memorandum from the late 20th century was the work of academics and social scientists. Given that the very essence of the two documents – in the ideological terms – is almost identical, it should be questioned how it is possible that the Serbian intellectuals in the 80s were thinking pretty much in the same vein like the Minister of Police – or in many aspects even more negatively – 150 years earlier.

The book «Serbs and Albanians Through the Centuries» by Petrit Imami,among other things,meticuluosly takes account of the cultural exchange between the two nations. Translation of the works by Serbian writers started immediately after

92 the Second World War. Radovan Zogovi´c was the first author published in Albanian (Poems of Ali Binak) in the literary magazine Novi život/New Life. The first translated books from Serbian were children’s books (1950). The first translated novel from an already established author was «Impure Blood» by Borisav Stankovi´c in 1953, and from contemporary writers it was «Far Away is the Sun» by Dobrica Cosi´c´ in 1954, the year when Cosi´c´ received the NIN Award. Books by Branislav Nuši´c, Ivo Andri´c, Meša Selimovi´cand others were translated shortly after. On the other hand, Albanian writers were represented for the first time in Serbian language in the anthology from 1951 Kosmet writes and rhymes. In 1962 a selection of poetry Poems, bitter and proud by Albanian poets was translated into Serbian by Esad Mekuli. The last more comprehensive selections of literature from Kosovo written in Albanian were published in the 70s: Rain in a Legend – contemporary Albanian poetry in Kosovo, selected by the great poet Ali Podrimje from Kosovo and published in 1972, and Trees – selection of stories by Albanians in Yugoslavia, selected by Hasan Mekuli (1977).

However, after the mass prostests of Kosovo Albanians in Pristina in 1981, the interest dramatically declined on both sides not only for the literary production, but for the cultural production «on the other side» in general. During the 80s, one of the rare Albanian writers still published in Serbia was Vehbi Kikaj. His children’s book «White Palace» was included in the primary school literature curriculum. The last edition of this book was published in 1989. From that moment up untill Slobodan Miloševi´c’s regime was overthrown, only two more books by Kosovo Albanians had been translated into Serbian. Both are poetry collections – one is «Call me by your name» by Flora Brovina (2000), the poet who was imprisoned in 1999, and the other is «Freedom of Horror» by Dzevdet Bajraj (2000). In the 1990s all cultural exchange between Belgrade and Pristina was halted. In line with Slobodan Miloševi´c’s repressive policies in Kosovo, not a single book was translated from Albanian during the 1990s. However, there was one book that was translated from Serbian into Albanian: the diary of the Miloševi´c’s wife, Mirjana Markovi´c’s «Night and Day» (1996), whose translation and distribution was financed directly by the Serbian Ministry

93 of Foreign Affairs. In such impossible circumstances, only the Center for Cultural Decontamination managed to organise and host an exibition of contemporary artists from Kosovo in 1997.

A «new wave» of literary translations had to wait until 2011, when the Belgrade’s publication Beton and Qendra Multimedia in Pristina collaborated on two anthologies – «From Pristina,with love» (selection of contemporary literature in Kosovo) and «From Belgrade, with love» (contemporary short story in Serbia). International Literature festival POLIP (https://polipfestival.wordpress.com) was founded in Pristina in 2012, where the authors from the two anthologies met for the first time. Also, writers’ residence programmes in Pristina and Belgrade started bringing together two literary scenes, something that was unthinkable until recently. The collection of poems «Beasts Love the Fatherland» by Arben Idrizi, Albanian poet from Kosovo, was published in 2013 by Beton in the TonB series. Idrizi’s poetic voice is one of the most authentic on Kosovo’s contemporary literary scene. He writes poetry in the aftermath of the 1999 conflict – about transition and the horrendous shadows of the war. As a contributor to Pristina’s newspaper Express, Idrizi caused uproar in 2013 with his sharp critique of Kosovo’s recent past. At the same time when Idrizi’s book was published in Belgrade, Miloš Živanovi´c’s exquisite poetry collection «Poetry of Dogs» (translated into Albanian) was out in Kosovo. The two poets participated in POLIP and their joint interview was published in newspapers, both in Pristina and Belgrade.

By publishing the anthology of contemporary plays «One Flew Over the Kosovo Theatre» (LINKS, Belgrade) and the memoir «Kosovo and the Demise of Yugoslavia» by Shkelzen Maliqi, the leading intellectual in Kosovo, the process of peace- building and understanding has been continued between the two, until recently, separated worlds. This year’s «Romeo and Juliet», the Serbian-Albanian theatre collaboration and coproduction of Radionica integracije/Integration Workshop from Belgrade and Qendra Multimedia from Pristina, had its premiere in Belgrade and it was then shown in Pristina too. This theatre collaboration may be seen as an event made possible by the literary bridge that was established in the recent years between Belgrade and Pristina.

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THEFUTUREOFOURLIVINGLITERATURE: EUROPEASACONTINENTOFCOLLABORATION by Steven J. Fowler – Mai 7, 2015

I’ve said this often, and often to consternation, but I believe poetry, & literature in general, lends itself to collaboration as language does conversation, for it is in poetry we are renovating the living space of communication, and this in itself is a collaborative act. I believe the poet comes up against something other than themselves in the writing of every poem, and in the shaping of every fragment of language there is a response taking place. What I’ve tried to do, to inculcate cross-European collaboration, is to bring about and showcase original, dynamic examples of what is produced when the other in question is the equally avid mind of another poet, and not a fleeting experience or emotion. And specifically, in the case of the Enemies project, another poet who happens to be from a place different than our own.

Since our first event in 2010, the «Enemies» project has curated 100 events, 9 exhibitions, in 16 nations, involving over 400 poets, writers and artists. So far projects like «Wrogowie» in Poland, «Auld Enemies» in Scotland, «Feinde» in Austria, «Yes But Are We Enemies?» in Ireland and many others have seen new poetic collaborations, tours and readings across Europe. These dynamic and ever shifting engagements have emphasised local writing communities, bringing together core touring poets with locally based poets, all of whom are collaborating and creating brand new work. The Enemies project has thus taken its ideas around the continent, travelled them, in physical space, always emphasising the importance of openness and exchange through collaboration and originality.

The fact is the tradition modes of «translated» poetry are the bedrock of literature exchange across our nations, through festivals, readings and the tirelessness of translators, but this is no longer enough in a new age of easy travel and rapid communication technology. Beyond these rarefied

95 remakings of literature across our continent’s languages, where some countries are open and some, more decidedly closed (I am looking to my own shores here...), there lies collaboration. New works, written over and under languages, in new forms, shapes and styles. Even if one rejected the aesthetic possibilities of collaboration for an artform not often associated with it, what cannot be denied is that collaboration succeeds in building human relationships that last. They create immediate dialogue, they bring communities of writers together and they build friendships. This, more than anything, is the aim of the Enemies project, a name for a project pioneering experimentation, innovation and collaboration, with its tongue firmly in its cheek, for what must we keep closer than our Enemies?

As the next year unfolds, and British poets collaborate with Croats, Austrians, Welsh, Slovaks & more, under the guise of the Enemies project, I hope to write further on this blog about what foundations can be laid between our nations and cultures through our literature made new in collaborative writing.

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YES,ITDOESWORK!ONTHEARTESERIES«WRITERSOF EUROPE» by Katja Petrovic – Nov 2, 2015

It’s well known that literature and television are difficult to reconcile. When you’re reading you embark on a quiet and leisurely journey to an imaginary realm, but the TV viewer expects entertainment with appealing images, eloquent wri- ters and brief commentaries. It’s open season for all clichés. For example, in the German literary show «Druckfrisch» the young, attractive Austrian writer Vea Kaiser – she landed a bestseller with her novel «Blasmusikpop» («Wind Music Pop») set in a mountain village in her home region – is seen with the backdrop of an Alpine plateau. (1)

It’s cold up there at high altitude, and the writer’s mini-skirt flutters in the wind, which sometimes blows so strongly, that you can hardly understand the interview. Other writers lean against trees, or they’re filmed out of focus, as they stroll

96 along the beach lost in thought. «Druckfrisch» host Denis Scheck even climbed into the pool with Kristof Magnusson, and the presenter was still wearing a suit and tie to rabbit on at the Arctic Circle about literature and life in Iceland. (2)

Currently, Michel Houellebecq probably rejects this kind of production in the most radical way. This summer he rebuffed the left-wing liberal daily Le Monde, which wanted to publish a six-part summer series about him, and wrote in an email, «I’m not talking to you», and threatened a lawsuit if anything were to be published about his private life. On the «cc» list, from Michel Onfray to Bernhard Henri Levy, he included all reputable Paris intellectuals whom he also asked to refuse to talk to the newspaper. That’s because Houellebecq has long since taken over his own production, as shown in his film, «Die Entführung des Michel Houellebecq» («The Kidnapping of Michel Houellebecq»), which was presented at the Berlinale in 2014. Self-ironical and with Houellebecq’s own style of poetry the writer puts himself in the hands of amateurish petty criminals whom he befriends and openly chats about politics, society and literature. It’s an enthralling writer’s portrait. (3)

Currently, the documentary series «Writers of Europe» pres- ents much less comic, through extremely informative profiles of the lives and experiences of writers in which popular authors talk about their home (4). Bernhard Schlink, Orhan Pamuk, Petros Markaris or Jorn Riehl explain how they see history and the present-day in Germany, Turkey, Greece or Denmark – without relying on the usual clichés. And Henning Mankell, Katarina Mazetti, Sara Stridsberg and Jonas Khemiri put the picture in context that many Europeans have of snow-white Sweden, the land of equal opportunities, where the economy is booming, and unemployment or xenophobia hardly still exist. In contrast, Jonas Khemiri, who became well known for his novel «Das Kamel ohne Höcker» («The Camel with Two Humps», filmed in 2007), reveals his experience as a half-Tunisian in Stockholm where he was arrested on the street because of his long black hair.

Martine Saada, arte’s chief cultural editor, explains, «We want to put an end to the idea that a writer lives cut off from the rest of the world and writes his novel. In this series, we’re

97 interested in the critical consciousness of many writers about history, politics and society in their country. Perhaps they don’t explicitly write about this in their work, but naturally it has an influence on their language.»

The episode about Austria shows how much, for instance, Catholicism, Conservatism and the contradiction between the former world power and today’s small state influence the language and work of Robert Menasse, Josef Winkler and Arno Geiger. Then the writers Mário de Carvalho, Lídia Jorge, Gonçalo M. Tavares and Mia Couto introduce viewers to their homeland, Portugal. On Wednesday 28 October the journey then continued to Romania.

(Translated by Suzanne Kirkbright)

(1) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=owXRfhfr7Mw (2) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YKrKCehHLpE (3) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7-Ap1g83Dg4 (4) http://www.arte.tv/guide/de/051138–000/europa-und- seine-schriftsteller-griechenland-erzaehlt-von/

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NOVELSWITHOUTFICTIONS by Jürgen Ritte – Oct 19, 2015

As the French writer Patrick Deville occasionally muses his stories are basically «novels without fictions». Deville is the author of brilliant continental investigations, reportages, historical novels, there is no real conception of his genre. One example of such a ‘novel without fiction’ is his «Equatoria» (2009,a cultural-historical and political portrait of Africa and its colonizers). Although Patrick Deville may not be represented in this rentrée (and this brings to mind Ricco Bilger’s recently released German translation of Deville’s hitherto much underrated novel «Kamupchéa», a magnificent journey through time across East Asia), he seems to have supplied the key word. Rarely have French writers quit the world of fiction in such numbers, and with such appetite for narrating stories, to tough it out in the realms of pure facts.

Delphine de Vigan’s work «D’après une histoire vraie» («Inspi- red from a true story») appears to set a trend here. After the

98 surprise success of«Rien ne s’oppose à la nuit» («Nothing Holds Back the Night», translated by George Miller 2013), a novel that already left behind pure fiction too, the writer grappled with the pressures of fame. She now recounts this «true story» – but how true is it? Perhaps, autofiction or autobio fiction are appropriate words – in this genre, of course, Christine Angot is relevant again («Un amour impos- sible»/An impossible love). She has the eternally recurring same story (mother doesn’t notice that daughter, i.e. Angot, was abused by father) and her eternally same style – «as dry and unenjoyable as a zwieback on a cruise ship» («Le Canard enchaîné», the satirical weekly) – but in the case of Philippe Jaenada things are entirely different.

In «La petite femelle»(The little female), he tells the tragic story of Pauline Dubuisson both grippingly and also keeping his distance. In 1953, Dubuisson was sentenced to death in France for the murder of her lover; she was treated as Messalina, as a «femme fatale», by a sensation-seeking and misogynous press. French cinema had already taken an interest in the material: in Henri-Georges Clouzot’s film «La Vérité» (The Truth), Brigitte Bardot plays the character of Pauline Dubuisson. When she was fourteen Pauline already had a relationship with a German navy marine during the German occupation of her native Brittany. Later in Dunkirk she was a German military doctor’s lover – he was decades older than her. After the liberation came the all too familiar scenario: a furious mob pulls her onto the street, rips off her clothes, shaves her head, tattoos her body with swastikas – and she only narrowly escapes the lynch mob. Jaenada allows justice for the fate of this woman, and in doing so he also illustrates the atmosphere in post-war France. French critics call this genre ‘exofiction’ where writers assume real-life destinies.

In «Eva», Simon Liberati conjures up another woman’s fate both as a victim and unattainable object of desire. The subject is the real Eva Ionesco, who even as a young child was fixed up by her mother as an erotic photo object, and after much erring and straying in the Parisian nightclub jungle at some point landed in the arms of the writer who worshipped her. A danger of this genre is naturally that one or the other individual may feel his or her personal rights

99 infringed upon. So Eva’s mother then also turned up and was asked to appear in court but was dismissed. This kind of frustration should be spared with Belgian writer Patrick Roegiers, even if he gets dangerously close to a holy cow. In his thrilling narrative, «L’Autre Simenon»(The Other Simenon) we make the acquaintance of the embarrassing brother of big Georges. His name was Christian, and he was a member of the Rexist government, the Belgian version of the fascists, and Nazi collaborators. In 1945 after the liberation he was condemned to death because of his participation in shooting 27 hostages (including the town priest in Charleroi). He fled to France and found sanctuary in the Foreign Legion; he was killed several years later in Indochina. An addendum to this episode from Europe’s dark past was that over a twelve-year period Christian’s granddaughter Geneviève, a doctor, faced prosecution in a Brussels court for of the murder of her partner. As ‘explanation’ of her deed she cited, among others, that her great-uncle Georges Simenon was guilty of everything and that all the bad influence in the family originated from him. True, the inventor of Inspector Maigret always tried to flee the irritating shadow of the past and carefully covered the tracks of his early years...

Xavier Mauméjean’s fantasy «Kafka à Paris»seems more harmless in its bid to tease out something – with extremely dubious results – from the meagre evidence of Max Brod’s and Franz Kafka’s Parisian journey in September 1911. A bulky illustrated volume by Hartmut Binder with exhaustive material on this topic has been around for a number of years and this offers enough information for dreams and speculation. Yasmina Khadra («La dernière nuit du Raïs»/Dictator’s Last Night) and Bernard Chambaz («Vladimir Vladimirovitch») focus on the truly big, yet also disproportionately more dangerous fish. Khadra spends the last nights inside the brain of the Libyan dictator Muammar Gaddafi and serves up, with exquisite skill, a multifaceted distillate from the life and thought of the revolutionary leader. Chambaz dares to tackle Putin – and the subject of Russia in general, perhaps a programme that is too vast.

For the genre «novels without fictions» or «exofictions», if you must, Laurent Binet takes the biscuit with «La septième fonction du langage»(The Seventh Function of Language).

100 The title, an allusion to a famous essay by the great linguist Roman Jakobson, sounds like an album from the classic French comic hero Blake & Mortimer. The two heroes, a bourgeois inspector – think: a cheap version of the brilliant MI6 officer Blake – and a PhD scholar and semiologist – think: pocket book edition of the Oxbridge Professor Mortimer – investigate the death of Roland Barthes in the French intellectual milieu of the early 1980s. They all feature – Foucault, Derrida, Althusser, Kristéva... –, even politicians like President Giscard d’Estaing and President-in-waiting François Mitterrand... Barthes didn’t just collide by accident with a laundry van on 25 February 1980, but he was deliberately run over! And this is about the only fiction, the intentionality of the ‘accident’, which Binet grants himself. The rest is vouched for in one or the other form. That the entire episode becomes supreme fun is because Binet, as a teachable pupil of semiology, has first learned to read and lay tracks (and therefore he can write a crime thriller), and on the other hand presents all of the acting characters in their sign functions, as ciphers, even as labels, as we perceive them in today’s intellectual landscape, not as psychologically complex characters. They are characters of an intelligent comic in which the familiar figures of Dupond und Dupont from Tim and Struppi appear with their umbrellas and disguised as Bulgarian killers.

This rentrée has a wealth of highlights in store: Mathias Enard’s confrontation of the real Orient with the Orient of our dreams in «Boussole» is splendid and masterful. It is a veritable journey through the sleepless night of a Viennese musician and oriental music expert. It allows places and encounters to march past the reader in an eminently present Orient. A good read and original, as always, is Diane Meurs’s research into the wide-branching genealogical tree of German-Jewish enlightenment thinker Moses Mendelssohn («La carte des Mendelssohn»). Sorj Chalandon’s gripping, touching and burlesque tragicomedy Profession du père is especially noteworthy. According to the writer this work teeters on the threshold between «res factae» and «res fictae» and is motivated by facts and fictions, thus opening up the intermediate realm. Set in the 1960s this is the story of a terrible domestic tyrant, who at times claims to have been a companion and friend of Charles de Gaulles,

101 at times a CIA agent and guerrilla fighter with the terror organization OAS against Algerian independence, at other times the father of the French currency reform and then again, a parachutist and maybe even the writer’s father... French history and French narratives – the one reflected in the other – Chalandon also narrates the history of emancipation from the narratives – and from the father’s story! And as so often in this extremely productive autumn the focus is on narrating history to control, understand and tame it.

And taming history can be an undertaking with a definite outcome: Boualem Sansal, Peace Prize Laureate of the Ger- man Book Trade in 2011, comes up with a dark extrapolation of the present, a negative utopia, which already reveals its source of inspiration on the book cover: «2084». This simple title is understood as a variation on Orwell’s 1984. Its con- tents spread the horror vision of a totalitarian Islam (here, admittedly still in a fictional North African state) where the people have all voluntarily submitted to all the absurd bans on thinking and thought commandments. This is depressingly close to the present – and will rank the writer, who is a supremely courageous contemporary, a few places higher on the black list of the murderous zealots...

(Translated by Suzanne Kirkbright)

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ISTHEPOLITICALMAKINGACOMEBACK? by Rainer Moritz – Oct 1, 2015

It sounds so easy: you pick the most important novels, short stories and poetry editions from a year; you assess and evaluate them, and finally you say what these novels, short stories and poetry collections share in common and what they reveal about current trends. Feuilleton editors often steel themselves for this task, announcing in lead articles how German writers increasingly turn to private material, to humour, the family or politics. This research into literary trends rarely has a long shelf life, since it ignores the production process of literature. What is published collectively on spring or autumn fiction lists is then related to quite different evolutionary circumstances. A writer like Ulrich

102 Peltzer, for instance, takes time and eight years flash by before he releases a new novel. Another writer like Gerhard Henschel needs barely two years to add another 500 pages to his autobiographical novel cycle.

The talking point of ‘non-simultaneity of the simultaneous’ also applies for literary output in an individual year. Yet, if you begin to think in longer time intervals, you’re soon struck by certain odds and ends – the shifts and changes that will be processed in depth by literary historians twenty years from now, since they want to attach a label to the books from the 2000s and 2010s.

Let’s stick with observations or insights that stimulate the impression of being more than just chance impressions. Let’s start with the simplest, the sudden awareness of a genre that is permanently marginalized – with poetry. It’s a com- monplace attitude that poetry is the worst-selling kind of literature. People often add that poetry events (and by no means just poetry slams) are extremely popular in literature houses or other venues. A writer like Nora Gomringer, for instance, who turns her own poetry and that of her colleagues into stage events, has occupied this performance niche for years. For her and many of her peers, poetry lives from perfor- mance, from the live stage event, not necessarily from written and rigid text. When the jury of the 2015 Leipzig Book Fair Prize first included a poetry collection on the shortlist for fiction – Jan Wagner’s «Regentonnenvariationen»(Rain Barrel Variations) – many people quickly resorted to the relevant le- xicons to make sure that poetry really is classed as «fiction». The jury then did what it had to: it worked systematically and announced Jan Wagner as the prizewinner. Wagner, a very pleasant and eloquent advocate of his craft, snow had to be available on all media channels to offer answers to the questions. He was invited countrywide to give readings and – a true miracle – he could look forward to sales soon reaching 50,000 copies. It was also clear before Jan Wagner’s award that plenty of German-speaking poets – Silke Scheuermann, Mirko Bonné, Nora Bossong, Ann Cotten, Daniela Seel, Ulrike Draesner and many more – are worth listening to. Time will only tell over the next few years whether or not the poetry boom, which Wagner has inspired, will last or will just be a flash in the pan. But this is all good.

103 As far as prose is concerned in 2015, the trends of the previous decade continue. The crime thriller – the bestselling genre, not only in Germany – is by no means stuck in the ‘entertainment’ category. As Heinrich Steinfest or Wolf Haas have already proven in previous years, crime stories exist with literary ambitions, and at the same time this speaks volumes about our society. Friedrich Ani («Der namenlose Tag»/Day Without a Name), Melanie Raabe («Die Falle»/The Trap) and Jan Costin Wagner («Sonnenspiegelung»/Reflection of the Sun), for instance, have published these types of books this year.

The family and generational novel enjoys continued popularity. At the latest since 2005 and 2007 when Arno Geiger («Es geht uns gut»/We’re Doing Fine) and Julia Franck («Die Mittagsfrau»/Lady Midday) won the German Book Prize with their experience-saturated and character-rich sagas, the stories have been springing up from everywhere. From wherever there are grandmothers blessed with memories, trunks disco- vered in attics and diaries emerging from nowhere, there’s a welcome reason to combine private realities with contempora- ry stories and to produce a bouquet of the family novel. The tedium cannot be overlooked thanks to churning out these novels. In 2015, original books were also published in this context such as Matthias Nawrat’s «Die vielen Tode unseres Opas Jurek»and Vea Kaiser’s «Makarionissi oder Die Insel der Seligen».

The outstanding epic projects that Andreas Maier und Ger- hard Henschel have worked on for years are also about the family. At best they are comparable with what Walter Kempowski and Peter Kurzeck devised before them. Yet Maier und Henschel strive to represent their own lives (and the- refore a record of the Federal Republic since the 1960s) in open autobiographical novel cycles. Since 2010, Maier has so far done this in a very compromised style in four volumes, most recently «Der Ort». On the other hand, since 2004 Henschel has published six opulent volumes, the last being «Künstlerroman» about his alter ego Martin Schlosser. In future, historians, who will inspect everyday cultural life in the Federal Republic, may delve into both large-scale literary projects to unearth a genuine treasure trove.

104 The most striking feature of the literary year 2015 is un- doubtedly the way that many writers turn to the political and economic events and the attempt to understand current trends from the history of the 20th century. This is because in the highly topical case of Jenny Erpenbeck’s «Gehen, ging, gegangen» (Go, Went, Gone) the refugees’ stories are depicted, or as in Alina Bronsky’s «Baba Dunjas letzte Liebe» (Baba Dunja’s Last Love) a comical comedy is set in the con- taminated region of Chernobyl, or Doris Knecht in «Wald»(The Forest) arrates the story of a woman, who loses her secure middle-class life due to the financial crisis, or Annika Reich in «Die Nächte auf ihrer Seite» (Nights by Her Side) includes the 2011 Cairo demonstrations on Tahrir Square. While historic retrospectives in texts by German-speaking writers are, of course, constantly related to the «Third Reich» – for instance, in Ralf Rothmann’s much discussed «Im Frühling sterben» (To Die in Spring), Jan Koneffke’s «Das Sonntagskind» (A Sunday’s Child) or Alain Claude Sulzer’s «Postskriptum» (Post- script) – numerous writers with a «migrant background» whom the feuilleton often praises, ensure that the timeline extends beyond the National Socialist era. Feridun Zaimoglu’s bumper novel «Siebentürmeviertel» (Seven Towers District), set in Istanbul in 1939 and 1949, or Dana Grigorcea’s «Das primäre Gefühl der Schuldlosigkeit», which dates back to pre-revolutionary Romania, are also included.

Where complaints arise everywhere that politics lacks vision and only responds to emergencies in the short-term, literature suddenly seems to reflect what were previously utopias or realistic ideas about how our society might look. In «Das Lächeln der Alligatoren» (The Alligators’ Smile) Michael Wildenhain asks how terrorism could emerge in the 1970s. Frank Witzel also follows up this topic in what is perhaps narratively the smartest novel project this year in «Die Erfindung der Roten Armee Fraktion» durch einen manisch- depressiven Teenager im Sommer 1969. By contrast, in «36.9 ˚» Nora Bossong takes a step back and expands on the life story of Communist thinker and politician Antonio Gramsci which she confronts with the banality of a contemporary Gramsci researcher.

Ulrich Peltzer probably digs the deepest. He was always extremely interested in political milestones of the 20th century.

105 In «Das bessere Leben» (A Better Life) on the one hand he aims to shed light on what the early 21st century capitalist world decides, and on the other hand to make comprehensible how their main players became what they are. Without establishing a superordinate narrative authority, in rapid succession Peltzer changes the perspectives of almost eight decades of his comprehensive material. The protagonists of the plot – at times set in Turin, at other times in Sao Paolo, or occasionally in Amsterdam or the Lower Rhine – are two men in their fifties who successfully internalized the risky capitalist business world with real or unreal assets: Sylvester Lee Fleming, who deals in obscure insurance policies on an international level, and Jochen Brockmann, a sales manager for an Italian company, who sells ‘plants for covering and laminating mixed goods and substratum’, in the end mainly in Latin America. Peltzer combines their ingeniously interlinked stories with what, for him, are the central markers of the 20th century, for instance, the date 4 May 1970 at Kent State University in Ohio when mass shootings occurred after student protests against the American invasion of Cambodia. In view of the conduct of financial market jugglers and the political disasters of the past one hundred years, the question of what could be called a ‘better life’ is a subject that this epic novel strives to describe.

It’s obvious, indeed you cannot overlook that the literary year 2015 is difficult to pin down to one common denominator. However, some trends and main themes can always be identified and their effects don’t seem so haphazard.

(Translated by Suzanne Kirkbright)

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THEHUNGARIANWINDOWINVIENNA by Wilhelm Droste – Oct 8, 2015

Anybody who wants to get to know Hungary now – to understand or even to want to understand – should switch off the radio, put down the newspapers and not go online. Instead, he or she should pick up a publisher’s books that makes itself small, in all modesty, and goes by the name of Nischen Verlag.

106 Bigger publishing houses survive from top-selling mass editi- ons. Bolstered with this reserve they courageously venture into «niches» where twenty years ago today’s household na- mes of Hungarian literature really made their shining debut. Sándor Márai, Péter Nádas, Imre Kertész or Péter Esterházy – all of them and a few more started out at the bottom of the ladder in these protected niches. Only then did they grow up into giants. This astonishing success of Hungarian literature opened numerous doors for upcoming writers. Nischen Verlag also benefits from this today. However, the publisher is going through tough times. It is reliant solely upon its expertise and on establishing one ‘niche’ on top of the next. This is a fairly adventurous, risky and unconventional way of creating a substantially taller Hungarian tower of books that merit even more accolades and admiration.

The author of one of the publisher’s books, «Der Verruf» by György Spiró (b. 1946), calls into question the myths and everyday romanticizations of Hungarians. This book is about the pseudo and angst-ridden period after the 1956 uprising. This writer, who would prefer to stay out of the paralyzing and entrenched political battles in his country, attracts wild opposition and furious indignation with all his books and plays. Showered with a bunch of national prizes he is still the eternal troublemaker. For thirty years, as one of the greats, he has been on the threshold of German editors and publishers, always in the front row, yet it’s like a curse. For incomprehensible reasons he is not allowed to enter the realm of German-speaking literature. It is as though the Iron Curtain were still in place, as if there were no tolerance for any opening. Now,this book finally marks the transition. With Nische, a German text has been made out of the Eastern and Central European secret. The publisher shows decisiveness. A short story volume by Spiró has also been released, maybe the big novels will also follow later. Nonetheless, that will far outstrip the volume of the previous books.

Another book is by Lajos Parti Nagy (b. 1953): «Der wogende Balaton», a short story collection, which is notable for its wondrous language. German readers will have their difficul- ties with this, as György Buda has transposed the text with almost inaudible delight into a lush and vital Austrian. This is artful and legitimate, since the Hungarian original is a skilful

107 artefact of street language and elevated literature. Parti Nagy experiences and listens to the world as a linguistic orgy and gives back this tonality. The writer unifies characters, which are normally far offset from each other, and never come to- gether. A poet by profession,he is captivated by a passion for play; his language seems cast adrift and carefully withdrawn from any worldly influence in the ivory tower of his striving for expression. At the same time, however, he is precisely the one who vehemently and rigorously despises and outlaws the collapse of political morals in Hungary today; he listens to how the populists and the people really talk, hence the emergence of his linguistic outpourings. He repeatedly writes from this strange mix of biting satirical fairy tales, which he then not only publishes, but broadcasts on the airwaves with his wonderfully deep, smoky radio voice. It is a mix of horror and warning with subversive humour; a political poetry that was, until now, unprecedented. Hated by those in power, he is the reliable dissenting voice. Now, this voice has two very distinct tonalities in German, as his book «Meines Helden Platz» (My Hero’s Square) was already published by Luchterhand in 2005 in a translation by Terézia Mora. In multicultural Berlin this worked in entirely different language idioms to do justice to the Hungarian word escapades. This was a happy coexistence, since both translators faithfully render the Hungarian original with their spectacularly diverse languages.

György Buda is in Vienna and working on the translation of an amazing novel by Gergely Péterfy (b. 1966). «Der ausge- stopfte Barbar»– this is the working title in German – if the translator stays close to the Hungarian. For months at a time, this book was scarcely available to buy in Hungary because every reprint always sold out within hours. The subject refers back to the early 19th century, yet it is extraordinarily topical for today. The contemporary flow of migrants has the effect of making foreign cultures unstoppably collide with each other. A black man is «stuffed» for museum purposes; he was friends with one of the most renowned Hungarian En- lightenment figures, Ferenc Kazinczy. The novel enigmatically deals with the great questions of humanity and barbarism which have much more in common with each other than we would like to think at the outset.

108 The publishing house has stayed loyal to its philosophy. Here, books appeared and appear that do not politicize, yet they are intrinsically highly political, unintentionally and with a strong will.

(Translated by Suzanne Kirkbright)

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THE HAPPY WELL-READ TROLL TAVERN by Aljoša Harmalo – Dec 5, 2015

The Slovenian novel began in a tavern. This doesn’t mean that Josip Jurˇciˇcwrote continuously drunk. (Although that is how most of early Slovenian poetry came to be.) The first Slovenian novel, «The Tenth Brother», literally starts in a tavern: «Narrators have, as is claimed by famed novelist Walter Scott, the ancient right to begin their tale in a tavern, that gathering place of all travelling folk, where diverse characters reveal themselves to one another directly and honestly alongside the proverb: in wine, there is truth.» Here Jurˇciˇcexplicitly emphasises its application as a literary convention, explained by the tavern being the only place of its kind for public and social life in rural areas, where all kinds of people meet and where (only) after a glass or two, a person shows their true nature.

Today,the Slovenian novel happens in a dive bar of a different sort. A place where courage does not require wine – since, hidden behind a more or less fabricated nickname, nobody sees you, nor does it cost you anything. The worldwide web is a growth medium for opinions, where all kinds of «originals», as Jurˇciˇcwould describe them, get to speak up, and where one can endlessly debate the euro crisis, the condensation trails of airplanes, the cuteness of the newest cat sensation... and books. In Slovenia, the latter debate takes place, aside from the rare blogs dedicated to reading (e.g. this or this, alas, both only in Slovenian), mainly in the context of the Kresnik Prize, the prize for the best Slovenian novel of the past year, a debate I intensely followed in the last two years while participating in the awarding of the prize as one of the four jury members. A little out of curiosity, a little out of world-weariness, with a little hipster distance, and with a little love.

109 I won’t claim that an extensive part of the Slovenian public debates the read, unread, and later (not) nominated books; one sometimes even gets the feeling that behind the various pseudonyms, there hides one and the same person. Yet these debates have the unmistakeable flair of popularity. The people that make themselves heard are people that read much more than the sad Slovenian average, but at the same time do not themselves write, study, or in any other way deal with literature. (Well, to be honest: sometimes there appears an author and anonymously contributes how much he liked his own novel.) Their comments thus vary from naked «likes» to more detailed analysis, from one or two sentences to extensive essay-like outpours, e.g. how the reader was touched by the characters of the novel, how he liked them or hated them, how he read the author’s style and where he began to get bored and put the book down... An insight into how the anonymous public experiences individual literary works can be exceptionally interesting – as a study of the reception of the modern Slovenian novel. But more importantly: it is part of the debate on literature that is necessary if we are to speak of literature as a vital part of society. The book is dead if people aren’t reading it, but it isn’t any less dead if it is read in silence and nobody talks about it.

The other part of the debate exhibits the passion of readers that cheer on their favourite writers and books. And from this point of view, it is certainly a smaller ego-trip for individual authors who have the most or at least the most fervent followers; personally, I have my reservations about this. Not so much because I was, as a jury member, berated as well as insulted – especially last year, when we awarded the prize to the somewhat excellent but less communicative work «Bodies in the Dark» by Davorin Lenko – but because I fear that in this way, the dialogue on art, too, is being transformed into a battlefield, just as is happening in all other social areas, and that it no longer is a dialogue but a monologue of the typical internet troll. For example, to claim that some novel is the best without having read all others (and you certainly haven’t, unless you are also completely insane – which by itself somewhat reduces the weight of your opinion – since 100 new original novels are published in Slovenia every year) or at least having read all those that have been nominated

110 (of which there are initially ten and later five), is simply regular trolling. To criticise the jury that it selects «novels for literary critics» and not for readers is akin to yelling at an empty bottle of brandy for having made us drunk. That, after all, is the point of a jury – to select the novel that is best, of the highest quality, and most complex, as these terms are understood by a professional reader. Why would a jury choose the novel that would be most enjoyed by the average reader? Average readers do this by themselves, with a jury or without, and nobody stops them, nobody censures them – in the library system Cobiss in Slovenia, we can continuously check which books are the most borrowed. And why all the offense and anger if the book closest to you doesn’t «win»? Surely that can’t reduce or devalue your love for it.

Competition is a crucial aspect of the institution of literary prizes, but there is no need for it to be included in other discourses about literature. Conversations about books are rare enough as it is, and it is a shame to waste most of the energy going into them on cheerleading and on things incidental to literature, which for the individual bookworm literary prizes are. The latter are in any case the black hole around which the literary system revolves, to the extent that it hasn’t been sucked in entirely – on literary prizes depend the financial survival of the author, his relationship to his publisher, the media attention devoted to the book, on them depends whether a work is worthy of a translation or not, or whether it will be treated at university or not... For this reason, it is nonsense that conversation about literature condenses around prizes, when books could and should be talked about always and everywhere.

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ŽIŽEK OR THE SPECTACLE OF EVERYDAY LIFE by Manca G. Renko, March 20, 2015

It would be very difficult for me claim to have ever been infused by a feeling similar to national pride. I love Ljubljana; I like the fact that I can be in Trieste in one hour, in Zagreb in two, in Venice in three, and in Vienna in four. I have never felt the need to explain to strangers why my homeland is something special or why it differs, in this or that, from

111 those of others. But on occasion, I do encounter inquisitive questions about what is considered to be most Slovenian. Since I still have no answer, I prefer to reply by saying that the most famous Slovenian is a philosopher – Slavoj Žižek. This seems to me to be closest to national romanticism: other countries export cars or pride themselves on their national football teams, while we have a philosopher.

Naturally, this philosopher has a complicated relationship with his homeland, and his homeland, too, has not (always) viewed him favourably. Although he is often seen on Ljubljana’s streets, he rarely lectures on domestic soil. Two years had passed since his previous public appearance (which seems like an eternity for someone so omnipresent in global media) and expectations for his event earlier this month were high. He appeared on the stage of the Slovenian National Theatre Drama together with Mladen Dolar and Alenka Zupanˇciˇc, with the common thread of the evening being the lie, the thematic focus of this year’s literary festival Fabula within which the event took place.

Tickets for the lecture by the three Slovenian Lacanians were sold out in just a few days. Not even the additional seats that filled up the stage of the central Slovenian theatre institution were enough. The media used the phrase «philosophical spectacle» increasingly often, which, together with the scent of spring that arrived in the city at the time, felt refreshing. On the spectacular evening itself, Mladen Dolarand Alenka Zupanˇciˇc spoke first. They held magnificent lectures that included almost everything: Francis Bacon, Bertrand Russell, the Epimenides paradox, the cat on the mat, the Cheshire Cat, Martin Luther, Jesus, Hamlet, Benjamin Constant, Imma- nuel Kant, Mark Twain, gays, blacks, and, to top it all off, smokers. They received honest applause, but one could feel the audience hold their breath: Žižek is next.

Slavoj Žižek spoke about cinema, utopia, Christianity, com- munism and democracy. He made fun of God. He was politically incorrect. He told a few jokes, some of which were on him. The small city audience, the domestic audience that as a rule is most demanding, lapped it up. And elsewhere in the world, they eat out of his hands and adore his appearan-

112 ces. Why? How is it possible to transform philosophy into a performance, into a spectacle?

Žižek’s performances are distinguished by that which is a crucial characteristic of good literature and art in general: sincerity. Žižek does not try to embellish himself and does not hide behind the veil of intellectualism; he does not distance himself from the audience but instead comes ever closer. He operates according to a tried and tested recipe: the more you talk about yourself, the deeper you go within yourself, the more you speak about everything and everyone. Far more than through worldview or level of education, we are united by what we most often conceal: lower passions, fears, the trivial, the banal. With equal ease, Žižek quotes Hegel and a pilot from an episode of Crime and Investigation and does so without giving the audience the feeling that he is ashamed of it. And why should he be? We all have our ceremonies of bad taste: we gossip, we read the yellow press, we stalk strangers and friends on social networks, we listen to bad music, we cry during romantic comedies or cheer passionately during reality shows/when «our» athletes compete. With Žižek, even intellectuals can relax in public: for a few moments, they forget about the stress of everyday pretension, the pointlessness of their posturing, and the need to take themselves seriously at any and all cost. They smile at the political incorrectness (and by the way, we all know that political correctness is the mother of all lies, don’t we?), they laugh at the jokes, and they feel relieved at the thought that they aren’t the only ones watching crime series in the evening. When Žižek’s lecture is over, the intellectuals glance at each other in slight shame and remark that Žižek cannot be taken seriously, not really, but he is amusing, isn’t he, and such an interesting phenomenon. After this, they feel some more shame for having had a good time – since, as we all know, nothing fits an intellectual worse than having fun. And it is precisely this which renders them hollow; Thomas Bernhard would say that whoever can’t laugh doesn’t deserve to be taken seriously, and Umberto Eco probably meant something similar when he noted that there are no serious scholars who don’t like watching television (he himself adores crime series).

113 Eco’s latest novel («Numero zero», 2015), which instantly propelled itself to the top of Italy’s book charts, was released about the same time as Žižek’s sold-out lecture in Ljubljana’s Drama took place. Although Žižek and Eco may at first glance not have much in common, attitudes towards them are similar: those that take themselves too seriously mock the apparent lightness of their narration and accuse them of lacking depth, on occasion even of being trivial. In doing so, they forget that it is precisely because of humanists such as Žižek and Eco that philosophy and history exist and persist among people as something living, something they can talk about and something which enriches their lives. People are fond of them because they are able to attach the most abstract of ideas to the most everyday of things: from television series to (romantic) relationships. Many can wax poetic about eternal truths and redemptive ideas, but rare are those who can give meaning to the paradoxes of intimate life. And as we all know full well – in art and the humanities, we first seek an explanation of ourselves and only then, when we have ourselves at least partly figured out, can we attempt to understand the world.

(Translated by Suzanne Kirkbright)

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THEANGSTOFGROWTH by Christian Gasser – Apr 30, 2015

Picture the scene: your job is in an area that will have experienced growth – and more, and more growth – for almost twenty years. Yet, by now your biggest worry is nothing more than this boom.

This superficially paradoxical case describes the current state of the French comics market that is still Europe’s largest market for comics. If twenty years ago 700 brand-new comics were released, in 2014, that total reached 5,410 (!) and 3,946 were actually newcomers. Naturally, the market has grown over the past two decades: graphic novels, numerous film versions and especially Japanese mangas have presented a new readership with the comic. Yet the growth of sales is anything but proportionate to the plethora of new publications.

114 This has consequences, which have been noticeable for several years, – for many publishers as well as writers. The bookstores are flooded with new releases whose lifespan is getting shorter and shorter. The average editions have collapsed. Anyone who sold around 12,000 comics beforehand is now happy selling several thousand books. Fewer and fewer writers and illustrators can live from their work and even high earners have had to make concessions: even if the high-flyers like «Asterix», «Titeuf», «Blake & Mortimer» and «Lucky Luke»continue to be the major top-selling books, it’s rare for even the most popular editions to sell more than 300,000 copies.

And then there’s the recession. The big publishing groups Delcourt-Soleil, Média Participations and Glénat, which domi- nate 37 % of the market, can for now resist the recession – nobody wants to be the first to stop this spiral. Over- production coupled with the recession also mainly confronts medium-sized and small publishers lacking financial reserves with existential problems: enterprising and artistically advan- ced publishing houses like Rackham from Paris and Atrabile from Geneva have cut back their publications to the basic economic minimum. After the furious start, the publisher L’Apocalypse (Paris) has taken a break for over a year and even L’Association, France’s leading publisher for authors, is reducing its production and recently refocused its programme along more commercial lines. Several years ago this approach would have been unthinkable.

The Big Three seem unconcerned about this – last year Delcourt-Soleil alone published 778 comics, the same as Média Participations (with Dargaud, Dupuis and others), even if they ultimately deprive their own authors. But the collapse of the independent publishing scene, which emerged in the 1990s, could have major consequences – the essential innovations happened and happen here. No L’Association? That means no «Persepolis».

The unique thing about the comics market is that we’re still talking exclusively about books. With less than 1 % of sales, the e-comic remains a side show (read more about this in my next blog). The comic industry is searching for its commercial success more and more with cross-media

115 solutions. A growing number of comics,even in France,supply scripts for real and animated films and the collaboration between comics and games is reinforced. There is also another outlet for this link: in 2013, for example, in France, the potentially record-breaking 200 literary adaptations were published.

As France is the only European country where the comic is commercially and culturally relevant, and continues to set the pace as well as being the main trendsetter, the situation in this country also influences other European comic markets. The German-language market is a case in point: even if we’re way off the 5,400 new publications mark, here the number not just of comic innovations, but also publishers handling comic books has mushroomed. Now, German comic publishers are also realizing the ominous cocktail of overproduction, competition and recession – even a publisher like Reprodukt is cutting its production and orienting its programme along more commercial lines.

The commercial and cultural upturn in the world of comics seemed so irresistible that everyone always quickly joined in, and nobody thought of consolidation. The comic is faced with major challenges, perhaps even heading for decline – and nobody seems to know the answer to the urgent questions.

The figures are from the annual «Rapport Ratier» survey by Belgian comic journalist, Gilles Ratier. This report is published annually by the Association des critiques et journalistes de bande dessinée (ACBD): www.acbd.fr

(Translated by Suzanne Kirkbright)

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WRITING IN SPACE by Beat Mazenauer – June 11, 2015

In the 1990s, hyperfiction pointed new ways into the literary future. Mark Amerika’s «Grammatron» narrated a Golem story through short text particles, which were interlinked, and offered alternative narrative pathways to reading. Yet the trend was short-lived – the new narrative forms were barely acceptable for traditional literary criticism. Today, what is left

116 is the complaint that hyperfiction has not managed to create any relevant works.

This criticism may be valid, yet it is still unjustified. Firstly, it compares 500 years of book culture versus 20 years of digital aesthetics. Secondly,the critique is based on normative aesthetic ideas that are, thirdly, often aligned to a lack of knowledge about what emerges on the internet in the marginal spheres of literature and art. The web universe «Désordre» by Frenchman Philippe de Jonckheere is just this kind of project. Since 2000 Jonckheere, originally a graphic designer and photographer, has been writing and working on an omnibus packed with text and image excerpts that are long since unmanageable, and they are based on «disorder» as a working title and principle. The basic form is a record of the artist-writer’s everyday experience. He recounts what he is doing, what he is working on and where he is travelling. Over the past 15 years, 250,000 documents (texts, photos, videos and sounds) have been collected that are assigned various category headings. These include playful applications like a series of travel photos that website visitors can then send as email postcards.

«Désordre» consistently expands within a multimedia nar- rative space that leaves infinite reading pathways open. «Infinite» in the literal sense of the word because chance is the primary design principle. «Désordre» defies any reading plan, even the author never knows for sure which narrative thread he is clicking on via the website’s welcome page. In recently compiled «Instructions for use», Jonckheere writes: «From the very beginning, even in the early planning and development stage for the website «Désordre» one of the design aims was to lead the visitor astray, by deliberately arranging all the generic rules of navigation so that they go against the grain.» This is achieved by leaving navigation purely to algorithmic chance. In this regard, the website’s structure based on information technology is «a miracle of orderliness».

In no time the critics will highlight the random nature of the reception and assess the resulting arbitrariness as «non- literary». Yet what about serendipity, or the aberration as a source of narrative fantasy?

117 Nowadays, these and similar projects encounter the same rejection by the critics as one hundred years ago, for instance, like the case of James Joyce. The comparison is possibly clumsy, yet literary quality is always initially measured in terms of traditional aesthetic norms, though without conside- ring that precisely these norms are in a continually shifting state of flux. Could it not also be the case that Philippe de Jonckheere’s «writing in space» also gives rise to new aesthetic ideas with which they can be first judged valid?

In any case, Philippe de Jonckheere’s comprehensive and enigmatic project «Désordre» is a challenge. «To a certain extent», comments the author, «the entire project of Désordre is less the work of its author than of the spectator, listener, reader or visitor. Désordre is a website and you are the author.» It’s the realization of what theoretically has long since been a topic of conversation.

(Translated by Suzanne Kirkbright)

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THEWORLDMUSTBEROMANTICIZED by Peter Zimmermann – Oct 25, 2015

The world must be romanticized. Only in this way will one rediscover its original senses.

The world must be romanticized. Only in this way will one rediscover its original senses. I return at this point to this famous maxim of Novalis, written in the early 19th century, since despite all the efforts to drive out its sensuality, art and especially literature never grows tired of comprehending art and life as a unity. Back in the day numerous critics denoun- ced Romanticism as a step backwards, as anti-Enlightenment. Its protagonists were called hypersensitive, with nervous disorders and will-o’-the-whips between religiousness and anarchy. And yet their message was nothing more than about the existence of a depth of consciousness – the concept of the unconscious was already in circulation at that time as well as the notion that this could only be founded through poetic intuition. More than 200 years later the question concerning how art

118 and life belong together is as critical as ever. When indi- viduals from the world of literature, namely, writers, critics, academics and agents sit together on a panel and reflect on their activities, things always revolve around this single problem: what role do we play in society? Do we play any role at all?

Romanticizing the world means also means perceiving it as a continuum where everything is connected to everything else, Novalis also claims. This has nothing to do with candlelight dinners and flattery, but with cognitive ability and the analytical power of literature which – and that’s the key point – all of this is of its own accord. In other words, a text or a literary work is not made meaningful by the desire to be contemporary, not by poise or commitment, but by the act of writing per se – and I’ll now liken this to the attempt at skimming off fragments of the self within the unconscious. This «I» is in fact part of the world, part of society, part of immediate reality; it has grown up, been made and deformed in it. I don’t need to cloak what I draw from within myself in another guise to make it adapt to the present, which is shrill, loud and moody. So we’re talking about a media created, artificial present.

In the 1950s and 1960s the Group 47 in Germany defined the role of literature to a highly influential degree – the focus was on composure and commitment. This restricted perspective made people like Grass, Walser, Enzensberger successful, but they laughed at Celan. Celan was no committed poet, he wasn’t suitable as a moral authority instructing people how they had to behave from the «Stunde Null», the «zero hour» onwards. For Celan there was no Stunde Null; nothing was concluded for him because he knew about the «condition humaine». You cannot state that evil has been cleared from the world by means of an artificial demarcation. And he was a survivor who didn’t suddenly want to feel guilty because he was still there and he was writing about the fact that he still existed.

Celan’s poems may not be easy to understand, but they are works of art – in a different way from Enzensberger’s in the slipstream of Brecht’s composed poems – absolved of any kind of expiry date. They are not images of a particular

119 time or posture; in a kind of subterranean river course they connect humans with each other who live in different times and under different conditions. But the foundations of human existence are unchangeable. And literature is great when it creates a connection on an existential level.

Fortunately, the European Literature Days are not held in the spirit of the Group 47, although they can feel similar to sitting a school exam. Now and then in the discussions and lectures the superficial is switched for depth, for instance, when an immediate response is called for due to political events and their media depiction. Then substantial overestimation of the writer’s role comes into play. This may even bear fruit on the book market, at least for one season. However, when we’re talking about literature, about its value, about its future, then actually we don’t mean short-term sales trends. We’re talking about what literature always could do the best: telling both the good and the bad about what makes human beings human. What each individual makes of this is his or her own business. As a writer you must be resilient to this uncertainty; you never know whether you’ll find like-minded people. In Wachau we probably also talked about this: the loneliness of writers. These moments make a difference. And they will endure.

(Translated by Suzanne Kirkbright)

120 BEATMAZENAUER:TRENDSNOTRENDS

In Switzerland, at the close of 2015 an old book has been released in a new format: «Rosa Laui» by Kurt Marti appears as an audio CD recorded by Guy Krneta and others. The new edition is of regional significance and no multi-lingual edition will be published. Germany’s Luchterhand Verlag originally published Kurt Marti’s poetry edition in 1967. Back then its pioneering novelty was that Marti presented poems in local dialect. This had already happened in Austria in 1958 with H.C. Artmann’s legendary edition «Med ana schwoazzn dintn» («With Black Ink»). In the Bavarian Wikipedia there is an entry about this in Viennese dialect: «Es haundelt sich dabei um experimentölles, expressionistisches Weak» («It’s about an experimental, expressionist work.»)

Local dialect and world literature to a certain degree define two mutually repellent entities. While the former is aimed at the regional context, the latter is disseminated globally. In this case, regional literature possibly has an easier job of retaining its unique qualities, while global literature fizzles out under the influence of free market trends. The Nordic crime thriller, a fascinating speciality in the 1960s from writers like Maj Wahlöö and Per Sjöwall, has long since become a boring, off-the-peg product.

Back to Kurt Marti. In Switzerland in 1967 his poetry edition (unlike Artmann in Austria) started a movement that has a continuing influence today on literature in the German- speaking part of Switzerland. Dialect has emerged from being immersed in the traditional sphere. What we understand by ‹spoken word› is heavily influenced by local dialect. This is sometimes experimental and sometimes ultra popular, but far from conservative language cultivation. With his novel «De Goalie bin ig» (English title, «I Am the Keeper») Pedro Lenz has landed a socially critical bestseller. Beat Sterchi experiments with the Bernese dialect in all its variations, and Michael Fehr fathoms out the musical rhythmic potential from dialect to standard language («Simeliberg»).

What does all this tell us?

When we discuss literary trends we should definitely multiply our viewpoint. The big trends in the world generally precede

121 micro trends that develop nationally or regionally. Both aspects belong together. The shift to dialect might well remain a specifically Swiss factor, which is also historically justified, for example, in the turn away from overpowering standard language that became the epitome of political superiority from 1933 to 1945. However, something similar probably exists in most countries in Europe. We should be cautious about being too quick to assert literary trends on a transcultural basis because this tends to level out idiosyncrasies – until finally the only thing we have left is the ‘great American novel’, which merely serves as a model for film versions in the home culture. All too often, however, it gives the impression that in a host of different countries all critics encounter the same international discoveries, which they have pressed upon them by large publishing houses because they have to bring in their high number of licensed editions.

How we pose the question whenever we look for trends addresses the specific and regional factors, perhaps even the national dimension because like any good vegetable, literature also grows from the bottom up. If you think of it in this way, it’s often not the juiciest bulbs that reveal the exciting trend, but the inconspicuous stems, which first have to be nurtured in order to flower. In Swiss regional dialect currently one can sense an experimental furore that is absent in other sectors. This furore will calm down again; it will become normal and make way for something else. That’s precisely what we have to devote our attention to. This need not contradict in any way the fact that transnational movements must play an important role in this. The scenario of ‘trends no trends’ is crystallized in the dialectic of nation and transnation. Globalization only plays a marginal role here.

(Translated by Suzanne Kirkbright)

122 3. INNOVATIONS IN THE DIGITAL FIELD

«Online first» was a catchphrase in the media world. Is this now arriving in the book sector as well? More and more established publishing houses are setting up e-book imprints. More than half of the top 100 titles on the Kindle bestseller list are by self-published authors. The serial novel and smaller formats are enjoying a digital renaissance. Crowdfunding and joint authorship of texts are being tried and tested. Book publishers are setting up subsidiaries to release games and Apps. Distributors are launching flat-rate models for e-book reading. The digital transformation of the marketplace appears to be advancing at a fast pace. On the other hand, there are clear differences between the American and European book markets where digital growth has now significantly slowed down and the market share of electronic books is not nearly as big as predicted just two years ago. What can be learned from the development of Scandinavian book markets for the Spanish and Italian market? Are there any opportunities for Polish or Czech writers in England or the US, if they self-translate their books and offer them on these markets? Does it change writing style, if authors increasingly become their own marketing managers on social media platforms? All these and many other questions arise, if we think about innovations in the digital context and attempt to learn from each others’ different linguistic areas and cultures, as well as from our mistakes, yet above all also from what we now regularly call «best practice».

123 SZILARD BORBELY: ABOUT CHANGE AND DIGITAL OBLIVION

I am searching on the internet. I am searching for the word «change». The most important change to shape the technology of research is the fact that now we always start with the internet. Myself included. The internet does not recognize change since all the details of a particular configuration preceding a change immediately disappear from websites. Thus, change as such is not what it used to be. In the sense that, before the internet, we still had the chance to observe a difference in the liminal space between the stages of before and after. Change consisted in the knowledge of this difference. That is what is vanishing now. The difference. That is, the perceptibility of a difference.

The design of a website changes because the layout is replaced. It is updated. The only trace of this occurrence on the website is displayed through a date. Last updated on, and then the year, month, day. The previous layout disappears without a trace. And soon everybody forgets about it. The act of updating is the metaphor of forgetting. Refreshing your memory, the memory of a network, means the deletion of a previous state. Digital oblivion. There is no old and new anymore. The Quarrel of the Ancients and the Moderns, one of the great overtures of the modern age, is no more on the agenda. That is the most radical symptom in the development of our understanding of what change is. Because there is no change. Change has become imperceptible. Updating is the self-eliminating change of the meaning of change. But that is not change anymore. It is something else. It is updating. Which is just a metaphor.

In any case, change rarely leaves any trace. As a rule, it takes the form of metaphors, expressions, and words. In the past, technology was supervised by rhetoric. Today it is controlled by digitalization. That is why one of the most important kinds of knowledge is the knowledge concentrated in the humanities – due to its attention to change. Due to its wish to know the meaning of something before a change occurred. Due to its practice of observing and signaling the transformation of meanings. The study of change means a study of the control over the meaning of things and a study

124 of the possession of power. As such, it is meant to safeguard the continuity of memory. However, safe-keeping and the preservation of values is not desirable anymore. The world is entering a new era. One in which we will not be able to trace back changes.

I am searching on the internet. I would like to learn about the cultural history of the encyclopedia. Or just simply about the history of the encyclopedia. I am not interested in one specific type, but encyclopedia in general. That is what I am searching for. Because the meaning of the word «encyclopedia» changes. The meanings of words constantly change. The paradox here is that without the help of the word «change» we cannot describe change. But what does the word «change» even mean? It denotes nothing, it just signifies. It points out that one thing is not what it was before. Yet it does not say anything about what it was or what it is. The words «change» or «to change» are empty signifiers and reveal nothing about themselves. Or about the things they address.

«Say yes to change!»; «We need to push for change, because change is good.» These sentences say nothing to us since they fail to communicate anything about the two different states of a thing, about the stages of before and after. They just record the fact that any given thing is not one, but two. At least. And that these two are not the same. However, we should not confuse the qualification of «not identical with a previous state» with that of «not similar with a previous state.» «How you’ve changed!» we sometimes say to each other. Meaning: you are not who you were before. But, being polite, we never say how you actually changed. Whether in a good or a bad way. By saying it we simply indicate that we are in between two stages. That we have knowledge of an old and of a new state of affairs, but we are still on a journey from the former towards the latter – trying to understand.

However, the acknowledgement of change is nothing more than the recognition of a transformation: it tells nothing about how the change will occur, and what the result will be. Because there is no such thing as change. There is no such thing as time. Change only exists in speech. That

125 is: language dominates the knowledge about change. Yet the word «language» signifies an abstract generality. There is no such thing as language. There are only people who speak to each other. People who declare that there is no such thing as change. Or that there is, indeed, such a thing as change. Because change is a linguistic category. We either believe it, or not. Language has the power to make us believe or not believe it. Language dominates change. This is why classical rhetoric managed to formalize our access to it through the four categories of change.

The word «change» remains imperceptible if change actually takes place. It becomes evident only if there is no change. Which is, of course, a contradiction. Since, in this case, only the word is being emphasized. There are only words, shapes, and figures. Repeated and re-shuffled. Classical rhetoric supervised it. With the onset of modernization, the discourses of power appropriated it. And now digitalization eliminates it. The new name of change is updating. It suggests that there is no change happening: things just moved through time. They overtook the past. The future stepped into the present. And became the past.

(Translated by Szabolcs László)

126 ABOUTWRITINGANDREADING

ISTECHNOLOGYAHELPORAHINDRANCEFORWRITERS? by Sam Sedgman – Sept 28, 2015

The internet can be a real problem. Or at least that’s how many writers, including Zadie Smith and Nick Hornby, someti- mes feel. They are two of a cohort of writers who confess to keeping their working habits in check by downloading soft- ware like SelfControl and Freedom – programs which block access to the internet in order to help prevent procrastination. Without it, many writers feel, they’d never get any work done.

I’m in two minds about this. On the one hand – fine. Every writer has their process, and who am I to judge it? And lord knows the internet is full of distractions. But on the other, haven’t there always been distractions of one kind or another? Magazines; laundry; phone calls from friends. Is the internet really so much more ruinous? To say nothing of the irony of the whole thing – that we need to download something from the internet in order to stop ourselves being too caught up in the internet.

It’s impossible to divorce ourselves from technology, whether we like it or not. Muriel Spark may have been able to get away with writing complete novels longhand into an exercise book, but today’s publishing industry is much less accommodating. Typewriters? No thank you. If the world wants.docx files with track changes from our editor, then that’s what we have to work with. As the world has adopted tech, writers have had to follow suit. And while there have been all kinds of boon in this digital revolution, there have been downsides too.

Take software. Most of us make do with popular, mainstream programs like Microsoft Word, which is built to please everyo- ne, but ends up pleasing no-one. Say what you like about the failings of a typewriter, but it was only ever built for one job. It wasn’t set up to perform mail-merges or allow us to embed spreadsheets. Like relying on a Swiss Army Knife when all you want is a pair of scissors, having a wealth of choices can often be a burden to a writer, and get in the way of their craft.

127 And writers have it easy. Think about software that supports other creative industries like graphic design, photography or filmmaking – software that sometimes requires a training course – and Word seems bewilderingly simple by comparison. Though I do think the mythology of the writer is different. Historically, there are far more accoutrements to the crafts of oil painting, screen printing or mastering an album than there are to writing – the brushes, microphones and bottles of white spirit dwarf the writer’s plain old notebook and pen just as Photoshop’s selection tools tower over Word’s ‘bold’, ‘italic’ and ‘underline’ buttons. The challenges of each craft are different, and need to be met in different ways.

Thank goodness, then, for the abundance of software designed specifically for creative writers. Scrivener does its best to serve novelists who like to plan ahead and jump around, Celtx & Final Draft help you write a script to the demanding standards of professional screenwriting, and there are plenty of apps out there to monitor and incentivise how often or how fast you write.

A lot of this software is wonderfully helpful – as essential to some writers’ processes as Final Cut Pro is to filmmakers. It can solve genuine problems in the writing process. Scriv- ener in particular does a fantastic job of understanding the way a writer’s head works when they want to flick between notes, chapters and pages of research. But it’s not much cop at writing a screenplay. The key here is specificity – ‘writing’ is not one job, just as ‘running’ is not one sport. Technology that’s truly helpful to a writer needs to really understand the quirks of writing for a particular form, but also be open-ended enough to allow us to make up our own forms from scratch. Something like Word is the closest thing we have to a free-form piece of software that transcends genre. But even that still has its restrictions.

But restrictions are good. As any writer knows, there is liberation in restriction. The pen and the typewriter and the page provided their own limitations which writers learned to exploit – just as we developed rhyme as a way to overcome the limits of memory. Out of the friction of our limitations comes further inspiration. Writing is not a problem that can be solved with a software update, any more than can

128 our preponderance for distraction. Writing has always been a struggle – with form and with ourselves. No amount of technological innovation will ever be able to change that.

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BOOK TALK – YESTERDAY AND TODAY by Lena Gorelik – Aug 27, 2015

I was sitting on the sofa chatting to two friends about books – those I’ve read and forgotten, and those I have to read and forget; about phrases that would stand the test of time, and stories that had become my own; about pages that were torturously waded through like walking through deep snow in winter, and memories that were still a vague feeling. Book titles appeared, mingled with front cover pictures, and the letters of the writers’ names illicitly changed the order. One of us was holding her mobile phone in her hand; Amazon was helping out. I winced.

In Hamburg I have this one friend. He was my housemate, well sort of; he was a fellow housemate’s boyfriend who lived part-time with us. He was an engineer, and I never did have or now have many engineer friends, except for him. He read. I read. That’s how the friendship worked. We left each other books by the door that we’d finished reading. At weekends we rummaged around for hours in book stores and flea markets, returning home in the evening with our prize, heated a Gorgonzola pizza and flung about writers’ names and book titles, read paragraphs out loud to each other and compared underlined sentences. If we hadn’t seen each other for a long time, the first question was never, «How are you?», but «What have you read recently?» I inevitably read whatever he recommended and I hurled insults at him about the tips, which I didn’t like.

So here I was sitting with two friends and Amazon took over this job. I entered a name and Amazon spewed out five others: you might also be interested in... Customers, who purchased this book... and so on. I typed in the first three letters and Amazon spat out the writers’ names. My friend’s shopping list told me what she had read and her wish list revealed what she was in the mood to read. I was annoyed,

129 more as a matter of principle than out of conviction; I found it incredibly practical. For the first time in months I had to think of my friend in Hamburg – Amazon was a little like him. Only an hour beforehand and I was ranting about e-readers. Pages that whisper to you just can’t be replaced by screens; coffee stains on the pages revealed tell-tale signs of how you read, and how the coffee was spilled because you couldn’t put the book down at breakfast. But you can cope without a book lover that gives tips based on algorithms.

(Translated by Suzanne Kirkbright)

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HOWTWOYOUNGDUTCHENTREPRENEURSARESHAKING THINGSUPINTHEMEDIAINDUSTRY by Henning Kornfeld – Oct 15, 2015

Two Dutch entrepreneurs in their late twenties who are more comfortable wearing hoodies than formal suits have succeeded in achieving something in Germany where even reputable media organizations have failed. They have set up an online kiosk, which sells articles from magazines, national daily newspapers as well as the regional press, including «Der Spiegel», «FAZ» and «Bild am Sonntag». The two entrepreneurs are Marten Blankesteijn and Alexander Klöpping, founders of the start-up Blendle, which launched in Germany in mid-September. The important thing about their new online kiosk is that readers purchase a single article rather than full newspaper or magazine editions. Publishers set their own prices for articles that cost from one cent for a short notice in a regional newspaper and 1.99 Euros for a headline story in «Der Spiegel».

During its first few weeks the German media’s response to Blendle was substantial and overwhelmingly positive – journalists are apparently among the most enthusiastic users. This platform is visually attractive and extremely user friendly. Articles can even be ‘returned’ if readers don’t like them or if they’re unsuitable. But anyone who expects Blendle founders Blankesteijn and Klöpping to rescue print journalism or even the media in- dustry will probably still be disappointed in half a year or

130 so from now. The «Rhein Zeitung» from Coblenz, a regional newspaper with a circulation of 187,000, has just reviewed its early venture with Blendle. According to this, two weeks after its launch it had sold 100 individual articles through the online kiosk. That’s equivalent to sales worth 49 Euros. These are very low absolute figures, but there’s also some good news for the «Rhein Zeitung». Thanks to Blendle it could boost its overall number of purchased articles by 15 %. Obviously, there are plenty of people who appreciate and use a product like Blendle: they’re comfortable in the digital world, they’re interested in excellent journalism apart from the news and they’re also willing to pay for this. However, they don’t want to be tied to individual media brands. Ne- vertheless, Blendle’s acceptance might be adversely affected by the confusing pricing of publishers. Many of their articles for sale on Blendle are also available free of charge on their own websites. The Blendle venture also represents a risk for publishers, since theoretically they could be damaging their own case. Readers who until now were obliged to buy or subscribe to the full edition of a newspaper or magazine are happy to purchase just a single article. Yet the opposite is also true – thanks to the wide range of Blendle options infre- quent newspaper readers can also become regular readers or subscribers.

The discussion about the sale of individual articles over the online kiosk almost always focuses on the opportunities and risks of this model for the media industry, while writers’ interests are scarcely taken into consideration. But there are also new perspectives for them: even before Blendle, Pocketstory (www.pocketstory.com), a similar online kiosk, was also launched in Germany. Individual journalists can also offer texts on this portal if they have the copyright for them. In practice, however, the point is to re-use texts that have already appeared elsewhere. The writers receive 70 per cent of the profits that Pocketstory earns from the sale of their articles.

Pit Gottschalk, former editor-in-chief and manager at Axel Springer, already arranges contracts between writers and Pocketstory through his Mediapreneure company. He hopes that Blendle will soon make this option available as well.

131 Gottschalk has noticed that nowadays most writers still find it difficult to slip into a seller’s role and actively promote their own articles. At the same time, he observes their increasing curiosity and growing desire to have a go at this. The new online kiosk could therefore promote journalists’ entrepreneurial skills. One thing is certain: Blendle and similar platforms are a big experiment for all those involved.

(Translated by Suzanne Kirkbright)

***

ARE YOU PAYING ATTENTION? HOW SOCIAL NETWORKS ARE CHANGINGHOWWEREAD von Sam Sedgman – 16. März 2015

Reading a book is refreshingly anti-social. It’s hard to read a book when someone is talking to you. It’s hard to read a book when you’re thinking about something else. It’s one of the few artforms we have where you have to pay attention the whole time, and do it, for the most part, by yourself. Reading, today, is unusual.

Theatre, cinema, concerts, works of art – these are all experi- ences that can be shared, unlike the solitude of escaping into a good book. And with the rise of social networks, this divide has been made far clearer. Whether it’s the comment section below a news article, the official hashtag for a TV show or a whole social network built around photography, social culture has got a lot more social. Reading, on the other hand, seems to have resisted this charge: it doesn’t fit this social model.

Or at least it didn’t use to. Today, a number of people are making a concerted effort to use technology to socialise reading. And it might change how we read forever.

You can see this in Medium, a burgeoning blogging platform created by one of the founders of Twitter as a place to put long-form stories with more depth than 140 characters can provide. Medium’s interface is clean, stylish, and open: it is, refreshingly, a place on the internet that values the quality of your reading experience. It also lets you comment on individual paragraphs. Articles (and it is mostly articles, though there is a hefty dose of fiction to be found here too),

132 are filled up with comments in the margin like a publicly- accessible system of track changes. It doesn’t want to you read and then comment: it wants you to comment while you read.

This isn’t the preserve of journalism. eReading services like Kobo Reading Life now allow readers to add notes, read annotations, and share favourite lines to social networks while they’re reading. Because, as Kobo puts it, «the only thing better than reading something amazing, is sharing it with others». Or, as a friend of mine put it, «the only thing better than reading, is stopping reading to tweet about it».

Wattpad, a platform where writers can post fiction chapter-by- chapter, has a vibrant comment section on each page of each book, so users can comment while they read. And this isn’t some internet backwater: 100,000 new stories are published there every month, by authors including Margaret Atwood, being read by tens of millions of visitors. It was a platform like Wattpad where E.L. James began writing the fan fiction that would turn into Fifty Shades of Grey. Plenty more books will follow suit – though Wattpad itself is the main place many of its (mostly young) users get their reading material.

It would be very easy to complain about this. To talk about how cramming a comment section into the middle of Tess of the d’Urbervilles is some sort of modern depravity, that misunderstands the glorious and proud solitude of reading, that turns readers into ‘content users’, skimming text in a constant state of distraction. But let’s put that impulse on hold for a minute, and focus on the positives that this trend might bring.

For one thing, community. The social element of Wattpad is what makes it work – writers hear directly from their readers, getting feedback and encouragement, which helps them get better. For another, surely this is what books need to do to keep pace with the cultural conversation? If a bit of tech integration is what it’ll take to get more people talking about books, surely that’s a good thing? To say nothing of the fact that these conversations are able to transcend geography and social boundaries in a way the traditional closed-circle book club just can’t.

133 But of course, that’s not why any of this is happening. Ama- zon didn’t make the Kindle to be a force for social change. There’s a huge commercial imperative behind socialising rea- ding, and someone’s going to very rich off of it. But that doesn’t mean there won’t be good stuff along the way, and it’s not like commercial interests would be a new thing for the book industry.

Books aren’t broken, and they don’t need to be fixed. But that’s not what’s happening here. We’re not seeing reading being replaced by eReading – any more than photography re- placed painting. Rather, we’re seeing the possibilities of new technology give birth to a new kind of cultural consumption.

Social reading won’t look the same as the reading I did when I was a child, but it won’t be better or worse – it’ll be different. Maybe focused attention and a sense of solitude aren’t as crucial to the reading experience as we previously thought. I guess we’ll see. But if they’re not,we’ll start to see writers exploiting these new possibilities – and writing things designed to be experienced in this new way. We will see writing that’s different – that’s innovative, and challenging, and new. And I think that’s a good thing,

***

SOCIALREADING–QUIETREADINGTIMETOGETHER by Beat Mazenauer – Dec 3, 2015

There’s something magic about reading. Concentrated rea- ding expands the world of experience and opens up fields of perception that in reality remain closed. Readers experi- ence more than a single life has to offer, or in the words of Henri Michaux, «Who in his or her entire life even had just ten seconds as a tiger?» Readers switch off from their environment and devote themselves fully to reading, as Paul Verlaine summarized it in wordplay, «Tout de même on se livre.» It never ceases to amaze how many readers on buses and trains brave the public tumult in this way.

Peter Bichsel is this kind of reader who devotes time and leisure to his reading. True, when he was once asked which book he would take to a desert island, he gave the surprising

134 answer, «I wouldn’t take a single book to the island because (...) I must at least be able to say that I’ve been reading.»

So reading is also a social gesture. You have to discuss books. In the days of analogue media, reading societies and reading circles existed for this. The newly created online reading salons could become a counterpart in the digital world. In 2014 the Süddeutsche Zeitung (http:// www.sueddeutsche.de/thema/Lesesalon) opened this type of salon on a trial basis and currently the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (http://blogs.faz.net/lesesaal) experiments with this. Its reading salon is available on websites of sobooks.de (https://sobooks.de). Users who have logged in and selected a book from the choices can mark sections of text and add comments, which other readers can add their comments on. But just one text sample is available free of charge. Anyone who wants to read more must buy the ebook – the hardback edition at home is no help.

The trial with the example of Jenny Erpenbeck’s «Gehen, ging, gegangen» («Going, Went, Gone») demonstrates right from the start the problem with this kind of reading salon. Is it helpful for the discussion if sections of text are commented with «What a miserable start» or «The pleb says...?» Maybe these sorts of remarks are useful for a cosy and private tête à tête – but in public such criticisms quickly appear bad-tempered, know-it-all and jarring. While comments on comments can quickly get to the heart of the actual issue, the text as a whole is in danger of rapidly being lost from view.

A little more practice is needed with such tools. The public factor has the advantage that new users join in, yet also the disadvantage that we cannot choose our discussion partners. However, this is often desirable to cultivate a trusting basis for understanding. But whatever the case – the experience can still be fascinating.

PS: Socialbook, a technically non-optimized platform, continues to offer a private alternative athttps://www.livemargin.com. This enables the set-up of group reading sessions.

(Translated by Suzanne Kirkbright)

135 ABOUTLIBRARIESANDARCHIVES

PROVIDEDTHEYSTILLEXIST,WILLTOMORROW’SLIBRARIES RESEMBLEAPPLESTORES? von Jacques Pezet – 30. Juli 2015

What are the libraries of tomorrow going to look like? Last month, during a dinner, I debated the question with Michael, an architecture student at Gothenburg University.

In my view people who lick their fingers to leaf through the pages of books will be an extinct species in future, as printed books are going to disappear and will be replaced by e-books. If you share my opinion, you must admit that building new libraries makes no sense in a world without books. So I answered Michael sceptically, «Do you really think that libraries will still exist in the future because you can already download all of Stieg Larsson’s books at home on your iPad?»

«It will be different», commented the Swedish architecture student. «People won’t come to libraries just to find books, but to meet other people.» According to him, readers will come to tomorrow’s libraries with their tablets and download books from the catalogue just like they once borrowed prin- ted books. Users will appreciate the convivial zen atmosphere and meet in libraries to read their tablets and talk about the latest books they’ve read.

I still can’t believe him. Today, algorithms already suggest books that might interest me and I can access a wealth of websites with reviews by literary critics and alpha readers. In these circumstances, why should I leave my living room and go to the nearest tablet library?

And what about «meeting in a convivial atmosphere»? Will the library become a coffeehouse? I doubt whether libra- rians would ever appreciate becoming part-time baristas or technicians tasked with sorting out all the glitches with tablets...

I was fairly surprised, however, as I discovered that bookless libraries already exist. In most cases, they are university libraries with young users who are perfectly attuned to

136 computers, but the first public digital library opened in San Antonio, Texas, in September 2013. The promotional video clip (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QtvytxreYlc) shows something that resembles a 4,000-square-foot Apple Store with orange furniture. Thanks to five hundred e-readers, forty-eight computers and twenty iPads, the users can access as many as ten thousand digital books listed in the catalogue. But no single printed book. In my opinion, the aim of this kind of library isn’t promoting literature or being a convivial place for reading books, but something radically different. The video presentation states that San Antonio’s «BiblioTech» supports the local population without any Internet access to get online to write a CV or answer job ads. Maureen Sullivan, President of the American Library Association, emphasized the facility’s social mission as she wrote in Time in September 2013: «The library is no longer the place where you walk in and the thing you pay most attention to is the book collection. It’s now a place where, when you walk in, you’re immediately attuned to the variety of ways that people are making use of that space.» Was my Swedish dinner companion right with his statement? To find out the truth, I contacted Catherine Muller, who works at ENSSIB and has an expert knowledge of the importance of digital books in the French and European libraries, and asked her if San Antonio’s bookless library was to become the standard for tomorrow’s libraries: «In my opinion,» she answered, «a variety of libraries will exist in the future: with and without printed books, specialising in old or new titles, borrowing books or not. In a word, the libraries will diversify according to their technical, social or political orientation. Anyway, even if we’re doubtlessly living in a transition period, I don’t believe that the generation born in the first decade of the new millennium will renounce printed books and their symbolism. This will be true even after digital books are in general use.» So, there’s no reason to be worried: our children, and possibly even our grandchildren, will still experience that feeling of anxiety that takes hold of you when you didn’t return that library book, which you borrowed, on time.

***

137 DIGITIZATION BOOSTS THE LITERARY SELECTION AT THE LIBRARIES von Lise Vandborg – 8. November 2015

In times of digitization and a growing literary market of diversity the libraries enforce the information and knowledge and acces to literature. Digitization supports the literary conversation both on the web and at the library.

Since 2002, danish libraries have been running a collaborative website on literature called litteratursiden.dk. The growth has been explosive and today it has more then 200.000 unique visitors every month. Content is primarily being created by a bunch of dedicated editors and writers, but as a registered user you can write blogs and post comments or join an online reading society to discuss your reading experience with authors and other users. Its in important focuspoint in the strategy of not only giving acces to books and information. The live conversation on literary subjects is continued via Litteratursiden and the social media.

Ebooks and audio books have also become a part of the library. Through a platform called eReolen Danish libraries have given acces to loads of ebooks and audio books since 2011. As a part of this solution eReolen have a current dialogue with publishers on different business models. The popular and numerous borrows are by some publishers seen as a thread to the commercial market but obviously the challenge seems to be digitization itself, and not the libraries.

LITERATURE IN DIGITAL FORM

Today, literature is not only contained in books as we know them. This is shown by the experiments of digital publishing development. Sms-short stories, literary apps and digital literature is co-existing side by side with paper-books. At the same time the circuit of traditional publishing has literatly been revolutionized by all this technology: Today the distance between author and reader has diminished into one single click. Also, certain kinds of literature are living in closed environments and are hard to encounter without guidance. It is the duty of the libraries to expose and make visible all literary forms, digital as experimental. Some years ago

138 I was part of the project «Litteraturen finder sted» (The literature takes place), which scrutinized the way new forms of literature became a part of the local library, it’s materials and physical facility. Focusing on terms like digital literature, self publishing and publishing at small press publish houses the project became a milestone for libraries doing more odd literature.

It has clearly become more difficult to navigate on the internet. Large and complex currents if information makes it hard to choose what to read and what to believe and there is no longer a limit between those who publish and those who doesn’t. Therefore it is more important than ever, that libraries take action upholding the role as one of the last information filters of our time. In my perspective, libraries must inspire people to read the many good books buried in the shadow of bestsellers. It is crucial that libraries act different than commercial players of the market by choosing certain books from others and sharing their knowledge on these books both in the digital and physical library.

THE LIBRARY AS CURATOR

Deep reading experiences are easily missed when you focus on one type of literature and we are kept in the same kind of reading even more if we use the «customers who bought this book also bought»-function on amazon. It automatically finds the bestsellers and makes it a lot harder to cross the line into unknown lands where reading surprises you. At Litteratursiden we see an increasing demand of lists entitled «books similar to Jo Jo Moyes» (or other popular writers). The good thing about these recommendations is that they are handpicked by a librarian, not a machine.

At the physical library we also try to facilitate in new innova- tive and digital ways. The librarian increasingly becomes a curator who brings literature up front through different digital platforms. In collaboration with authors and other parts of the literary society interaction between readers and works is made possible – sometimes the reader/user is even asked to co-produce becoming a part of literature itself. In this way, development of digital technology is helping us creating more conversations and meetings at the library with literature as

139 the main subject and at the same time it ensures a better and healtier society in times when gathering around literature seems more essential than ever.

(Translated by Thomas Vang Glud)

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RE-BOOK,AEUROPEANE-BOOKPROJECTFORPROPOSAL von Renata Zamida – 12. Dezember 2015

With the exception of a few countries, European libraries have been slow at adapting to change and modernization. This means that the introduction of e-books is in many libraries merely one of many future plans. The situation can partially be blamed on the considerable turbulence in relation to the matter when it comes to the American experience where there has been constant disagreement in the relationships between libraries and publishers without a system that could cater to the needs of both in site.

Most large service providers impose their own conditions that often place libraries in a subsidiary role and are therefore perceived as unjust or unsustainable. Adding to this, certain sales systems totally bypass libraries or even take over their role. What is raising concern is that these systems are threatening the basic mission of libraries, as their substantial power allows them to far more promptly respond to changes brought by the development and advances in technology. This means that users are now offered a number of paying services that offer e-book borrowing. With large publishing houses generally standing behind these systems, users are able to choose from a great range of front-list and commer- cially interesting titles than available to public libraries that mostly have access to older and commercially less interesting works.

The European Union in its outlook (Digital Agenda and Europe 2020) clearly defined public access to cultural contexts as one of its basic priorities. Being one of the primary generators of a reading culture, the public library system contributes greatly to the development of the European cultural area. Irreparable damage is being done with libraries unable to effectively carry out their primary activities.

140 That is why we came together to establish a European Project for Proposal that initiates the collaboration between different countries to share the experience and know-how of establishing a user-friendly, public libraries based e-book lending program.

Re-Book: Who and Where? The project joins 6 countries and 6 organisations from the wider European region: Slovenia (Beletrina Academic Press), Belgium (Bibnet), Denmark (Copenhagen Main Library), Latvia (Culture Information Systems Centre), Serbia (Biblioteka grada Beograda) and Czech Republic (Charles University Library). The partnership joins three partners with already established public e-book lending programmes and three who are still in the process of doing so, in order to maximize benefits of the project for all stakeholders, including policy-makers.

Re-Book: How? Re-Book was developed as a project with two main objectives:

– To help establishing a Cross-European sharing of good pro- motional practices regarding the e-reading culture (partners will be sharing and implementing various promotional and innovative audience development tools evolved in the partner countries with the aim to broaden the range of e-books users in public libraries and stimulate e-reading of European literature in Europe and beyond.) – To support analysing and designing appropriate business models and policies including e-books in public libraries based on a study that was conducted by Bibnet (one of the partners to the project) from Flanders, Belgium and Bibliotheek.NL from the Netherlands.

The project’s aim of establishing cross-European sharing of good promotional practices will be implemented through the creation of an open source archive of creative and innovative solution for e-reading promotional campaigns. This archive of promotional tools will be open to any other country interested in e-reading promotion, not limited only to partner countries of the project. During the three years of Re-Book project all partner countries will use each other’s promotional activities in connection to their ongoing e-book lending models.

141 The project will therefore help to cross-fertilize the expe- rience, expand the dialogue and develop suitable business models and unified European policies which will outline possi- bilities for successful development of e-book platforms in the future. Most public lending models are designed in a way that enables remote e-book lending to the end user (library member) free of charge. Nevertheless it could be hardly claimed that inter-institutional licensing settlements have been so far developed in a manner that would allow libraries an establishment of attractive e-book catalogues. Project partners will work closely with publishers during the project period and several business models (time-limited licenses, loan-limited licenses) will be tested in order to discover the ones that render the best results in audience development.

Keep your fingers crossed for the EU funding process to be sucessful... Re-Book would be the first e-book project to be supported in the EACEA scheme of Cooperational Projects.

***

WRITERS’HELP by Beat Mazenauer iTunes shows how it’s done. An extensive catalogue of music tracks, games, books and of course Apps is available to users. Anyone who has stored his or her credit card data obtains the desired products in seconds. This speed is sometimes even consolation for the fact that books are linked with exasperating DRM editions that only cause hassle. Sup- pliers of audio books give iTunes credit that competitors like audible.de (from Amazon) may well make similar promises, but they load their service with prohibitive costs. iTunes is almost fair as regards its costs for suppliers, so they say.

But what about those who choose other avenues and don’t merely want to feed a global quasi-monopoly? In Switzerland a group of spoken word writers and publishers has formed to set up their own version of «Tunes». The spoken-word.ch website (www.spoken-word.ch) is now online and offers a catalogue of tracks and albums in audio format. Initially, this is not likely to yield big profits. In any case, the copyright holders linked with the project are not on the side of major

142 profiteers. The whole point is entirely different: part of the online marketing should be self-managed. spoken-word.ch is not acting exclusively. Anyone who publis- hes here can also opt for alternative routes – whether this is via a publishing house or web portals. But spoken-word.ch tries to override the disconnections between performance and literature, and to create a common pool for this. The platform is open to all writers with stage experience and the ability to produce technically flawless tracks. If they publish on spoken-word.ch, they can keep most of the revenue. Only the future will tell how far consumers are also willing to take up such offers.

(Translated by Suzanne Kirkbright)

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«GOOGLING»WITHOUTGOOGLE by Beat Mazenauer

Trapped in its own algorithms Google increasingly turns up exactly what we were expecting anyway. To put it provocatively: Google manages its own knowledge, and anything beyond this goes undiscovered. To make it more aggravating, this knowledge often comes with lists of lists of lists, but no real content.

Some time ago the frustration with such experiences moti- vated an Internet project called literaturschweiz.ch. This has now been finalized and is available in a new version 1.5: www.literaturschweiz.ch. The web portal for Swiss literature aims to function more efficiently than Google within closely defined niche parameters. For this purpose the old concept of the catalogue search has been linked with full text search. Basically, literaturschweiz.ch is a meta-search engine that doesn’t search the global net, but concentrates on a catalogue of pages stored in a database. These pages are selected for qualitative content and are continually supplemented. Pure book lists are not considered. Special websites incorporating databases are integrated by API interface, so their contents are directly displayed in search results or can be played back. Additional elements are built up around this core that reinfor- ce the site’s information value: a document-based resource

143 of Swiss books with multilingual reading tips, a comprehen- sive literature schedule, a list with the current months’ new books or an overview of network partners that can be filtered via columns and categories. For example, in the category «Li- terature promotion, a list of all literary sponsoring institutions can be compiled at a single click – and then accessed via direct links. These offers from literaturschweiz.ch can also be exported to other websites via a widget or interface.

The project is backed by an association that is supported by reputable institutions in the literary world, for instance, writers, publishers, booksellers, libraries and so forth. Of course, an obvious criticism is that the national element represents a fairly ineffectual category in a global era. That’s certainly true. Yet a good counterargument is also that the national element makes it possible to define a finite quantity in a never-ending sea of information. We know from experience that slightly tighter restrictions are a good thing – plus, the entire offer can always be linked together.

Nevertheless, the global dimension – aka Google – asserts its power and effectiveness. Users «google» automatically, even if a Google search often only yields a few results. Perhaps, getting around this familiar habit is the biggest challenge for digital niche offers like literaturschweiz.ch.

(Translated by Suzanne Kirkbright)

144 ABOUTE-BOOKS

THE PARADOX OF DIGITAL TRANSFORMATION by László Szabolcs – Mai 21, 2015

A recent visitor to Budapest, the novelist Jonathan Franzen, believes that we are living in a «media-saturated, technology- crazed, apocalypse-haunted historical moment» which con- stantly gives one the feeling that the Krausian last days of humanity are near. Apocalypse notwithstanding, the Ameri- can author – known for gluing off his laptop’s modem port so as not to let himself be tempted by the internet – was kind enough to accept the invitation to be the guest of honor for the 22nd International Book Festival in Budapest. He took part in several genuinely interesting and entertaining public discussions, gave a number of interviews, endured the photo sessions, signed a whole army of books, and then was free to finally do a little bird-watching in the Hungarian countryside.

Of course, the irony is that like most of the audience members at the discussion, I found out about his visit through the channels of what Franzen called the «infernal machine of technoconsumerism.» We were informed about the event, his books, his background, his obsession about birds, etc., on social media; then we shared these with our friends and invited them to attend the festival; and later on, read his interviews on the various literary websites which function as a dynamic network for culture in Hungary. Thus, it is quite easy to see how the digital and technological element was key in the realization of a very direct, personal, and (if you will) «traditional» literary experience. All that was missing from this symbiotic – part digital, part personal – encounter with a remarkable writer and his world of fiction was to read the book, The «Discomfort Zone», which was newly published in Hungarian. For all the usual reasons (mobility, ease of access, storage issues, and in case of Franzen’s books, weight) I would have preferred to purchase the e-book version, but then I remembered: this was not an option. Just like it is not an option with many of the books published in Hungary.

Therein lies the paradox of the digital transformation of the publishing industry and the book marketplace in the country,

145 and perhaps in the whole of Central and Eastern Europe. The wide-ranging and effective online promotional measures of the publishers, and the up-to-date media savvy of the (granted: urban, middle-class) public are not matched by an e-book production process or marketing strategy – which could complement the market for print books. The Hungarian literary scene has all but embraced the digital ways of the online realm. A forthcoming book now gets an early Face- book page which is widely shared and liked online, then excerpts and cover images start to appear, and a short trailer is made for Youtube by fellow filmmaking artists and actors, all building up to the book launch which can be live-streamed and tweeted. Afterwards come the online news reports, the sometimes clickbait-sounding, but insightful reviews, and (a trend which is becoming highly popular) Face-book photos with fans holding the book in various settings and holiday destinations.

Recent data on the Hungarian book market indicates that the- se strategies might have led to success, since the continued decline in book sales after 2008 finally turned in 2013, and there was a 2% increase for 2014 (as reported by the Hunga- rian Publishers’ and Booksellers’ Association). Yet, while print books and authors are promoted through online and digital methods, there is almost no initiative in creating an e-book market. Although the main publishing houses have slowly started to produce e-book versions for a small fraction of their output, the two websites for e-book commerce (ekonyv.hu and dibook.hu) have very low visibility. Making matters worse: the websites of the publishing houses do not even have links leading to the e-book stores. In such circumstances, a couple of hundred sales for an e-book seems already a success, and the total market-share remains under 1% (a meager 130,000 euros in the 146-million-euro Hungarian book market).

As most specialists agree, the reasons for the slow and inef- ficient development of the e-book market are partly cultural and partly bureaucratic. There is no denying the fact that in Hungary (and in the wider region as well) there is a strong culture of internet piracy, based on the almost unquestioned principle that everything downloaded should be free of charge. In a survey conducted at the 2013 Budapest Book Festival, half of the respondents answered that they had read at least

146 one e-book in their lives, but that 42% of them downloaded it illegally. Of course, it is safe to assume that the actual numbers for the use of piracy are much higher. Resulting from this is the other reason for the reduced scale of e-book production, namely that the author’s royalties for e-books are quite high: as opposed to the 6–12% for print books, it rises to 25–50% for the e-book editions (unofficially meant to compensate for the loss caused by illegal downloads). But most important of all, the underdevelopment is caused by the famously unfair EU tax legislature which deems e-books as «electronically supplied services,» and keeps their tax rates of VAT at 27%, in contrast to the 5% on print books. Unfortunately, as the recent ruling of the European Court of Justice against both France and Luxembourg showed, tax reforms for this domain are not likely to take place in the near future, maintaining relatively high prices for e-books throughout the EU.

Yet, perhaps we shouldn’t be too harsh on the prolonged infancy of this new form for reading: we are experiencing the difficulties of an exciting and unpredictable paradigm change. All we can hope is that through this transformation we will get closer to a truly rich, thought-provoking, and entertaining experience of literature.

***

THEE-BOOKMARKET:HOWENGLISHISDISPLACING SMALLERLANGUAGES by Renata Zamida – Sept 3, 2015

What do e-books mean in the context of preserving «lesser used languages»? Practically nothing. Whoever works in the book industry knows what the wider used languages are, and what they mean. This is especially true in the European context. Spanish, English, but also German, French, and Italian are those European languages that the global platform called Amazon is has been supporting since the beginning. Newspapers and book publishers will never be able to establish an electronic platform comparable to those of Amazon, Netflix, Apple, or Google, which not only offer a global electronic marketplace but are also the owners of user devices, from readers, tablets, smartphones, and computers.

147 Therefore, traditional providers of content will, at most, be able to be hosted on these platforms under conditions determined by their owners. In the case of e-books, one of the most painful limitations for lesser used languages is precisely the linguistic limitation or the globalisation of English that has been going on for many years. It has squeezed its way into all fields: let us take a look at only the academic field, where it is the norm that scientific papers are written in English and that all other languages are not only worthless but can even be a barrier. And not only the academic book but also literature in English is, through e-reading, taking over global primacy. The more demanding electronic reader is a user of e-books for a generally far longer period of time than, for example, there exists an online platform for the sale and/or lending of e-books in his own country and language. In the year 2009 or 2010 such a user considered and bought the back then most hip and simple e-reading device, the Kindle. He is now married to the Amazon family. But if this user is Polish, Hungarian, Slovenian, Croatian, Russian – then he simply does not have access to literature in his mother tongue on this device. In the 21st century, based on available data, more than half of readers wish to read electronically as well. If they do not have access to e-books in their language, this does not mean that they will stop being e-readers, but that they will not be e-readers in their mother tongue – in Slovenian, Croatian, Hungarian, etc. In Slovenia, the number of frequent users of the biggest online platform that offers access to e-books in Slovenian (Biblos) numbers around 12,000. They have access to around 2,000 e-book titles in Slovenian. Yet this is still ten times too few e-books in Slovenian to turn Slovenian e-readers away from the increasingly wide reading (and buying) of e-books in particular in English. This is also due to the fact that the most popular titles, bestsellers, are not available in e-book form in lesser used languages, since the rights for their release in e-form are priced so highly that they simply do not represent a viable investment for publishers in smaller book markets. It has become more than obvious that we are losing in this field. Amazon offers e-books in only a handful of world languages and many languages, above all Central and Eastern European as well as Asian (with the exception of Japanese) languages, will not be among them for a long time. The Kindle is in this

148 way a victim of its own technological progress – if Amazon wishes that the confirmed languages work flawlessly on the oldest generations of its reader (the first of which were put on the market in the far-off year of 2007), the technical testing of each new language costs quite a lot and takes a long time. If, for example, Slovenian publishers wish to sell e-books on Amazon, then these cannot be in Slovenian. And the Slovenian e-reader slowly but surely takes on the habit of reading the new crime or romance novels or Nobel laureate in English – on his e-device.

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WHO’SAFRAIDOFTHEE-COMIC? by Christian Gasser – Mai 11, 2015

The «e-book» has been the slow-burner for years at book fairs. At Comic Festivals, of course, events are organized about the e-comic, although the approach is comparatively reserved and tentative. Facing up to the digital revolution – sooner or later this will also impact on the comic – is not happening as consistently as it should.

There are several reasons for this. On the one hand, demand for digital comics is still extremely small – not only in Europe, but also in the US. In France, sales generated from e-comics amount to less than 1%.

However, there is a more important aesthetic and content- based reason for the latent suppression of the subject. While digitizing a prose text is straightforward, keeping largely the identical form and being launched on the market as an improved PDF, digitization of the comic raises some fundamental questions, or more accurately: it places the comic, as we know it, in question.

In contrast to a novel, a comic is not simply digitized 1:1 – the layout must be reworked. It’s questionable whether the design of the comic page, which is the most important and coherent element of comic syntax, makes any sense on a digital reader device because only a handful of readers have big enough screens. Possibly, a dynamic comic-page layout with panels of varying widths and heights, with full-page

149 and double-page or trimmed images will become a sequence of individual images. The comics’ narration and sequencing must now be revised, indeed even invented. Besides, many authors will want to use the additional possibilities that the e-Comic offers: animations, sound, 3D perspectives and interactivity.

That will create a new expressive form that combines ele- ments of the comic, animated film and computer game. This development has been upcoming for years; currently, the name for these hybrid forms is «motion comics». Although the science-fiction writer Philip K. Dick already described the first motion comic in 1964 (!) in his novel «The Zap Gun», to my knowledge until today no convincing motion comic has appeared, and not a single approach has established itself as forward-looking. On the contrary, these «prototypes» of a new form of expression predominantly combine – to put it provocatively – the weaknesses of their components: poor image narration, rudimentary animations, cheap sound effects, infantile interaction and all in a terribly tame, non-dynamic and non-user-friendly way. That inspires nobody. For this reason, for the time being, if you want to read a comic, it’s preferable to pick up a book, or a DVD, if you feel like watching an animated film.

Another reason for the lack of interest in the e-comic is naturally the fear that the comic, as we knew and loved it, might become obsolete because of the new medium. Digitizing in the comic sector will have a much more lasting effect on the narration and reading of comic strips than on prose texts. The media transfer will fundamentally revive the expressive form. In the long run, the comic book and e-comic cannot survive as two media for a largely identical work. So, it’s questionable whether the comic and e-comic can have a long-term parallel existence like the e-book and the book, or like vinyl and mp3 – presumably, writers and publishers will have to decide from the outset whether they want to produce a comic or e-comic – the one at the other’s expense.

Nevertheless, this is no excuse for the failure to face up to the reality of the new medium. It will take its revenge.

(Translated by Suzanne Kirkbright)

150 ***

ISTHEE-BOOKBOOMALREADYOVER? by Dirk Rumberg – Oct 20, 2015

In the week prior to the Frankfurt Book Fair the reports and rumours were amassing that the e-book market had reached its limits of expansion – at least for published titles. Widely divergent figures and prognoses circulated at the Frankfurt fair and in general, as ever, an air of edginess and uncertainty prevailed about the appropriate way to react to digital changes. But the good news for all bookworms is that for the key markets sales in the book sector are generally increasing; in Germany as well in the USA more print books are being sold again.

In Germany the industry association for companies in the digital sector, Bitkom, published a survey according to which the number of e-book readers rose by just one per cent compared with the previous year. 32 per cent of 14- to 29-year-olds read e-books, whereas this was 30 per cent for 30- to 49-year-olds and 28 per cent for the 50 to 64 age group, while this was just 11 per cent for readers above age 65. In total, only one quarter of Germany’s citizens reads e-books. On the other hand, 39 per cent basically rules out reading any book on a screen.

In Great Britain, a book and e-book market that many conti- nental European publishers have eyed up during recent years with many assuming their own development would progress as it has done here, e-book sales (of publishers) have even declined – while the sector has grown as a whole. According to a study by Nielsen market researcher, BookScan, from the start of the year until August, sales of print books in the British book market have increased by 4.6 per cent – the first rise since 2007. Also relevant is that British book retail chain Waterstones (with about 300 branches in Great Britain and Ireland) will in future no longer sell the Kindle e-reader in its branches – it would prefer to use the space for sales of print books again. Waterstones’ experience with poor Kindle sales is no exception, for instance, Blackwell’s books records markedly weakening business for the e-reader Nook. A trend in Great Britain therefore continues that already emerged in

151 2014 in the most developed e-book market – in the US. In 2014, for the first time in quite a while the number of sold print books again increased by a respectable 2.4 per cent compared with the previous year.

The e-book boom is certainly not over. However, the limits of growth for this market are now clear – and it’s happened quicker than many people thought. It’s becoming increasingly more unlikely that market quotas for the e-book in Europe will be similar to those in America. In Germany, the quota of e-books is stagnating. Only a few publishers will achieve a sales quota of over about ten per cent.

Nevertheless,many publishers are preoccupied with two major concerns with regard to digital offers. Firstly, the monopolistic sales structures, or in practice the absolutely dominant market role of Amazon. Secondly, increasing competition from self- publishers.

This year was the first year that Amazon attended the Frankfurt Book Fair. It was represented with a big stand in Hall 3.0, just a few metres from major mainstream publishing houses. The industry giant awarded (with a star-studded jury) a lucrative prize for a self-publisher who picked up a print book contract with Lübbe in addition to 30,000 Euros prize money. Plenty of managers from Seattle and Luxembourg attended – they were prominent and had obviously travelled some distance. All in all this was a clear signal that one of the leading industry players is no longer hidden away here, even if it continues to clam up when it comes to shedding light on any figures. However, discussions with other industry participants lead to the definite conclusion: the giant from Seattle/Luxembourg accounts for more than 50 per cent (some think this is 65, others even 80 per cent) of sales in the (German) e-book market. This applies for publishing titles, and in particular, also for the self-publisher market where Amazon has significantly expanded its value added chain thanks to KDP, and for which the giant is by far the most important sales channel. What has definitely already motivated the digital opportunity of creating, selling and reading books is an even broader and even more confusing range of offers – along with falling average prices. The Bitkom study already mentioned

152 also shows that in Germany now more than half of the 100 best-selling e-books originates from self-publishers, in other words from writers who don’t sell their works via publishers (and generally for markedly lower prices than these). Every fifth interviewee admitted to having already read e-books from self-publishers once. This ‘democratizing process’ in publishing will not vanish,and in future surely this will present established publishers with one of the biggest challenges.

It’s also worth glancing at the US, the source of these studies, which not only predict that print book sales have again outstripped those of e-books, and mainly also indicate that after a decline by eight per cent in 2014, this year e-book sales are due to collapse by up to a quarter (24 per cent). However, this only applies to titles that are released by publishing houses. The e-book market as a whole continues to expand – even in the US, yet the growth is exclusively down to the success of self-publishers. Now, the (German) publishers are also reacting to this. For instance, last year after Lübbe already took a majority stake in the self- publishing platform Bookrix, in this sector Droemer has also been active for a while with its Neobooks. All the rumours and information now prove that other publishers (like Piper) also offer markedly improved e-book terms.On the eve of the book fair Random House (together with BoD) even announced that it was founding its own self-publishing platform called Twentysix. In the relevant forums and blogs, the industry giant already largely earned mockery and ridicule for this – and in particular, for the rumoured terms and conditions package. Indeed, it’s questionable whether it can succeed with these types of offers in winning any substantial share of the self-publisher market.

In conversations and during tours of the exhibition halls in Frankfurt as well as at publisher parties, there was plenty of talk again of digital developments and challenges. Subscription models were the source of equally controversial debate, like the latest verdict that the economic viability of scientific publishers is under threat by offering libraries extended rights for digital «loans». Nevertheless, leaving the fair you had the feeling that for the foreseeable future book publishers and the book trade (unlike other media

153 organizations such as newspaper and magazine publishers or even music labels) will do their main business with print books – simply because the readers want it that way.

(Translated by Suzanne Kirkbright)

154 DIRK RUMBERG: INNOVATIONS IN THE DIGITAL FIELD

(2015, Attempt at an Overview)

Twenty years ago, Google didn’t even exist and the same goes for Wikipedia. In the US, for the very first time Amazon sales went into three-figure millions but the company wasn’t trading yet in Europe. The trio of Amazon, Google and Wiki- pedia along with smartphones stands for the revolutionary transformation that was, and still is, influencing our media world in recent decades.

Judging by the revolutionary changes, which these firms and technologies achieved, 2015 was more a year of quieter evolution and technical innovations in the digital field. At least, retrospectively at the year-end this appears to be the case today. Who knows in what garage, teenage bedroom or shared student house the next big thing was dreamed up so that twenty (or rather five) years from now we’ll say: that totally changed our world.

Regarding today’s obvious trends during 2015 three major themes can be identified that also played a role in our blog entries and throughout the annual conference in Spitz:

• How digital developments influence writers (and rea- ders).

• How digital developments impact on libraries.

• The economic effects of digital developments for pu- blishers.

These three themes are ultimately also related to copyright issues, which are generally relevant beyond the general public’s attention span, plus they are regarded as specialist themes.

A book is not a medium to keep «in the background». It’s worthwhile constantly bearing in mind this seemingly banal platitude when reflecting on the effects of digital trends on the book market, about reader behaviour, writers

155 and libraries. One can listen to music «in the background» (and in over 95 per cent of all cases this is exactly what happens), even if occasionally this activity is perhaps going on while driving the car or washing up, ironing or doing homework – music really is being listened to. Television is also increasingly becoming a «sprinkler system» that goes on «in the background»; and surfing on the net goes on in parallel, talking to friends, chatting, telephoning and cooking. You can’t read a book while doing something else. You can neither drive a car nor surf on the net while reading a book – and when cooking at best it’s one glance at a recipe, not reading the latest crime thriller or most recent non-fiction bestseller. That’s just about still possible while reading «in the background».

Reading (not only books) nowadays competes with even more alternative activities than 20 years ago. Anybody who travels with his or her eyes open on a city or commuter train sees that. When boarding aircraft most passengers more often than not leave the stack of newspapers untouched – in any case the stack has become smaller. Sitting on a bus or plane people then play on a smartphone or watch a film on a tablet. Reading is (still) a rare pastime here.

Those who read are taking a conscious decision about how in the minutes (or in the case of a book it’s more like hours) they want to spend their time (exclusively). The possibility of doing this digitally makes travel bags lighter; but the alternative information, entertainment or diversion is ‘just one click away’. «Mobile first» is a trend that many Internet offers have increasingly embraced no matter it’s about information or entertainment offers. Digital content is increasingly accessed via smartphones and tablets and less and less on desktop computers.

In relation to books at first glance, in 2015, one can make out something like a changing trend – apparently,the unstoppable advance of ebooks appears to have slowed down, and ebook sales are stagnating or in decline. Even in the US more and more print books are being sold. Evidence can be supplied for these trends virtually worldwide. At least, that’s true when one only observes the book market, which has been created and dominated by (traditional) publishers. However,

156 increasingly this is no longer the entire book market. For a long time in plenty of key markets more titles are offered by self-publishers (mostly only as ebooks, or even more via the print-on-demand solution) than are released by publishers. The sales figures of most are homeopathic. But time and again there are outstandingly successful examples – and the ebook sales charts of Amazon – both in English-speaking as well as on the German market are dominated by such (cheap) self-publisher offers. Traditional publishers certainly take this seriously, as one can see by the fact that nowadays almost none of the major publishing groups survive without their own self-publishing platforms. Meanwhile, there are famous examples (of former) self-publishers who now have publishing contracts (and critically monitor whether this makes them really sell much more than they hoped in order to make this worthwhile due to the evidently lower share of royalties per copy).

For a long time, self-publishing has also no longer been an activity for frustrated would-be writers who have trouble finding a publisher. By now, as the book trade only swings into action for a few titles – and on behalf of publishers – established writers also prefer to take their writers’ destiny into their own hands. «Marketing and PR is overseen by the writer» is a phrase that, in 2015, agents and writers had to hear from publishers more often than in the past.

A former boss of mine, the Bertelsmann post-war new busi- ness founder, Reinhard Mohn, used to say (the gist of this): every problem that we’re confronted with today was also faced by somebody else beforehand. We have to take a look at how they solved it, at what we learn from it and how we adapt the answers to our circumstances and what we can do better. This means two things with regard to (digital) developments on the book market, their impact on writers, publishers, the book trade and libraries. On the one hand, it means being open for incentives from other fields (the music and film industry, yet also the gaming industry to mention just three examples). Yet this need not mean treating eve- rything that’s available here as automatically good without any kind of critique. For example, given good arguments you can treat flat-rate models, which are a success in the music sector, as the wrong avenue in the book market.

157 The other approach to learning (in traditional and unavoidably heavily language-based and therefore often national) book markets is to risk looking more closely than before beyond national garden fences. For instance, to observe what’s hap- pening in Slovenia in the libraries sector or to focus on how in a non-Amazon country like Sweden people deal with the topic of self-publishing. Additionally, and precisely because of the language barriers the usually more challenging look towards Asia may offer plenty of interesting and inspiring ideas. Not only in China, but especially also in Japan or South Korea some surprises can still crop up here.

«The winner takes it all» – see Amazon, Wikipedia and Google – this appears to hold true for major digital trends. In 2015, the book market showed – and will show in 2016 – that it’s still possible to find life in plenty of small niches.

158 Illustration: Yvan Alagbé

159

APPENDIXELITLITERATUREHOUSEEUROPE

The ELiT Literaturehouse Europe establishes an observatory for European contemporary literature focusing chiefly on: re- search, discussion and publishing results concerning literary trends across Europe, as well as the inter-cultural communi- cation of literature within Europe and the dissemination of literature among the diverse cultural spaces within Europe. It enables writers to introduce their works in other linguistic areas and to discover new opportunities for publishing based on digital media. It develops innovative forms of communica- ting literature for young people from different south eastern European countries of the Danube Region Strategy who get to know Europe’s shared heritage through working on a literary subject and producing a collectively authored ebook.

ELiT Literaturehouse Europe regularly organizes these events: European literature youth meetings, European writers’ rea- ding tours sessions, workshops for young writers and – the annual highlight – the European Literature Days in the Wach- au/Lower Austria. ELiT Literaturehouse Europe promotes literary transfer in Europe with guest appearances by Euro- pean writers in other countries. Particular emphasis is on the dissemination of the multilingual aspects of European litera- ture. ELiT Literaturehouse Europe organizes reading tours by writers as well as workshop sessions in Wachau. It focuses on inviting EU Literature Prize winners as well as hosting events for them in European partner organization countries in Ljubljana, London, Budapest, Paris and Hamburg.

At the European Literature Days successful writers meet their prospective counterparts in workshop sessions. They relate their experiences of writing, publishing, networking, their approach to readers and media and engage in dialogue with the young adults about writing, publishing, networking and meeting readers as well as the new opportunities and risks of digital media. Thanks to its workshops in London, Budapest, Hamburg and Ljublujana, ELiT makes it possible for young writers to benefit from digital media for publication and transnational exchange also in other European countries.

ELiT Literaturehouse Europe headquarters is in Wachau/ Lower Austria, where it facilitates networking for literary

161 experts, centres and events as well as setting up cooperative programmes within Europe. It upgrades the professionalitiy of it’s work and currently sets up a programme for writers and translators-in-residence. The European Literature Days take place in Spitz, a little village in Wachau, an outstanding cultural landscape and UNESCO World Heritage Centre.

At the website www.literaturehouse.eu and trough ebook- and book on demand publications ELiT Literaturehouse Euro- pe will introduce literary trends in Europe and publish and discuss texts on European issues in cultural policy.

AUTHORSANDEDITORS

Marguerite Abouet, After spending her childhood on the Ivory Coast, Marguerite Abouet has lived in Paris since she was twelve. Her graphic novel series «Aya» is among the most successful comics in France and has appeared in multilingual translations.

Yvan Alagbé, born in Paris to a French mother and a father from Benin, Yvan Alagbé is a member of the publishing collective Frémok or FRMK, a joint-venture of the belgian group Fréon and Amok, the publishing house he created with Oliver Marboeuf in the early nineties.

Pierre Alféri, French writer, poet and essayist. He is amongst the most innovative voices in France. Alféri is also well known for his experimental films and theatre studies, visual poetry and tone pieces as well as for his picture books and posters (www.alferi.fr).

Szilard Borbely, Hungarian poet (1963 – 2014), he is one of the most important authors of contemporary Hungarian literature.

Alexandra Büchler, Czech translator and editor living in Britain. She is Director of the European platform Literature Across Frontiers.

Patrick Deville is among France’s most successful writers. Deville is a cosmopolitan who lived in the Middle East and Africa and is in perpetual motion for a cycle of novels, each of which is set in one continent. He is also Director of

162 the Maison des Écrivains Étrangers et Traducteurs in Saint Nazaire.

Wilhelm Droste, German writer. He is editor-in-chief of the review Drei Raben in Budapest.

Steven J. Fowler, born 1983 in Cornwall, contemporary Eng- lish poet and avant garde artist, he is the director of the Enemies project.

Christian Gasser is a novelist and luminary on the graphic novel. The Swiss national is co-editor of the comic magazine, STRAPAZIN.

Rosie Goldsmith, british multimedia journalist whose special interests are art, literature and international affairs. She has worked for BBC Radio around the world, and now directs the European Literature Network in London.

Lena Gorelik, German writer and journalist arrived with her Russian-Jewish family as a «quota refugee» in Germany. She publishes novels, short stories, essays and articles for Deutschlandradio Kultur as well as writing on current political and social affairs in the Süddeutsche Zeitung and Die Zeit among others.

Aljoša Harmalov, Slovenian literary critic, columnist and essayist. Editor of Airbeletrina and Mentor.

Iman Humaydan, born in the Mount Lebanon governorate in 1956 and studied sociology at the American University in Beirut. She is a Lebanese writer and lives in Paris.

Saša Ilic, Serbian writer. He lives in Beograd and is member of the editorial board of BETON (literary supplement of the daily newspaper Danas).

A.L. Kennedy, the Scottish writer and winner of the Austrian State Prize for European Literature is among the most re- nowned European contemporary female writers, a committed publicist as well as anti-war campaigner.

Anna Kim,The Austrian writer and EU Literature Prize winner arrived in Europe from South Korea as a small child. She

163 writes prose and poetry and in her novel among other things tackles the Yugoslav wars and human destinies in Greenland.

Henning Kornfeld, news media journalist and based in Heidel- berg. Until 2012, he was Deputy Editor-in-Chief of the media news service kress.

Jamal Mahjoub, the British writer of Sudanese heritage now lives in Barcelona after numerous changes of residence. His novels notably include In the Hour of the Signs (Die Stunde der Zeichen) – a historic novel set in Sudan in the 1880s. One could think of being a witness to the contemporary visions of the IS Caliphate.

Rainer Moritz, German literary scholar and academic, writer, publisher and translator. He is Director of the Literaturhaus Hamburg.

Ágnes Orzóy, editor of Hungarian Literature Online (hlo.hu) and editor-at-large at Asymptote (www.asymptotejournal.com/ ).

Katja Petrovic, born in Hamburg, free lancing radio journalist in Paris.

Jacques Pezet, French-Honduran journalist based in Berlin.

Atiq Rahimi, born 1962 in Kaboul, French-Afghan writer and filmmaker.

Ilma Rakusa, a winner of the Swiss Book Prize for her novel Mehr Meer (More Sea), the acclaimed writer, translator and publicist is a European par excellence. She grew up and lived in Budapest, Ljubljana and Triest, and studied in Zurich, Paris and Saint Petersburg (Leningrad) and is among the leading experts on Russian literature.

Manca G. Renko, Slovenian historian and the editor-in-chief of the AirBeletrina literary journal, published by Beletrina Academic Press.

Jürgen Ritte, French-German literary scholar and academic, translator and writer. He is Professor at the Université Sorbonne Nouvelle-Paris 3.

164 Dirk Rumberg, German management consultant (media indus- try) and literary agent. He is Managing Director of Ultreya GmbH.

Sam Sedgman, editor and digital content producer based in London. He was the Digital Producer and Editor at Free Word Centre, he edits the London Playwrights Blog.

László Szabolcs, studies in Bucharest and Budapest. Editor for Central European University Press and member of the József Attila Circle (JAK).

Lise Vandborg, journalist and cand.mag in Scandinavian Lan- guage and Literature and philosophy. Since 2003 editor-in- chief at Litteratursiden.dk (Literature site).

Najem Wali, Iraqi writer living in Germany. He is cultural correspondent for the leading Arabic newspaper Al-Hayat, and regularly writes for the Süddeutsche Zeitung, Neue Zürcher Zeitung and Die Zeit. His novel Bagdad Marlboro describes the war in Iraq from an Iraqi and American perspective.

Renata Zamida, Slovenian literature expert. She works at Belletrina-Academic Press, is Director of the Fabula Festival in Ljublanja and is involved in setting up the book lending platform Biblos.

Peter Zimmermann,writer and journalist. Features and cultural editor for ORF/Radio in Vienna, responsible for the book show Ex libris on Ö1.

THEEDITORS

Walter Grond, Austrian writer. He is the artistic director of ELiT Literaturhaus Europa.

Beat Mazenauer, Swiss literary critic and networker. He is director of the platforme www.swissliterature.ch.

165 THANKS

Thanks to transkriptwunder.com, to the translators Claudia Carrel, Michelle Hartmann, Suzanne Kirkbright, Szabolcs László, Svetlana Rakocevic, Friederike Ridegh, Marcel Saché, Thomas Vang Glud, Renata Zamida and to the team of ELiT Literature House Europe Daniela Freistetter, Albrecht Großberger, Jochen Gruber, Klaus Moser, Barbara Pluch in Krems and Birgit Politycki in Hamburg.

Planning and Organization ELiT Literature House Europe

NÖ Festival und Kino GmbH Minoritenplatz 4, 3500 Krems Telephone: +43 (0) 2732/90 80 33 Fax: +43 (0) 2732/90 80 31 Email: [email protected]

166 167

INDEX

Abouet, Marguerite....81, 162 Müller, Herta...... 55 Alagbé, Yvan...... 81, 162 Mahjoub, Jamal....28, 31, 164 Alféri, Pierre ...... 61, 62, 162 Mazenauer, Beat116, 121, 134, Büchler, Alexandra .... 31, 162 142, 143, 165 Borbely, Szilard ...... 124, 162 Moritz, Rainer...... 102, 164 Deville, Patrick...... 76, 162 Orzóy, Ágnes...... 46, 164 Droste, Wilhelm...... 106, 163 Petrovic, Katja ...... 96, 164 Fowler, Steven J...... 95, 163 Pezet, Jacques...... 136, 164 Gasser, Christian.81, 114, 149, Rahimi, Atiq...... 28, 52, 164 163 Rakusa, Ilma...... 24, 44, 164 Goldsmith, Rosie...... 24, 163 Renko, Manca G...... 111, 164 Gorelik, Lena ..... 40, 129, 163 Grond, Walter...... 7, 165 Ritte, Jürgen...13, 76, 98, 164 Harmalov, Aljoša...... 109, 163 Rumberg, Dirk...151, 155, 165 Humaydan, Iman .. 45, 51, 163 Sedgman, Sam...127, 132, 165 Ilic, Saša...... 92, 163 Szabolcs, László27, 34, 145, 165 Kennedy, A.L.6, 15, 24, 28, 29, Vandborg, Lise...... 138, 165 51, 163 Wali, Najem...... 36, 165 Kim, Anna...... 28, 41, 163 Zamida, Renata..140, 147, 165 Kornfeld, Henning .... 130, 164 Zimmermann, Peter28, 118, 165

ROKFOR

Neugier ROKFOR ist eine Software, die Bücher und 123 Kompetenzen 123 THEMA andere Drucksachen produzieren kann. Hinter Rokfor stehen Gina Bucher, ROKFOR Redaktion, Urs Hofer, Programmierung, Interessen und Rafael Koch, Gestaltung. 123

MATERIALSAMMLUNG METHODE suchen Insbesondere möglichst große und Das Material fließt in eine Datenbank, heterogene Datenmengen sind für die online gesteuert wird. Inhaltliche Rokfor interessant – unabhängig und formale Strukturen werden als davon, ob es sich um Text oder Bild Regeln formuliert, die logisch nach- oder beides handelt. Wir analysieren vollziehbar sind und Algorithmen das Material auf explizite als auch entsprechen. Um Inhalte zu katego- implizite Zusammenhänge. Zentral 123 risieren, können verschiedene Tools sind dabei Fragen wie: Welche eingesetzt werden, z.B. Listen, Ordnung führt zu Wissensgewinn? MATERIALSAMMLUNG Stichwortmasken oder Selektoren. Wie kann via Struktur eine Narration Rokfor besitzt auch die Fähigkeit, aufgebaut werden? Welche Stich- semantische Zusammenhänge als wörter verbinden den Text? Ziel ist 123 Netzstrukturen darzustellen, um es, dem Leser mehrere Zugänge zum komplexe Abhängigkeiten zwischen Inhalt zu verschaffen. analysieren Materialien abzubilden.

123

Konzept 13 IDEE 123 Methode

1 123

Verlag 1 Geldgeber Datenbank 1 Inhalt 1 Algorithmus 3 Form

3 23

1 Layout-Templates 2 Gestaltungsregeln formulieren

123

INHALT, ALGORITHMUS, FORM ERGEBNIS Rokfor betrachtet automatisiertes testing Im Zusammenspiel von Gestaltung und Design als einen alternativen Zugang testing Programmierung werden die Layout- zu Gestaltung. Durch automatisierte testing Templates entwickelt. Das letztlich Prozesse ergeben sich neue maschinell hergestellte Dokument Begründungen für gestalterische kann so immer wieder neu generiert Entscheidungen. Ideen für Regeln, werden – mit unterschiedlichen In- auf denen automatisiertes Design halten und veränderten Regeln. Rokfor basiert, beinhalten unter anderem 123 stellt die Arbeit des Gestalters nicht Zufälle und Unschärfen durch infrage, sondern gewichtet den algorithmische Positionierung und Arbeitsprozess anders. Die Arbeit Skalierung einzelner Elemente. verschiebt sich von der Gestaltung Zusätzlich beeinflussen klassische einzelner Dokumente zur Gestaltung Raster- und Layout-Systeme die 13 eines einzigen Regelwerks für das Entwicklung von Algorithmen. komplette Ergebnis. Inhalt Form

123

PRODUKTION Ein Klick auf Vorschau oder Document Export erzeugt ein PDF. ERGEBNIS 3 123 Die modulare Struktur erlaubt es Produktion NEU auch andere Formate, beispielsweise START Webseiten, zu produzieren.

EDITIONROKFOR

K5.018 GINA BUCHER; Chic Politique. A catalogue

K5.029 URS HOFER; East Coast West Coast. Bewegungsstudien

K5.016 GINA BUCHER; Français fédéral. Singen gegen den Röschtigraben

B5.111 HG. VON WALTER GROND, VERONIKA TRUBEL & BEAT MAZENAUER; Ich und die Politik. Europäische Literatur-Jugendbegegnung 2015

B5.104 BEAT MAZENAUER; Literatur Medien Kritik. Essayistische Streifzüge

K5.030 URS HOFER; Lost in MySpace. A Journey Into The Nirvana

B5.108 BEAT MAZENAUER; Mind the gap. London Calling

T5.103 TAZ. DIE TAGESZEITUNG; Mini Utopien. Das Wörterbuch zum taz-Kongress

W5.105 BEAT MAZENAUER UND VERONIKA TRUBEL (HRSG.); Neues Lesen neues Lernen. Europäische Jugendbegegnung 2013 in Semmering und Tulln

K5.008 URS HOFER; The Answer to the Final. Generated Sermons

K5.116 URS HOFER & RAFAEL KOCH; Title of the Show. Some Notes about a Lecture W5.100 FISCHER, HAMANN ET AL.; Wilde Assoziationen. Der Mensch wurzelt im Traum

W5.107 HG. VON VERONIKA TRUBEL & BEAT MAZENAUER; Wo sind wir denn zuhause. Europäische Literatur-Jugendbegegnung 2014 B3.115