Literary trends 2015 - European Commission

Literaturehouse

Europe ed. by Walter

Grond and Beat

Mazenauer

Literarytrends 2015

Ed. by Walter Grond and BeatMazenauer

All rights reserved by theAuthors/ELiT

The Literaturhaus Europe isfunded by the Creative EuropeProgramme of the EuropeanUnion. For copyrightinformation and credits forfunding organizations andsponsors please refer to theappendix of this book.

Edition RokforZürich/BerlinB3.115/18-12-2015

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FOREWORD

TRENDS IN EUROPEANCONTEMPORARY LITERATURE

The virtual project «Literaturehouse Europe» invol-ves six institutions from Budapest, Hamburg, Krems,London, Ljubljana and Paris with the common aimof creating a European feuilleton, which focuseson 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 commissionsinternational correspondents and writers to provi-de contributions on these topics; via the websitewww.literaturhauseuropa.eu it also publishes theirblogs on various aspects of literature as well asliterature in general. Quarterly dossiers give an in-sight into the various perspectives in the differentcountries, and lastly, every autumn a panel of expertsand writers debates themes at the European Litera-ture Days symposium, which is held in the convivialatmosphere of Wachau.

The new series «Trends in European ContemporaryLiterature» summarizes the key texts and discussionsfrom the current year and endeavours to compile in-formative overviews. Here, the focus is on a processof 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 flexiblebook production thanks to an automated processenabling the text to be provided as a free downloadin PDF format, or for a modest fee as a haptic «bookon demand».

FOREWORD

The first volume of «Trends in European Contem-porary Literature» includes texts, discussions andsummaries featured in the Observatory from Januaryto 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 artistsand writers to show commitment for human dignityin the face of war and the global refugee trage-dy. The current deep-seated social changes demandgreater awareness towards writers from other cul-tures. Their books make far-reaching social changecomprehensible.

– Trends in contemporary literature in the English,

German, French, Hungarian and Slovenian context?

For several years there has been a notable trend fornovels, which dispense with fiction, and treat factslike fiction or showcase autobiographical elements asa ‘reality show’. However, it is not easy to identifywhether this heralds a new realism or a hyper-genre.Additionally, the striving for identity as homo poeticus

and homo politicus, in particular, for writers fromthe former socialist countries represents a challenge.After the collapse of the Soviet Union writers grewto appreciate their freedom from the political sphere.However, the younger generations are developing anew understanding of engaged literature with noconnection to debates from the post-war era.

– Innovations in the digital field

Currently, the media sector and not the literary sectoris the focus of most activity. Today, the industry

FOREWORD

leaders in the book and booksellers’ market areselling fewer ebooks than previously due to themore inflexible price determination, lack of offers andgreater access difficulties. However, a constant factoris access to literary content via electronic media andsocial media networks – especially for young readerscircles. Presently, important innovations are ongoingin the area of ebook sales, ebook lending and ebookplatforms in small countries like Slovenia.

Walter GrondArtistic Director ELIT Literaturehouse Europe

INHALT

1. The Migrants . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13A.L. Kennedy: The Migrants. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 15Ilma Rakusa: The Migrants and EuropeanLiterature . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 24Posts from the «Observatory» (1) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 27Talk with Jamal Mahjoub . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 31Najem Wali: On Exile and Home . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 36Posts from the «Observatory» (2) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 40Iman Humaydan: Migration, Identity and theLiterary Imagination . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 51Herta Müller: Homesickness for Future . . . . . . . . . . . . 552. Trends in European contemporary literature . . . 61Pierre Alféri: Non sequitur. The garbled story ofpresence . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 62World Novel – Talk with Patrick Deville . . . . . . . . . . . 76Word and Image - Talk with Marguerite Abouetand Yvan Alagbé. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 81Posts from the «Observatory» (3) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 92Beat Mazenauer: Trends no Trends . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1213. Innovations in the digital field . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 123Szilard Borbely: About Change and DigitalOblivion. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 124About Writing and Reading . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 127About Libraries and Archives . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 136About e-books . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 145Dirk Rumberg: Innovations in the Digital Field . . . . 155Appendix ELiT Literature House Europe . . . . . . . . . . 161Authors and editors . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 162Thanks . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 166

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 emphaticresponses in answer to the question «Is there a Europeanliterature?» – «No and yes. Yes. Of course there is – thereare shared lines of heritage. No, it has always been anexport-import undertaking, like Europe and its culture ingeneral. It’s a fruitful melange. A formidable machinery thatassimilates everything from Chinese noodles, Japanese printsand South American plants, and has made everything, whichit encounters, its own.»

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

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

To approach and clarify this issue we must consider writersfor whom this tension-ridden area is particularly relevant.The purpose is to trace migrants in Europe – no matterwhether they change the focal point of their lives insideEurope or whether they hail from countries outside Europe.A myriad of questions emerges: were they already writersupon leaving their country of origin, or did they first beginwriting after their migration? What language do they writein? How did they learn the new language? Are the topicsfeatured in their texts rooted in the culture of their nativecountry or in their new home? Where is the main area ofinterest for their work? Are they perceived in their new homeas writers who belong, or more as migrants and outsiders?How does their literary language alter by living in-betweentwo cultures? How do they change and enrich the language?

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

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A.L. KENNEDY: THE MIGRANTS

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

When I first wrote this lecture a summary of my argumentcould have been – when art fails, there is cruelty, becausecruelty in humans is caused by a lack of imagination. Thereare not enough enough human beings who are ill in theappropriate kinds of ways to individually create epidemiclevels of cruelty. They can do harm. Of course. But to dogreat harm, cruel societies, cultures of cruelty have to becreated – either by accident or design, usually both – so thatthey 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 followsand thereafter cruelty thrives.

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

But it is also true that failure of the arts, of artists, helps thecruel amongst us triumph and begin to oppress us all, evenin 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 asmall, dead boy made it to headlines of many newspaperswhich had, only hours before, been pouring out hatred atrefugees 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 areboth of an alien species and a danger.

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

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

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– only this little boy in Western-style dress was dead andface down. He was at once familiar – a boy’s body at rest– and horribly changed – a lifeless body, face down, caughtin a moment of helpless return to the material. We couldeasily imagine him as human and alive and not swarming.He developed a name – Aylan Kurdi and stopped being partof a swarm. The others who died in his boat – including hisbrother – were brought a little closer to not swarming. Hisparents developed names and they stopped swarming. Thesepeople came to be regarded as people. They were imaginedas human. The imagination of the public understood littlekids and beaches, cradling little bodies, their limbs heavywith tiredness, not death. That imagination swung towardsno longer regarding the human beings camped at Calaisin miserable conditions and occasionally being crushed ordrowned or smothered trying to reach the UK as peoplewho might have been kids and played, kids who weren’tnecessarily born to be an existential threat.

Our media may or may not have been permitted this changeof tone because of public disgust at increasingly repellentcoverage, online petitions and the like. Or else because theUK and other Western European goverments – having beenunable to wish away the humanitarian crisis they helpedcreate and to hide its human impact behind a screen ofmore and less racist abuse – had decided to change tack.Perhaps so many coutries with so many arms to sell couldpersuade us that bringing additional war to Syria would helpstop people fleeing the war in Syria, while also happening tomake a number of arms manufacturers a great deal of money.Perhaps, in fact, a little dead kid could make us want to blowup other little kids whose names we would never know andwho 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 inpieces, or on fire and if we could imagine that other, stillalive kids, might one day play on their own beaches intheir homelands – or else in happy sand (don’t muslim kidsenjoy sand, anyway, haven’t we heard that somehow...?) thenmoney could be made. We could imagine people (perhapskids) thanking us for blowing up some of the people whowere blowing them up in such a way that everything turned

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out well in the end. You’ll be familiar with imaginings of thiskind 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 beenmuch less successful and have lacked an ardent desire for anend to cruelty, brought about with the minimum cruelty. InWWII there was an amount of agonised thinking about howwe could defeat undemocratic forces and Total War withoutbecomein undemocratic and embracing Total War. There waseven an amount of blood shed to preserve artistic and culturalheritage where possible. And leaders could imagine that warshould be militarily successful, rather than profitable – thataiming for an undending version of the reverse would bea terrible mistake. These are things we have forgotten toimagine since, but like to think we can conjure up with flagsand parades and the repetition of the word HERO.

So, at the time of writing, the swarm is no longer quite theswarm it was. The public imagination is allowed to thinkof it as a necessary evil that could cause us to unleashanother necessary evil or – ideally – casued Russia to becomeembroiled in evil and leave us out of it with hands as cleanas we can manage. The ambient hatred of the Other haschanged focus. The media around us (which are increasinglydistrtusted and ignored and therefore increasingly stridentand toxic) spend time worrying a little about VW exhaustemissions, rather more about David Beckham’s marriage andvery much more about the strangely beige and gentle threatof Jeremy Corbyn – a candidate the media didn’t backand whose existance they find perplexing. The massivedisplacement of human beings from their homes all acrossEurope and the Middle East is rarely examined in anythinglike depth. The humanity of refugees, emigrants, or for thatmatter David Beckham and Jeremy Corbyn, the humanity ofour responses is allowed or encouraged to fade

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

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True art is not an indulgence, but a fundamental defence ofhumanity. We seem condemned to forget, to learn and toforget this truth. Each time we do, some of us die. Thosedefined as Others go first. The strangers, the migrants, thoseforced into desperate motion by cascading cruelties: weignore them to death, torment them to confirm our ownprejudices. Dominant regimes around the world may simplyexecute whole families by remote control. Nonetheless, allthose people – the harmed, the running and the dead – theyare us. Harming others recoils upon us. Morally, creatively,environmentally, literally, ignoring this fact means that wehave 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 engagedmind, the superior imagination. What use is that in thesedark times? How do we save lives? How do we render livessecure? Is that even what an artist wishes to do?

I would argue that any artist practicing their art at a highlevel of technical skill and realisation will be defendinghuman beings. The effect of art is inherently beneficial,unless it is actively shaped to a malign agenda – and thatagenda will usually damage the effectiveness of the art.Because fully-functional art is about the irreplaceability ofthe human experience and it communality, it helps save usall. But we probably no longer live in a time when simplypracticing our art is enough. All over the world – and evencountries which see themselves as harbouring free expressionand democracy – artistic expression is on the retreat andinhumanity at every level is apparently increasing. This is, inpart, a falsehood produced by a media industry addicted toshock and illusion, but certainly worldwide conflict, pandemicdisease, imposed poverty and debt are all producing theirpredictable results – despair, rage, death, violence, intellectualstruggle and bewilderment, nihilism.

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

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

I feel we need to rediscover and restate our full potential asartists, our roles in shaping and creating cultures and thedebt we own to those cultures which still harbour us, whichallow us our louder-than-average-voices. If we know what wetruly are – we can fully be what we are.

Mass culture in Europe and around the world is increasinglyaddicted to wealth and loathing and its incessant prioritisationand promotion. Shoddy, debased and debasing propagandaoverwhelms by dint of its sheer, grinding, global repetition.And yet, for generations we have been able to identify theprecursors of catastrophic violence in human societies, ofviolence against groups and individuals. We know that strictcontrol and suppression of humanising art, the control ofmanifest joys, the rationing of shared pleasures – these allmark the beginning of a process which ends in hell.

The minimisation and silencing of art from individuals andgroups classified as «Other» combines with and complimentsmass media attacks on those groups. Real life migrants –rather than we voluntary outcasts – are easy targets. Inthe UK, those who have been evicted from their homelandsby the consequences of our economic and military policiesare now blamed for their homelessness. To paraphrase ColinPowell – we broke it but we don’t want to fix it. Withinmany societies, the only response to pain and grief is acondemnation of its victims. In the UK, our summer headlinesframed a crisis which saw utterly desperate human beingseven trying to swim the English Channel as a torment fordelayed British holiday makers. Radio phone-ins played upthe threat of illegal immigrants numbering in their hundredsas a horde that would overwhelm our whole culture. Thesame culture that has spent decades expelling art fromits discourse and from its financial blessing, has embracedloathing. Theresa May, Britain’s controversial Home Secretary,

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alarmed the Insititute of Directors and surprised the Uk’sMigration Advisory Committee by using her address to thisOctober’s Conservative Party Conference to deny the positiveeffects of immigration and repeat a number of allegationsabout job-stealing, healthcare clogging immigrants whichsimply aren’t true. Hoping to shape our imaginations into astate of fear from which she could then save us.

But history teaches us that our greatest wrongs, crimesagainst humanity and genocide, arise from cultures wherehatred has become a part of the air citizens breathe. Whenimagination fails, a culture fails, a society fails, a nation failsand then – perhaps – later there will be lawyers, someattempt to establish truth, guilt, reconciliation. Establishingwhat is termed «intent to destroy» when we try to prosecuteindividuals for crimes against humanity and genocide is oftenhugely difficult precisely because of the Political pronounce-ments, media activity and propaganda that shape and thendominate sick cultures. In a hate-filled culture, a nation’ssense of self becomes grounded on those it despises. Truecitizenship becomes a narrower and narrower concept – andoutwith its safety death stalks ever closer.

Clearly, all interested parties inclduing writers and artistsmust act in the UK and elsewhere. And we are attemptingto organise, to rediscover the faith in ourselves as a speciesand as workers for the survival of that species. But weare pressured by a raft of new negative forces. We knowthat 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-calledWar on Terror mean that writers are censored, or self-censor.Some are simply silenced by exhaustion. But I will say againthat without artists and perhaps writers in particular, humanbeings are easier to destroy, first in effigy, then in part, thenas a totality. Groups and individuals trust their immortalityto their cultural creations – removing access to their dignityand 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 athreat to all.

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Real-world migrants are now among a growing number ofstridently defined «Others». At a global level we’re seeing adecline 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 thepublic discourse while internet communities form coral reefsof solipsistic myth and confirmation. Sharpening redefinitionsof loyalty and identity are bringing about a conflict betweensovereign states and corporate states. Old-style nationalismsof loathing and exclusion are condemned by corporate mediawho borrow and promote their agendas. Meanwhile, nationa-lism as an expression of non-corporate identity, cultural choiceand personal diversity may offer a reclamation of citizensrights and a resurgence of cultural expression.

What’s happening culturally and politically in Scotland atthe moment arises from a cultural uplift in the 1980’s and90’s and it offers a positive example of alternative andchallenging expression bringing about non-violent change.The idea of multiculturalism is close to the heart of thatproject in interesting ways that refresh some like myself,used to the old sectarian fault lines, based on centuries-oldreligious and political differences. There has been an attemptto expand an idea of national identity to truly include simple,voluntary residence and that hasn’t harmed Scotland’s senseof self, quite the reverse. London is a remarkably successfulblending of multiple cultures and this has given it remarkabelresilience. Ther are many examples of united cultures fullof difference that succeed. In a globa; cultural landscapewithin which the inaccuracies of «Zero Dark Thirty» canjustify torture, or we can watch online executions in jumpsuits of competing colours, or see the Merkelstreichelt offerhopeless sympathy needs all the positive examples it canget.

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

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they cause us, by blaming them on Others. Our new Inde-pendent Press Standards Organisation can currently induceapologies (in small print) when errors of fact have occurred.Most attacks are framed in fact-free outbursts of rage. Overthe last two decades in the UK mainstream media articleshave repeatedly linked migrants to disease and all manner ofcrime. Zeid Ra’ad Al Hussein, UN Commissioner for HumanRights recently characterised Europe as having «a nastyunderbelly of racism» which skews our response to genuinehuman need. He made particular reference to the UK andour self-styled commentator, Katie Hopkins. Like a number ofsimilar figures, Hopkins seeks to generate outrage in orderto get attention, website «clicks». She has a backgroundin PR and the military and rose to fame on a TV realityshow. This is an almost perfect path to prominence in ma-ny unwary and fading democracies. Research, facts, qualitywriting – they require funding, effort, ability. Confirming ofreaders’ prejudices is easier. UK surveys repeatedly showthat responders massively over-estimate numbers of fraudu-lent benefit claims and immigrant «Others» – this error issubstantially a mass media creation. It is a nightmare ofalien 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 andits exhortations to genocide.

Commercialised hate on a global scale means it’s no surprisethat trafficking people for gain, using them as slaves, asproduct, is – like warfare – a growing business. It grossesaround $150 billion. (Slaves, like oil, are valued in dollars)The industry affects more than 20 million people. Notcockroaches. People.

And, beyond punishing migrants, the UK government removessupport from those with special needs and mental healthdifficulties, the homeless, poor, old, young, sick... Each of usis sullied by some aspect of this cruelty. An institutionallyracist police force, an under-funded legal system and a prisonindustry geared to increase re-offending and profits hidesome of the consequences while increasing others. As in somany fading democracies, manifestations of mercy rely on

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groups and individuals having internalised values other thanthose in the ascendant.

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

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

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ILMA RAKUSA: THE MIGRANTS AND EUROPEANLITERATURE

Rosie Goldsmith: Ilma Rakusa, you epitomize a Europeanwriter both as regards your biography and the multiplelanguages, which you speak, and as regards your work as awriter, translator and teacher. From this European perspectivehow did you respond to A.L. Kennedy’s lecture?

Ilma Rakusa: First of all, I would like to say that I agreewith every one of A.L. Kennedy’s statements. I’m veryimpressed by what she has to say on this subject; onecan’t improve on this. I would like to quote a phrase of theRussian poet Marina Tsvetaeva, who was herself an exile;she emigrated with her family after the Russian Revolutionfirst to Czechoslovakia and then to France. She first lived inPrague during the 1920s, then in Paris and corresponded withRainer Maria Rilke. In one of her letters in 1925 she wrote inGerman to Rilke, «Every poet is a migrant.» And in a poemin Russian she wrote, «All poets are Jews.» She died in 1941when she committed suicide after the Germans marched intoRussia.

Rosie Goldsmith: Is that the writer’s role personally also toregard 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 whatAlison said, and to discuss this issue in our writing – in otherwords, to describe destinies with empathy and fantasy, notmerely when it’s about migrants, but about all individuals,but also to give each person a face. What is so difficultnowadays is that we always only hear numbers, worryingnumbers – for most people for the time being these areincomprehensible numbers about refugees who are currentlyarriving in Europe, yet numbers are not reality. Reality iscomprised of destinies, individual destinies. We must createfaces; we must talk about details and about backgrounds. Wemust pose questions, yet we must do so with love. Thesepoints were all mentioned in Allison’s talk. I think writers aregenerally good at this, and that is also their metier.

Writers have a few more chances to express their ideasand get across their attitude through writing a little more

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vociferously, and perhaps to reach out to a few more people.So a lot more responsibility is already associated with thisespecially now. Three days ago in Vienna I gave a talkabout the Serbian-Hungarian and Jewish writer, Danilo Kiš,at the Jewish Museum. Sadly, he is a writer who alreadydied in 1989 before the outbreak of the Yugoslavian war.Danilo Kiš never wanted to be homo politicus – he alwaysadvocated being homo poeticus, yet he said in Yugoslavia– back then this what it was still called – we can do noother; we have had so many problems in the past and inthe present. The writer inevitably becomes homo politicus aswell; and in many essays, pleas and interviews before 1973he already warned about nationalism in Yugoslavia. He didn’tsurvive to see the outbreak of the Yugoslavian war and thebreak-up of the country. He died in October 1989, but hesensed it. He really was a writer from head to toe; his fatherperished in Auschwitz as a Hungarian Jew, his mother wasMontenegrin. He focused on the Holocaust in his books andon Stalinism in «A Tomb for Boris Davidovich». I consider himas one of the most important, most meaningful writers of thesecond half of the twentieth century. Well, now, in relationto a writer this conflict between homo poeticus and homopoliticus is occasionally a conflict. Today, once again we’re ina situation in which one cannot withdraw from this questionand 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 inthe current situation, that is, nationalism. I’m half Hungarianand I am frequently in Hungary. I love my Hungariancolleagues, writer colleagues and friends. Orban’s politics isscandalous. Many Hungarians are suffering because of it.Orban isn’t the only one in Europe. An aggressive type ofnationalism is on the rise; it originates from outside, fromRussia or Turkey. It dominates in several Eastern Europeancountries and is gaining ground with radical left-wing andright-wing parties across the EU.

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

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clichés that unfortunately Europe has been confronted withall too often, and yet they are setting a precedent again andare 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 toour countries. We have to show understanding in bothdirections and I think this is the really big task over thelonger term – for this process to succeed, to avoid somethingelse happening, namely, a society, as it were a parallelsociety emerging in which these people then live, a kind ofsegregation or ghettoization. This is highly problematic initself and, of course, could lead to increased problems. Then, itvindicates precisely those people who fuel these fears, theseright-wing parties and so on.

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POSTS FROM THE «OBSERVATORY» (1)

STRUGGLING WITH PARALLEL WORLDSby László Szabolcs – Oct 22, 2015

I managed to arrive to Austria from Budapest quite unevent-fully, the trains were on time, running smoothly, passengersaround me chatting in several languages, as if nothing couldever disturb the calm and quiet normalcy of a borderlessEurope. Yet if the European Literature Days in 2015 wouldhave been held just over a month ago, it would have beenan entirely different experience altogether. In September, thegeneral– and outright shameful– confusion and cynicism ofgovernments and transnational institutions over the refugeecrisis gave rise to a completely different scenario which see-med to belong to a parallel universe. People were forbiddento enter Keleti railway station, trains were stopped altogether,and the border was closed. Hegyeshalom, this small bordertown that had been regarded as the gateway to the Westbecame, once again, the sad omen for the edge of the possibleworld. The contrast is so striking that one begins to questionwhether 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(«Jegyzokönyv»/The Minutes of Meeting) which describeshow the narrator was forced by the border guards to getoff the train bound to Vienna because he was carryingan amount of money which exceeded the legal limit. ForKertész– and later, for Péter Esterházy, who quotes the storywhen writing about a similar experience– such a micro eventsignifies that the bureaucratic and technocratic essence ofpast or future regimes will constantly cause fear and generateaggression toward the defenseless individual. For a longwhile, I was certain that these warnings were simply well-meaning cautionary tales from an older generation that hadbeen marked by a dictatorship, and that in fact «history»–perceived as the grim tale of another century– was mostlyover and done with. My present was defined by progressivevalues, freedom of movement, fluid and plural identities, and aspirit of interculturality. But, seeing the police close the giantgates of Keleti station (not to mention hearing and reading

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the shocking frenzy of xenophobic reactions all around) wasa wake-up call; one had to realize that history was backindeed. Moreover, it reappeared with a cruel and unusualsarcasm: when the Hungarian authorities faked a re-openingof the station, the first train– which the refugees hopedto be heading to Austria, yet instead took them to theclose vicinity of overcrowded refugee camps– was (perhaps,accidentally?) decorated with commemorative images of the1989 Pan-European Picnic, the foundational event of freeborder crossing in the region...

Such unforeseen, almost unbelievable, but typical and troublingparadoxes; and the moral, social, and cultural incompatibilityof parallel realities which define our everyday lives are trulythe stuff of literature, and only through the possibilities ofliterature can we address them. By upholding the story ofprogressive values, freedom of movement, fluid and pluralidentities, and the spirit of interculturality– and in the sametime reflecting on the cruel sarcasm of a grim historyunfolding before our eyes. After the first discussion andround of reading of the European Literature Days 2015 withA.L. Kennedy, Anna Kim, Jamal Mahjoub, and Atiq Rahimi inthe Klangraum of the Minorites Church in Krems, I genuinelyfeels to be in the right place to witness and engage in suchan intellectual and artistic challenge.

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THE AWKWARD SUBJECT OF COMMITMENTby Peter Zimmermann – Oct 23, 2015

All over the world (at least I think so) people enjoy talkingabout the weather. They mainly do so because grumblingabout the weather is a constant, and there is no fear of anyconsequences. In any case the weather does what it willwhether you like it or not. That’s why it’s ideal for examiningthe causes of your personal emotional condition. The weatherknows no limits, it cannot be manipulated or controlled andit’s temperamental. So it’s not surprising that it affectspersonal moods. Today, it makes you happy. Tomorrow, youmake it responsible for your depressive frame of mind. Theweather is this damned homeless companion that you have toaccommodate because it’s stronger than you are! Nobody, not

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

What do you feel threatened by? Who is threatening tooccupy the continent? And exactly what or who is it im-portant to defend? Of course, the war rhetoric refers to therefugees who are arriving in Europe across the so-calledBalkan route to claim their right to asylum in what arepresumed safer and rich countries, particularly in Germany,England and Scandinavia. In the light of the large number ofpeople who are fleeing – a number incidentally that is notsurprising for political analysts – it would be necessary to actin a coordinated, pan-European way. You can’t just wish thepeople away; they’re here now and should be treated likehuman beings. Nevertheless, there is no coordination and noplans. Never before was it so obvious that there isn’t evena policy any longer, that is, in the sense of acting on thebasis of values. I don’t even want to mention ideals. We’vealready sensed it: politics is a placebo that produces place-bos: security, prosperity and justice. Now we see that it’s notabout any certainties or facts here but about assertions orrather marketing feelings. It’s about feeling secure, feelingwealthy and feeling a sense of justice. Since real politicaltasks cannot be resolved with any of this, the politicians takerefuge in strong emotions – the idea that we are in a war.Foreignness is flooding the familiar. We’re no longer mastersin our own house. Home must remain home, so that’s whywe need a ‹Fortress Europe›. By the way, the Nazis put thismessage into circulation to call for the defence of areas thatthey had occupied during the Second World War. That’s alsoa way of gauging how politics and morality no (longer) shareanything in common.

In her opening lecture A.L. Kennedy also referred to preciselythis emotionalized language in Great Britain that reveals thenature of politics in all its helplessness and irresponsibility:refugees are cockroaches, for example. This comparison wouldsuggest that mass destruction could be justifiable. In lessaggressive diction refugees are described as a swarm, as

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a mass that is intimidating all the same, sans brain, sansface, but voracious and difficult to stop like a plague oflocusts. This image also justifies a violent approach. Thatis the response from Europe’s elites to the consequencesof a war with – viewed historically – no less Europeanparticipation. From this starting point Kennedy aims tofathom out how writers then have to behave towards thissituation. Must he/she take a stance? In the light of crisissituations this question is often posed and the answers givenare exclusively the wrong ones. Every human individual,including a writer as well, is entitled to show commitmentfor a cause that seems to him or her right and true. Everywriter is entitled, as a corrective of politics (or non-politics),to be concerned about moral issues, to educate, to makethings visible, to expose political rhetoric in its emptiness anddubiousness and to construct counter-models. Yet he or sheis not obliged to do so.I regard it as fatal to oblige literature to be useful for civilsociety. This forces writers into a logic of utilization fromwhich they should actually have emancipated themselves –unless they define themselves as part of this logic. WhenSwedish writer David Lagercrantz adds to his late fellowcompatriot Stieg Larsson’s millennium trilogy by penning afourth and probably even a fifth volume, then he does so infull knowledge that this is a purely commercial undertaking.That corresponds to the logic of economic utilization. WhenA.L. Kennedy claims to take a stance and in her books,essays and newspaper commentaries to alert the audience tothe traps of pseudo-politics, she does justice to her personalstandards of a writer’s profession, although she also conformsto the logic of moral utilization. Anyone who withdraws fromthese types of logic gently falls under suspicion of enteringinto a common pact with those who want to barricadethemselves behind the walls of the fortress. The quietindividual just accepts the noisy ones.I regard it as a quality of art in general that it withdraws fromall kinds of calculability and knows no limits, like the weather,– it can’t be manipulated and controlled. We shouldn’t desireanything from art; we should find in it what we feel is trueand right. Entirely of its own accord, without any signpostsor any user manual.

(Translated by Suzanne Kirkbright)

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TALK WITH JAMAL MAHJOUB

Alexandra Buchler: Jamal Mahjoub is a Sudanese Britishwriter. He divides his writing between what he describedto me as literary novels and crime novels. Yesterday hepresented his book called ‘In The Hour of Signs’; which is setin 19th Century Sudan, and the subject of it is the Mahdistinsurrection. I was reminded of my childhood as a readerbecause I first encountered this topic through a young adultnovel by the Polish author Sienkiewicz, it was one of myfavorite. It is a about two young friends, a boy, a Polishboy and an English girl who are actually kidnapped by theMahdists, it is a great adventure.Jamal,I would be interestedto know what made you choose the subject of that book onthe Madhist insurrection in the 19th Century?

Jamal Mahjoub: The reason I wrote it was simply. My firstnovel was about a young man who travels to Sudan fromBritain, who doesn’t know anything about his father’s countryand feels that a part of his identity is there. That led me toquestioning what Sudan was and that led me to going backto the 1950s and the moment of independence and that ledme further back to the 19th Century which was really thebeginning of the creating of the modern State of Sudan. Thiswas at this very dramatic moment when the Mahdi emergedand you had this confrontation between these two types offanaticism in a way, you know, this belief in religion. And soit was one thing led into another.

When I began writing I was aware that there were twostrands that I wanted to write, there were two areas that Iwanted to write. I wanted to write about my own life in thepresent but – and at this point I was living in London – I alsowanted to write about Sudan and that part of my heritageand which is where I grew up. So – oddly enough – thenovels that were published were the novels about Sudan. Forevery novel that I wrote and published, another novel waswritten but was never published and so that unpublishednovels were really a sort of exploring my existence in Britainas a migrant. I found and assumed that I knew Britain andthat a part of my heritage belonged there, is like the reverseof my character in the novel. I discovered that I was acomplete outsider and that there was a great deal, there was

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

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

Jamal Mahjoub: The crime writing comes out of again twothings, probably an interesting crime fiction going back tomy childhood. My grandmother on my mother’s side was afanatic about crime fiction and she used to weirdly enoughsend me books by post from England which were way aheadof me. So I would get these Agatha Christie books wrappedup in brown paper and string arriving in Khartoum and intime I read a lot. And so that was one thing, that I wantedto write about this and the other was simply that I wantedto continue the kind of diversity that I wanted to have in mywriting. I wanted the writing to cover this vast universe ofdiversity that I saw around me. And one strand, the literallynovels was simply not enough. So it is a kind of a way ofmultiplying a multiplicity of identity. I felt that – and thisgoes back to something that was said early – that you arenever really appreciated; I don’t think that I am appreciatedas a British writer. I don’t think that I am appreciated as aSudanese writer; I am kind of in between two or three stools.And it is very difficult for people to place me, you know. Andso you end up in a kind of twilight zone which for me theonly way out of that is to increase the complexity or thediversity of my writing. So the crime writing is really in thatsense 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 thatParker, the name is made up of two parts; Bilal is the namefrom my father’s side, great grandfather and Parker is mymother’s maiden name from the English side. So it is kindof adopting another space. I wanted to write about Egyptbecause in the 1990s my parents left Sudan for politicalreasons. My father was working for a newspaper that was

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closed down my Omar Al Bashir and the whole revolutionof national salvation, whatever. And they moved to Cairoalong with a lot of Sudanese and I was fascinated by thisSudanese exile life in Cairo, and I was also fascinated byCairo itself as a city. So I envisaged a kind of epic novelthat would incorporate all of these things and of course itnever happened and in time it gradually became transformedinto; or metamorphosed into this idea of a series of crimenovels taking place in Cairo with an exile Sudanese ex policeinspector who lives in Cairo and who makes a living helpingpeople with their problems.

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

Jamal Mahjoub: They are set in Cairo in whatever, theEgyptian environment. The grand master plan is ten novelsand my idea is that I would go up to the revolutions orthe Arab Uprising, or the Arab Spring, whatever you wantto call it. I mean it has really been an amazing ten yearswith everything, all the terrible things that have happenedwhich have transformed the world. All of those things havesome kind of impact on the political situation in the MiddleEast and in Egypt. So each novel takes a year, there is aprogression through it and so we gradually see the buildupof the same, of a group of characters moving towards thatmoment.

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 – thatmodel is based on the idea that everybody is basically amigrant and therefore migrant literature is what literatureis. In Europe I think we have to get beyond the idea ofexoticizing the migrant and exoticizing migrant literature andbeginning to accept it as being a part of main literature.Whether we have gone within a living memory, within lessthan a hundred years from the position where London wasthe center of an empire that stretched around the world to thepoint where that empire has somehow imploded backwardsinto Britain, we now have a situation which should be an

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enrichment of what British literature is. But if you look atBritish publishing, the critics, the whole literally world it islargely made up, very largely made up, over 90 percent madeup of people who do not have that kind of background. Thewhole context of the discussion, of the discourse eliminatesthat whole world. What do we mean by that when we sayhomeland? It is a kind of distancing things and saying wellokay that’s some kind of Arabian nights place where there isthis homeland where nice things grow and so on. We needto get beyond that somehow and we need to get it to thepoint where this literature is seen as a genuine contributionto what current literary culture is. There is this idea of a kindof universal humanity.

László Szabolcs: There was a debate some 20, 30 yearsago because, and all of the topics we talk about seem tobe familiar from that postcolonial literature and postcolonialtheory. Samaraj Adi wrote about imaginary homelands. Hewrote about translated men and women and then we haveHomi Bhabha who theorized the «Third Space» which youcalled the twilight zone. So we have a conceptual backgroundand we had debates. Nonetheless you still say that it had noimpact in Britain. How comes that? We learnt postcolonialtheory in Romania, we learnt it in Hungary and yet it didnot have this kind of impact. What could European Literaturelearn from these theories, from these approaches, from theearly writings of Samaraj Adi or Homi Bhabha or HanifKureishi etc. etera?

Jamal Mahjoub: These subjects have been discussed for along time but I think it has been discussed within a veryspecialized zone which is. We are talking about a particulargroup of people. I was a postcolonial writer, but there was apoint at which post colonialism vanished and what remainedwas a kind of interest in sort of global feminist issues and therest of it was kind of forgotten and there was sort of sensein a way that it was no longer of importance. I rememberreading a review in the TLS; I think it was a about JhumpaLahiri and it was sort of saying, what needs to happen isthat these writers have to get there exotic past and start towrite about the here and the now. So there was a debate,there has been a lot written and a lot talked about and a lotof theorizing done but it remained within a very closed sort

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of circle, it didn’t spread out into mainstream literary cultureand 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 uniqueset of circumstances. Writers like Hanif Kureishi and a lot ofother people came out of it. And Hanif Kureishi came out of avery very specific multicultural background. I mean he wasgrowing up in South London or whatever and worshippingDavid Bowie. I mean there is this a kind of contradictionwhich is when you look back on it, it seems quite ahead ofits time and now we see it in so many other places. So yes, Ithink that there is a lot to learn from them.

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NAJEM WALI: ON EXILE AND HOME

AN ATTEMPT TO DEFINE EXILE– 25. Juni 2015

Often, writers in exile are faced with the question why theyleft their country and whether ultimately this wouldn’t leadto a loss of their memories, to their forgetting those privateand cherished places where they’ve lived for years. Do theirworks not then lose the warmth and familiarity of those whowere still living in the country, and do their opinions notlose the same measure of authenticity? It’s certainly not anexaggeration to state that since the last century no writerhas got around these sorts of questions, entirely regardlessof which nationality he may be and whatever the reasonsfor his exile. How many creative artists had to tolerate thecriticism that they had betrayed their native country becausethey left it – from Dante to Joseph Conrad up to Joyce,Márquez, Kundera and Vargas Llosa. And regardless of whatare allegedly the intended answers of the respective inquirersin each case – incidentally, they’re usually more interested inpolitics than literature – at the end of the day they assessthe writer not on the basis of his work, but his residenceor creative home. This very restricted view then entices themany who look on writers in exile with suspicion anywayto reach a naive conclusion: that the latter must inevitablyfind it difficult to write about their home countries, sinceit’s virtually impossible to work through historical eventsadequately in a novel because this requires, among otherthings, an intellectual and psychological maturing process onlocation. And they obviously lack this. For these and otherequally naive reasons, it’s perhaps better if the writer inquestion presently makes do with writing about exile.

In this case the critics evade the really crucial questionwhether purely on the grounds of having left his country awriter automatically loses the ability to remember the «there»and to write about this based on his imagination? Is ittherefore 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 kindof exile, even if the writer is living in the «home», which isin any case a term used more in politics than the world of

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

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ANYONE WHO DOESN’T FEEL GOOD SHOULD GO– July 23, 2015

One of the magnificent quotes from Nobel Prize LaureateMario Vargas Llosa about writers and exile is, «Anyone whodoesn’t feel good, where he is, should go!» This statementbecomes even more powerful when you consider that thePeruvian writer’s life is entirely permeated by politics. Oneof his works is entitled «A Fish in the Water». Here hedescribes how he felt about his state when his strongpolitical commitment was taking up most of his time, so ittook the «water» of literature away from him until he beganto snap for air like a fish on dry land. Back then, for fivelong years he didn’t compose a single line of literature whilehe was involved in his electoral campaign for the PeruvianPresident’s office. Ultimately, this wasn’t successful and Llosarecognized that he could only be successful as a writer, thathe could be of so much more use to his country and humanityregardless of where he lived or whether he voluntarily decidedto take up residence in Spain and decided to adopt Spanishcitizenship. For him literature is the air, which he needs tobreathe, regardless of where this is written. Instead, whatmatters for him is the purity of this air that is his conditionfor creative work. What is the importance of a work, whichdoesn’t inhale the breath of freedom, and has emerged inthe unfree shadow of a dictator or social taboos or serving aconfessionalist-racist regime? Does this kind of work benefitanyone at all; does it contribute something to a country’sculture and to humanity?

Mario Vargas Llosa knew that he would never have beenable to write «The Time of the Hero», «Conversation in theCathedral» and «The Green House» if back then he had notlived in exile in Paris. Similarly, Gabriel Garcia Márquez, who

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received several threats after his return from a long period ofexile, knew that ultimately he would again be forced to leavehis country, Colombia, as he not only lacked the necessarypeace 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. Hewas not the first who sought his country outside of it. Beforehim James Joyce sought his Dublin, which he hated to death,elsewhere. Fanatics naturally accused Joyce of betrayal, butJoyce, Márquez or later Llosa and others who went into exiledid their country a service by doing so, since they could nowreally write what wasn’t possible from inside. Their aestheticand creative value is measured by the text of their works, nottheir place of residence at the time of composing this or thatwork. What value is there if a creative mind remains in hisso-called «home», if he cannot write the text here that he hasin mind? A creative artist who goes away to write freely andto be able to speak with an uplifted voice has much moreinfluence than one who «courageously» has to assert hisopinion underground or one who is alive, yet whose mouthand hands are tied. So it is completely irrelevant where thewriter’s «geographical» exile is located.

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EXILE AND THE BURDEN OF HOME ON US– Oct 5, 2015

It is right, of course, that many writers and artists are«geographically» in exile. Yet in my view, back «home» theyhad already gone into inner exile since they became awareof the pain in the country where they were born and lived,or better still let’s say: since they felt a constant ache intheir mind and soul because of the experience of the state’sinjustice to the people; since they also strictly rejected thesocial tyranny accompanying the terror of the state’s forceand the latter being used as a justification for destroyingeverything that is beautiful. When sheer survival becomesthe main content of life in a state, then all that is beautifulin this land becomes painful and the land itself becomesexile. To state this quite unequivocally: exile knows nolimits, passionate yearning cannot be measured in terms ofdistance – it lives within you and is fatal. The sense of

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being a stranger – inner exile – begins when one feels lonelyand abandoned, seeking a firm foothold on solid ground andthis ground is pulled from beneath one’s feet. The feelingof being a stranger begins when the heart begins to waila lament. Exile is much greater than external borders. Itdestroys the friendly association with the world, and withothers. In this way, exile first begins «there» at the momentwhen one becomes aware of one’s creative energy or pain.«Geographical», outer exile is then only its logical, thoughtragic consequence. By adopting this explanatory model it isthen only apt to assert that every form of creative writing isultimately 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 HamburgUniversity, at first I focused on special interest topics inGerman «exile literature», that is, those writers who leftthe country in their dozens after the takeover by the Nazisand Hitler in 1933. I learned in the process that you cancount the novels, which deal with «geographical» exile, onthe fingers of one hand. The same applies for novels writtenin other languages, or at least for those novels, which I’mnow reading in their original language, primarily in Germanand Spanish. Most truly great literary works were created inexile and are by no means about this «geographical» exile,but rather about the idea of man’s eternal inner exile, abouthis social alienation because those who engage in creativeactivities are in league with what is absent. Their heroesembody a general human language that overcomes limits andthey present the narrow ideas of headstrong nationalists inall their ridiculous dimensions – maybe because they havematured and grown up by breaking away from the seeminglyso rigid definitions of national cultural identity.

(Translated from German by Suzanne Kirkbright)

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

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

I had to leave Germany to write the second novel – to escapeboth this story about myself as well as myself; I went toIsrael where nobody knew me. I travelled a lot and driftedalong more than actually doing anything. At Christmas, whichI didn’t celebrate that year, I wrote most of the second novelthat was hanging and floating over me like a great, darkcloud. I didn’t like it while I was writing it, and nor did I likeit 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, oneof them was even a political book. None of them caused meany particular trouble and I was always still myself. And theyloved my story the same as before.

The next novel was perhaps in reality the second; I tookyears to write it, which wasn’t usual, and I was extremelyscrupulous and careful to distance myself from myself whilewriting. I was careful to note whether the questions stillabsorbed me. Whether they were still directed at the girlwho once, when she was eleven, came to Germany, withoutbeing able to speak a word of this language, and only writingnovels. They said it was migrant literature and then they alsosaid that we drew on the wealth of experience of migrationand the treasure of a second language, and in this case theywere right.

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

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


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WRONG AND RIGHT – RIGHT OR WRONG?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 touristsduring a protest against the treatment of the Uyghurs in China –

they mistook the group for Chinese. The police intervened with teargas...

I hardly find this report absurd, even though it is quiteabsurd. In fact, I’m familiar with the situation – not inthis extreme form, yet in a milder way: I am constantlymistaken for a Chinese woman. ‘Constantly’ is perhaps aslight exaggeration: in six out of ten cases, I’m consideredChinese; in 3.8 out of ten cases as a Japanese woman, andvery occasionally the person who addressed me is delightedthat 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 Austriaand so I’m Austrian. Oh no. I already notice how he startsto 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 istall, much taller than your average Asian woman. He beams.He is pleased to have found something. Her body languageis also different. She moves... differently. But Austrian is tooobvious; 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

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the composition of my personal identity. What is genuinelyKorean about me and what is maybe more Austrian. Hefinally gives his judgement: it’s right – she’s a genuineKorean, 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 agenuine «questionable case» (Fragefalle), or a «trap» question(Fallenfrage).

The trap is always set up in the same way: whenever I’minvited to give a reading, initially plenty of time is devoted toexplaining why I write in German – that is: why I don’t writein Korean. Then, some nice quotations are presented fromWikipedia and my family’s «migrant story» is told chapterand verse. Born in South Korea. Father visiting professorin Germany. And so on. After the reading the listener cancreate his own picture of who or what I am, by asking mequestions, so my biography then dominates the subsequentdiscussion.On the one hand, this is naturally due to the fact thatthe majority of the audience hasn’t read my books; maybepeople’s opinion is that they wouldn’t offer enough materialfor discussions, and I wouldn’t like to rule out this option.On the other hand, however, I cannot help feeling that inthe course of the reading it was more my person than mytexts that was introduced in connection with my knowledgeof 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 supposedlyautomatically gets me more attention. I have to contradictthis: «exotic writer’s bonus» – no way! «Exotic writer’sminus»! If as an «exotic» writer you don’t comply with therules of the literary business, – if you don’t write about your‘exotic’ background and how you came to enjoy an «exotic’slife», how an exotic’s daily routine feels, what you have togo through as a lonesome ‘exotic’ – you’re not even halfas interesting as a «non-exotic» writer. You don’t make thegrade.A good «exotic» writer is only someone, who fulfils his roleas an «exotic», and writes migrant literature. So can a wrongAustrian produce the right Austrian literature? I fear theanswer to that is: no. Not yet.

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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 linguafranca. The most famous of them and the names mostfrequently mentioned are Joseph Conrad, Vladimir Nabokovand Samuel Beckett.It is less well known that writers from Greenland almostexclusively write in Danish. So what happens, if Greenlandseeks (total) independence? Are these writers then migrantliterati? After all, they’re not writing in their native languageand mostly don’t live in their native country (though most, ifnot all of them would presumably say Danish is their nativelanguage, and Denmark is their homeland. However, as I knowfrom personal experience, biology outdoes culture).

B – My husband is American and he’s lived for three yearsin 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 theMiddle East are migrants. In some newspapers the Balkanshave 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, Nabokovand Beckett do not count as part of migrant literature.

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


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MY EXPERIENCE OF MIGRATION WAS PROLONGEDby Ilma Rakusa – July 13, 2015

My experience of migration was prolonged: from my birth-place Rimavská Sobota, the journey led to Budapest, then toLjubljana and onwards to the divided city of Trieste and inJanuary 1951 to Zurich. I was five years old. My baggagecontained three languages: Hungarian, Slovenian and Italian.At school, I soon learned the fourth language, German, andalso 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 thelanguage of the books that I avidly devoured.

Reading became my passion because I didn’t really feel athome in ultra Protestant Zurich and without the sea. Onthe other hand, in the parallel world of literature there werediscoveries 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 inconversations with myself in this language that dominatedmy life and thinking. Not Zurich, but the German languagebecame my home. That is true until today, and there issomething reassuring about it. Admittedly, I know the import-ance of the other languages that live with me. I generallyspeak Hungarian with children and animals – an emotionalreaction. My father’s language, Slovenian, smoothed the pathto other Slavic languages like Russian and Serbo-Croatianthat I translate from. All eight languages, which I speak, havetheir own significance, their special temperature and specificconnotations. However, I am only fluent in all registers andnuances of one language which is why this is the onlysuitable language for my writing, even if I sometimes wouldlike to enrich and support it with other linguistic experiences.Basically, I have in mind a polyphonic German – an idiom thattransports the colours and sounds of my native languages.

And my inner compass always points to the East – towardsmy home. As a Slavicist, translator and publisher I havemade bridging gaps my vocation and the heroes in my booksare migrants between East and West. That has nothing todo with trauma, but with an attitude to life that combines

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longing and cosmopolitanism, remembrance and expectationsfor the future.


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WRITING IN TRANSIENT PLACESby Iman Humaydan – Mai 28, 2015

This is the first time that I’ve finished writing a novel sinceI’ve been living in France. I believed that writing outside ofmy country would increase my feelings of being no place.But now I am able to say that writing itself can becomea home. It occupies the place of home and accompaniesmy wakefulness while moving through so many transientplaces; I inhabit writing when I am between one train orairplane and the next. I live today in a place of shrinkingdreams, in streets that don’t look like me, in places thatmake me question if I’d ever be able to carve the lettersof my language in their stones. But I find myself drawingcircles in the air and writing on the surface of the rivers’waters. These places are intractable. Both intractable andattractive, I don’t know if I prefer to remain outside them orgo right inside. If I go in, I’ll narrate the seductive fullnessof remaining on the margins – that is to say, I’ll alwaysstay on the outside to some degree. These are migratingpeople’s places, in which writing looks like nothing but itself,and in which travel and movement change words. I writewhat all my senses capture on my daily hunt in these newplaces. I write my transformation and the transformation ofmy language. I also write while longing for home and I meetother people who live placelessness, just like me, and whowrite it in another language.

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

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

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whose opening lines stick in my head whenever I hear itsung.

Somehow writing is able to continue on out of place – itstrolls through the corridors of Twitter and Facebook. It cancapture transient memories on virtual walls. It’s the life ofsomeone living in a world that is not the one they camefrom. It also migrates between two worlds, two places, twohistories, two cultures – indeed between multiple places andmultiple worlds. Its very place is inbetweenness.

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

And at this moment, there’s no place left to inhabit exceptlanguage. Language itself becomes places to live in. Asa «foreign writer», I divide myself in these places, withoutmoving. I furnish these places of language with my senses...I see them, listen to them, and touch them through writing.

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EMIGRANTS IN HUNGARIAN LITERATUREby Ágnes Orzóy – Nov 23, 2015

Leave the place that is not good for you. Those who are leavingare 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 ofmigrants since World War II. In Hungary, the issue explodedin the hot summer of 2015,with thousands of migrants arrivingin the country daily. While the media image of Hungary sunkto an all-time low, this development brought out the bestand the worst instincts in locals, deeply disturbed by imagesof exhausted families living in tents at Budapest’s KeletiRailway Station and stalwart young men marching throughborder villages. Most of the migrants do not want to sayin Hungary, however – their intention is to continue towardmore affluent Western and Northern European countries.

Both for historical and economic reasons,Hungary has certainlynot been a popular target for immigrants in the last fewcenturies. According to 2014 figures, migrants make up less

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than two per cent of the country’s population. For over ahundred years, our problem has typically been emigrationrather than immigration, with only a few considerable wavesof immigration. Even at those times, however, Hungarianswere not confronted with people coming from distant culturesas the immigrants were mostly ethnic Hungarians fromneighboring countries – mostly from Romania, but also fromSlovakia, Ukraine, Croatia and Slovenia. In this blog entry,I have collected some Hungarian writers and poets whoseoeuvre was influenced by the experience of living betweentwo (or more) worlds.

The great wave of emigration that started in the 1870s andlasted up to World War I is documented in a recent novelby Imre Oravecz, a major poet and novelist. Oravecz hadspent years in the US in the 1970s, travelling back and forthbetween the US and Hungary, before eventually returning tosettle in his native village. In 2012, he published CalifornianQuail, a novel about his grandparents who emigrated toAmerica around the turn of the century. The life of thisgeneration of emigrants – about 1.5 million Hungarians,mostly young agricultural and industrial workers – has notreally been part of the national memory, except for the merefact of their absence, present in a well-known, powerful lineby Attila József: «s kitántorgott Amerikába másfél millióemberünk» (roughly translated as «and one and a half millionof our people staggered to America»). Oravecz did extensiveresearch about the life of Hungarian communities of workerson oil rigs in Toledo, Ohio and Southern California, who leftHungary 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 theworld they had left behind was lost forever, ravaged by WorldWar I and the Treaty of Trianon that ended the war, in whichHungary lost roughly two-thirds of its pre-war territory andone-third of its population.

When the initial hope for a better future after World WarII was quickly disproved by the Soviet occupation andthe Communist takeover, a number of Hungarians choseemigration, among them Sándor Márai (1900–1989), one ofthe most successful writers of the pre-war period. Withan astonishing clairvoyance, Márai foresaw that Communist

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power would entail a complete loss not only of freedom ofspeech but of freedom of silence as well. He decided toleave the country, and lived the remaining 41 years of hislife mostly in the US, yet hovering in the void. A non-personfor official Hungary, a writer without an audience in America,Márai continued to write in Hungarian, and published anumber of books, including his diaries and Memoir of Hungary,a fine account of the years 1945–48, including his decisionto leave the country. He committed suicide in San Diego in1989, and did not live to see his renascence in Hungary andhis international success after the translation of Embers.

If the summer of 2015 was an all-time low in the internationalimage of Hungary, the autumn of 1956 was certainly thehighest ever. The Hungarian revolution was regarded asthe fight for freedom of a tiny nation against a tyrannicalempire, and Hungarian emigrants were seen as heroes –the gorgeous, dauntless Hungarian freedom fighter on thecover of Time Magazine was voted as Man of the Year. Asthe new Hungarian government, headed by János Kádár,officially declared the events to be a counter-revolution,writers who emigrated in 1956 were punished by damnatiomemoriae in their homeland, similarly to Márai and otherswho had fled from Communism. Victor Határ, George Faludy,János Nyíri or György Ferdinandy never really became partof the Hungarian canon, although they continued to write inHungarian (Ferdinandy wrote in French and Spanish as well,while Nyíri wrote mostly in English and French), and twoof them returned to their homeland – Faludy lived the lasttwo decades of his life in Hungary, Ferdinandy moved back in2010.

As none of the writers mentioned above switched languages,they could not be integrated into the literature of their chosencountries. Agota Kristof, however, who fled to Switzerland in1956 with her husband and young child, wrote in French, alanguage that she learnt as an adult, and that she claimedshe never managed to learn perfectly. Her case is especiallyinteresting as the success of her Trilogy – narrated by a setof twin brothers living in symbiosis during the war, thenseparated by the division of Europe – is due not least to theeerie, fragmented language in which it was written.

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Some writers who emigrated from Hungary in 1956 andbecame successful in their chosen countries have playeda mediating role, translating and disseminating Hungarianliterature. Two poets living in the UK should especiallybe mentioned here: George Szirtes, the T.S. Eliot Prize-winning British poet, the translator of Sándor Márai andLászló Krasznahorkai; and George Gömöri, who has translatedseveral volumes of poems by Miklós Radnóti and GyörgyPetri, in collaboration with British poet Clive Wilmer.

The first decade and a half of the new millennium has seena new wave of emigration. In the intoxicating years of theregime change, most young people believed that once theCommunists are toppled, Hungary would catch up fast with itsWestern neighbors. This did not happen, however, for a varietyof reasons, including the resurfacing of major traumas andantagonisms within the society that had been suppressedduring the Kádár era, as well as the economic crisis of2008, the repercussions of which hit Hungary extremely hard.Hundreds of thousands of Hungarians, many of them youngand 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 thelanguage of their chosen countries – some of them verysuccessfully so, like Terézia Mora, who left the country in1990 for personal rather than political reasons. Mora, whowrites in German, has garnered such prestigious awards asthe Ingeborg Bachmann Prize and the German Book Prize.Her books revolve around the experience of being betweentwo worlds: the stories in her collection entitled «SeltsameMaterie»take place in a village on the Austro-Hungarianborder, whereas her novel «Das Ungeheuer»takes the readeron a journey through Eastern Europe. Mora keeps close tieswith contemporary Hungarian literature; she has translateda number of books (by Örkény and Esterházy, among others)into German.

Another Hungarian who has won the Deutscher Buchpreisis Melinda Nadj Abonji, who emigrated to Switzerland fromthe province of Vojvodina in Serbia which has a largepopulation of ethnic Hungarians. Her novel «Tauben fliegen

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

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IMAN HUMAYDAN: MIGRATION, IDENTITY ANDTHE LITERARY IMAGINATION

«We are all migrants... Writers are migrants.» This is howthe Scottish writer Alison Louise Kennedy ended her openingremarks at the seventh annual European Literature DaysFestival in Spitz, Austria. These words were a primary focusof discussion throughout the festival. There were discussionsabout 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, thissubject is connected to the nightmares of the second decadeof the third millennium. What can literature do? How doesit reflect reality? What is the role of literature today? Orcan a writer simply say, «I write literature, create art, useimagination, I have no connection to what’s going on rightnow...»?

A.L. Kennedy’s words made me think about the «committedliterature» of the 1970s, that became paired in our mindswith the ideological systems which collapsed, beginning withthe fall of the Berlin Wall, to the erosion of the SovietUnion, to the failed regimes in the Arab world. But whatKennedy is talking about is deeply different and current.Her language gives individuals and their own initiativesspace in the face of the widespread public frustration thatpermeates art and culture. This gives literature a rolethat has no relationship to the system, but rather allowsit to stand as a critic of rampant globalization that hasincreased poverty, unemployment, shifting wars, political andhumanitarian refugees.

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

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LANGUAGE

History is made in different languages. The issue of languageis also at the heart of conversations about migration andwriting. Europe has dozens of languages and the question re-mains if we can say that there is such a thing as a Europeanliterature? I don’t understand why there’s such insistenceon fixing a description of literature or identity: Europeanliterature, world literature, Asian literature or whatever otherword we use? It’s Literature before anything else and thisis where its importance resides: in its humanism and howclose 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 writerswho became Europeans and live in Europe if they still writein their language.

To immigrate to Europe at a young age, live in a country notyour 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 ofthemselves and their roles. Many Arab writers have found akind of balance: I am a political (or non-political) refugee, Iwrite in my language and I write my memories. I am not aEuropean writer.

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

WRITING AND MIGRATION

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

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

Similarly, there are migrant writers who travel to Europehaving been coerced to leave their countries and writers whotravel in order to discover new places, have new experiencesand write about them. It’s the people coming from countriesthat experience daily violence who lose in their victimhoodany human support from the world. This leads writersto then revaluate the values of the world around them.They begin to rebuild their world from scratch, having lostconfidence in any notion or laws of human rights. We canwalk down the street in any Arab capital, to experience forone day what a Palestinian or Syrian or Iraqi lives. Thiscan lead us to realize what the word cruelty means, butalso indeed to realize that such surreal cruelty is beyondthe current European imagination. What does it mean thento write about migration? For refugee writers, writing aboutmigration means learning how to deal with conflict but inanother language. And to dream of a peace that is missing.

Globalization was able to advance global wars throughmirco-local means. But it won’t always succeed in keepingthese wars far from the centres of power. The weakest areinfluenced by this and strongest will bear its consequences.In France, no one can forget Charlie Hebdo and the recentattacks. In Germany, Austria and other European countrieswaves of refugees and people fleeing violence, about whomthe world remains silent, are arriving daily on its soil.

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

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

In this calm... the image of thousands of Syrians in littletents under the snow in the Lebanese mountains comes tomy mind. And through the words of A.L. Kennedy there is asecond image, the little boy who drowned and whose bodythey found on the seashore. We must extricate ourselvesfrom the fiction of silence and indifference. We must speakup.

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HERTA MÜLLER: HOMESICKNESS FOR FUTURE

Acceptance speech for the award of the Heinrich Böll Prize2015For decades in Eastern Europe besides the commonrepressive regimes there was a visible, shared weariness ofrepression and paternalism due to dictatorship. And therewas also a shared, hidden desire – the desire to escape.

I know people who lived their lives for years with a projectionof the possibility for escape. They thought of escape every dayand oriented their life towards it. For example, at universitythey focused on Oriental Studies for years to just to applyat some later date perhaps for an official trip to Japan –and then, when this opportune moment arose, at the firsttransit point in the first airport in the West, they interruptedthe trip to claim asylum. Others became specialists intechnical drawing because this profession involved the skill ofsurveying. Word got around that the terrain was sometimessurveyed close to the border. So some people chose theirprofession as the chance of the potential opportunity forescape – and the profession stuck and never suited them andhalf their life they felt tricked by their illusion because theprospect of escape never came. You can say that thousandsof people spent half of their lives in the conditional tenseof escape. In this complete wall-to-wall misery the hiddenthought of escape was a mixture of despair and hope.

From this time I know that there are collective and individualreasons for escape, thus general and personal reasons. Theseare equally strong. But the general causes need no reinforce-ment whatsoever from personal ones to make escape a realitywhen it finally becomes possible. The general, omnipresentcause is sufficient, the collective hopelessness and bitterness.It grew in everyone’s minds. And it is an obsession, a causeanyway because it suggests: it’s better anyway than herein 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 thisconclusion.

Total resignation underlies this conclusion. This is why it’sso absurd when the refugees, who are arriving now in ourcountry, are described as an invasion or as an avalanche. Es-cape has nothing to do with aggression. Escape is defensive

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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 andrisky, profoundly political attempt at escape. For there was acrucial point at which the quite ordinary, tolerant, inconspi-cuous, resigned and politically passive individual risked hisor her entire existence and escaped at any cost. Because theRomanian borders were closed, they were death zones. Atthe Hungarian border, soldiers shooting and trained dogs torerefugees to shreds. And at the Yugoslavian border there wereboats in the Danube that hunted down swimming refugeesand ripped them to pieces with the boats›propellers. Thechances of survival weren’t even fifty-fifty; the end of everyescape was open to fatality. Nevertheless, over the yearshundreds of thousands fled in secret and often all alone. Thebullets, the dogs, the boats›propellers didn’t frighten anybodyaway.

I worked in an engineering factory and time and again onemorning an otherwise punctual, reliable worker didn’t turn upfor work any longer – and then he didn’t ever come back. Afew days later we heard he had escaped. It was quite rare tohear a few months later, off the record, that he had sent amessage from Munich, Paris or Toronto. Very often, however,he had disappeared from the face of the earth and remainedso for ever. He had arrived nowhere. Although none of ushad seen his intention to escape, nobody was surprised if oneday his colleague at work escaped. And nobody was shockedwhen he was killed. A gentle whisper of pity was enoughfor the colleagues. This pity was even tinged with a hintof envy, although the escapee was dead. Bitter envy whichwas personally hurtful. It was by no means schadenfreude,but a kind of admiration. Like a medal of sorrow for thedaring act of fleeing. Afterwards, he was never mentionedagain. It would have been frivolous to remember his death inconversation. It would have been half self-betrayal becauseyou yourself also harboured the thought of escape. You hadto stay calm inside the mind; escape was in the conditionaltense, the hope of the better, personal opportunity. And thatworked best through silence.What do people do before an escape? Some went to thefortune teller. They wanted to fathom out their chances byarranging cards or reading coffee grounds. They wanted to

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predict chance, perhaps even to exert a gracious influence ondestiny.

I had one friend who was a seamstress and fortune teller. Ilet her make my clothes. But once I happened to be tryingthings on when a client came to have his fortune told. Shetrusted me; we had known each other for ages. She hid mein the room and ushered him to the kitchen table. The doorof 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 coffeegrounds alone weren’t enough. And the text was poetry. Itwent something like this:

«Here I see two feet, that’s you. And there where you areis something green. It doesn’t start here and also doesn’tfinish 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 intothe cornfield, into the tobacco or turnip field. And don’t walkover the grass; don’t run into the green space. Here, I seea long neck; it’s a swan and you are arriving at a sparklingriver.» The seamstress paused, sighed and asked, «Can youswim? That’s the Danube.» His voice was too soft. I didn’tunderstand his answer.

While listening I thought how beautiful these surreal picturesare. 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, itsimpact is the greatest. But how can telling lies be sobeautiful? I asked myself. But that was too simple becausethe seamstress painted the pictures with her eyes in thecoffee grounds; she deciphered them and believed herself inwhat she was telling there. It was invented, but not a lie.And this aesthetic beauty of language became a dimensionthat defined the place of escape. The suggestions becameconcrete instructions in the mind, maps of the escape, planswith methods, times and geographical data. The aestheticbeauty of language was translated into the deed.

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

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In his lectures on poetics, Heinrich Böll once referred verybriefly to the «search for an inhabitable language». After thewar in a country where not only the houses were bombed, forBöll, this phrase probably implied something quite concrete.But he doesn’t add a single additional word of explanation forus about what it is. It remains in suspense and the crypticelement makes this expression so metaphorical and strong.So convincing and paradigmatic. You can use it how youlike. 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 arrivesomewhere in a foreign place where anyway it can only bebetter than back home. And from Böll one quickly attuneswith Jorge Semprun, who states that not language as such ishome, but what is spoken. Hence, the content of speech canbe «inhabitable language».

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

Böll also doubted this because after the war only the expul-sion of Germans from the East was regarded as «expulsionfrom home». In 1973, Böll wrote that the «word expulsionfrom 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 Germancommemoration there is still nowhere which puts on theagenda this initial expulsion of hundreds of thousands of peo-ple from Nazi Germany. That highlights the great misfortuneof 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 ofnerves that are permanently broken. In 1974 in his PEN

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speech in Jerusalem Böll said the «German word misery»was a «forebear of the word foreign». The émigrés neverknew whether they could afford their homesickness both forpolitical as well as psychological reasons. Nobody called themback. Yet post-war Germany would have urgently neededtheir experience and personal integrity.

Yet in spite of this perhaps contemporary Germany became a‹homesick or nostalgic home›. Not only for those of us wholive here. Also for people who have to escape dictatorshipand war. They feel homesickness for peace and security. Andbecause Germany can offer them that they are homesick forGermany. In their thousands they have the same homesick-ness that East Europeans of my age still know well evenwithout war – homesickness for future.

When I travelled by train from Timisoara to Bucharest fora while the tracks ran really close to the Danube. Youcould see across to Yugoslavia. And when this part ofthe journey began everybody in every carriage graduallystood up. Without reason, without saying a word everyonestood up, absolutely everyone; they walked along the aisleand looked across the border towards Yugoslavia. Youngand old, and even policemen and soldiers in uniform werestanding among them. It was a silence like hypnosis. Likea revelation everyone knew what the other person wasthinking now. Silence and watching; eyes like slantingmirrors. The seagull or swallow in the sky, they were flyingaround one’s neck. And when the train pulled away fromthe Danube everyone returned to their carriage again withouta word. Everyone sat down again and talked again aboutsome subject from beforehand – as if the interruption fromthe sparkle of the Danube had not happened.

I was always a little lightheaded from this hypnosis inthe aisle; I had a queasy feeling when I imagined what itwould be like if everyone could unexpectedly escape fromthe 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 countedhow many people escaped from East European dictatorships,day by day. When the Soviet tanks also came to Budapest

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

I believe that when the pull of total despair captures acountry the mass psychosis of escape emerges. This is thecase in Syria and Eritrea. And the pull never ends whenthe despair subsides, the murdering acts of the dictator, warand the apocalypse of Islamic terror. War is a political enemyand refugees in wars are politically persecuted and everysingle one of them needs protection. This protection cannotbe 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. Anywaythe arrival is perceived as rescue. Rescue is a tired word. Buteverything about it is better than life at home with barrelbombs in the streets. Heinrich Böll was in the war and hewrote, «Most people died young, and dying isn’t easy whenone is young: there is a small, official deception in the words‹killed› or ‹fallen›; in these words there is a pretence of asuddenness of death that is only granted to a very few. Thedying become silent in a way that resembles disdain; theyalso easily shiver because the macabre majesty that comesupon them is cold.»Until now there was homesickness for future, but after thearrival the future clings to the skin. Future sounds likeshelter, but it is deceiving. For future is abstract and shelteris concrete. Beneath the soles of the feet shelter is a realplace. But the future is an unreal time unknown to itself.The present never stops, and one drags around the past. Whoknows, perhaps the future starts when the first calm sets inafter the escape.


(The spoken text applies)

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2. TRENDS IN EUROPEAN CONTEMPORARYLITERATURE

In 2015 the Observatory for European Contemporary Litera-ture focused on the German, English and French as well asSlovenian and Hungarian linguistic areas. The key themesrelated to trends in the literature market, debates concerningthe national literary marketplace as well as social and politicalframework conditions for writers in the individual countries.

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

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

«Reportage literature enjoys a long and illustrious tradition –starting with the Greek historian Herodotus and his accountsof nations in antiquity up until Mark Twain’s travel reportsas well as, in the last century, the stylistically influentialreportages of Egon Erwin Kisch, Joseph Roth and RyszardKapuscinski. In the US, against the backdrop of two worldwars the genre was newly defined as new journalism, –Truman Capote, Hunter S. Thompson and Tom Wolfe areregarded as its most important representatives. War-likeconflicts, global movements of refugees, political persecutionand state surveillance, natural catastrophes and epidemicshave made the genre acutely relevant in recent years.»

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

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PIERRE ALFÉRI: NON SEQUITUR. THE GARBLEDSTORY OF PRESENCE

IN BRIEF.

Our attention is torn between different tasks and multipleactivities, divided between duplicate screens, diverted bythe incessant allures of commercialism and while our focusdisintegrates in the to and fro of urban life it is increasinglydifficult for us to concentrate on literary subjects, even if theyhave a narrative quality. If one casts sly looks at the readersin the underground, one might think that the only impactis the addiction of suspense and immersion in chill realitiespromised by English-speaking and Scandinavian crime stories.That would be to overlook the new styles of reading andportable media that make handbags rather lightweight. Onnotebooks, tablets, ebook readers and smartphones the latestfashion is for micro-narratives – for «flash fiction» and «twitte-rature». This material is circulated on websites (such as theGerman-speaking www.kurzgeschichten-stories.de) and onlinejournals and newsletters; it is the focus of competitions andexchanged among a semi-public community (with a daily mail-shot to subscribers, for example, at «365tomorrows: A NewFlash of Science Fiction Every Day») and ranges across allgenres from fable to science fiction. These extremely conci-se forms are optimized for new formats of text communicationlike 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». Yetare they on these grounds the new literary forms as such?What are their role models? What is their heritage? Whatdoes their success tell us about today’s expectations of anarrative? And about what an incident is for us? About whatis worthy of narration? Do these extremely short stories andtheir «fast finish» styles offer narrative techniques a chanceof renewal that corresponds to the current digital revolution?Or are they only the dust into which well-thumbed forms ofnarrative fiction degenerate, their worst clichés, meaninglesstrivial literature whose unavoidable destiny is self-destructionlike time-limited messages on Snapchat? These are the sortsof questions that I would like to invite us to think abouttoday.

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If literature had to disappear one day, crushed by its strivingfor the concise form, its history would form a strange loop.This is because it also began with extreme brevity – withsuccinctness, set in stone. The short-lived micro-narrativesthat circulate on social networks are evidence of the comfortof our portable keyboards and the speed of inconsequentialdistribution on the Internet. The conciseness of inscriptionspassed down through the centuries, which epigraphs gathertogether, reveals the precise opposite, namely, the painstakingtechnique of stone engraving with the hammer and chisel,the sacred weight lent to every word, the belief in thesuperhuman perpetuity of what is written in contrast withthe influence of time and usage. Keeping it brief neveramounted to writing a minimum. In a dedication, motto orepitaph, in a maxim or an oracle the focus was on ellipsis,concentration, tempo and elegance. In other words, it wasabout a dynamic economy of meaning where the inner tensiongives the decisive note. The Latin «brevitas» is a virtueof discourse for which Quintilian even provides a concisedefinition: «Not saying less or more than is required». Thisis the counterpart of «copia» or «fullness» – that speaker’sdevice, which can be used at any time, to spin a storyto 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 onauthors of epigrams, yet it is also used among the besthistorians among whom the aptly named Tacitus rankedhighly. Nevertheless, it is also useful even for narrators ofstories in the context of morals, in the judgement, sentenceor oracle: brevity is the soul of wit.

In fact, the forms of brevity owe most of their success totraditions of wisdom and later to the moralists. Compact,perfected rules stimulate the fantasy and are conveyed in anunbiased 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 proverbssuch as those like «immense depth of thought in popularphrases, hollowed out by generations of ants» (Baudelaire

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in his short fragment «Rockets») often appear dull to us,like pebble stones that are too heavily worn, scarcely anyless like platitudes than old proverbs about the weather.However, it suffices to apply them in a realistic situationand to coat them with our saliva to recognize one of thecore elements in them that Jakobson calls the «grammarof poesy» – parallelism with all its asymmetrical effects –and to see how every word deploys the broad spectrum ofmeanings and connotations that have been deposited in them.The history of the pithy observation is long. It spans fromthe Greek «gnome» (gn[U+1E53]me) to Latin «sententia»,from the apophthgems of great men and characteristicsof the moralist to the personal maxim of Chamfort, thephilosophical fragment of the Romantics and the Nietzscheanaphorism. Of course, contradictory forces are at work duringthis long history. Polysemy, the adaptability of the proverband maxim, which are suitable for many purposes, was stifledby reactionary religious morals, when they were ready tomerge in a collection of doctrines that is subject to a divineauthority. In the «Wisdom of Sirach», in the «Imitation ofJesus Christ» or the Surahs of the Quran, the sentencesbecome laws; their composition fossilizes and their readingbecomes a duty. Playing is no longer required; learning isdone by heart and by reciting.

However, the sclerotic freezing of meaning is rather theexception than the rule. The conciseness of successfullycrafted phrases and their diversity tend to push moral thinkingmore in the other direction, towards interpretive opening andakin to old wives’ tales and the ethics of the moralists. Aphantom doctrine is suspended over collections of maxims orideas and their outlines are blurred. Long before Plato andAristotle, the Greeks exchanged expressions of flexible andcautious wisdom, which observed opportunity and fortune, –«kairos» and «tyche». And long after the establishment ofmonotheistic dogmas, the scholarly disorder of the moralists’maxims appealed to every reader’s sharp-sightedness and hisor her fantasy. Their dispersion was a counterbalance to theintolerant universality of each individual, as if the principleswere as abundant as the cases. The collections of theseconcise forms, for instance, by La Rochefoucault, Vauvenarguesor Joubert, give everybody the option of finding his own waythrough them. Their morality is the morality of a flexible,

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revisable guideline for behaviour in the world. As is the casein large sections of Chinese aphoristic thinking, it brings intoplay never-ending casuistry and an art of combination that issensitive to «the extravagant nature of individually differenthuman beings», as Chamfort states in the «Incipit» of his«Maxims and Thoughts». And he conceded, «What I learnedI no longer know; the little I still know, I guessed.» In therealm of ethics and philosophy, concise forms seem rather tocorrespond to far strewn thinking that is configured like anisland group. Their concentration, the high and memorablespan of their train of thought is often concentrated playfullyin the final words. This is referred to as a «point». Thesophisticated aesthetics and ethics of the Renaissance periodset great store by this. Moreover, the «point», this principleof thorough reasoning, in which Baltasar Gracian sees the artof genius itself, actually coincides with a tension of meaningthat 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 wasno detour. In particular, when stated in succinct terms, itimplies something analogous to the «point». «Micro ficti-ons», which incorporate just a few lines or even only severalwords, endeavour in the overwhelming majority of cases toemphasize the incident or event that they report. They doso by adding an ironic or paradoxical nuance. A narrativepoint, which is no longer a «word figure», but a temporal andcausal «thought figure» corresponds to the rhetorical pointof the sentences. Today my telephone is faulty, my ankle isbroken and I have a stiff neck. Today I stepped on my catwhile 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 rockand swung his long pincers high above him. He destroyed several

skyscrapers and buildings. A fire broke out. The city turned apurple-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 storiesprefer to cite Félix Fénéon and his «Nouvelles en trois lignes»

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

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

It cost too much, staying human.

However, these «new short forms» seem to me in the firstplace a sort of refuge for light and childish illusions, slightlynaive fiction and clumsy jokes that would not be acceptableelsewhere.

The effects of the «short turn» in narrative fiction are thusnot 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 ajoke is the only memorable thing. In the best cases, on asmall scale they integrate the classic narrative patterns ofthe short story and anecdote. The short-short» story, whichis also known as «flash fiction» (or also «smokelong story»)and only spans one or two pages is incidentally a shortnovella or short story or anecdote that already existed atleast since the early 20th century. These two genres, whichare generally widely respected, were defined in aestheticterms and recently also statistically on the basis of theirtreatment of the incident (l’événement). The novella, whichwas mentioned by Boccaccio, thought through by Goetheand dismantled by Robert Petsch, narrates a single incident

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through a series of different scenes. The anecdote, originallyjustified by the renown of its protagonist, nowadays refersto every treatment of an incident in a single scene. Thenarrative challenge for the related short forms lies in main-taining the probability («probabilitas») of a plot sequenceon a reduced scale. The associated disadvantages, that is,for deploying any word art, as Poe correctly explained, arecompensated for by the unity of attention and thus by theimpression of a quasi-simultaneity of all elements.

Yet which «unique incident» is actually meant here? Whatdeserves 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, whichis preferably extraordinary; it is always uplifting in some wayand mostly overcomes obstacles. In the basic arrangementemerging from this restriction the beginning creates anexpectation that only the ending will fulfil. It poses aquestion whose answer it postpones. After two-thirds of thenarrative a test or contradiction produces a disruption ofthe balance, an upset or a turning point (Wendepunkt). Thiscentral peripety – the decisive incident, the only one in thecase of the short story or anecdote – leads to the resolution ofthe conflict due to the success (and more rarely the failure) ofthe hero. Actually, this scheme can be identified everywhere,as idiot-proof as it may be – and scholars of storytellingcount thirty-six versions of it, divided into three, five or sevenepisodes, which can be altered in genres of conflict- and basicbehavioural patterns. Although all literary narratives, whichare worthwhile reading, deviate from this scheme, if theydon’t entirely turn their back on it, it continues to structurethe vast majority of published narratives whether short orlong. The underlying conception of the incident merits furtherquestioning more than the detail of its construction thatmerely interests screenplay authors. Hence, there is a human,unusual and instructive action, yet for peripety and resolutionto occur, it must precisely follow the laws of causality and thelinear continuity of time. The incident is just another elementin the iron chain of causes and effects that merely standsout a little more. The narrative «point», which ultimatelyembellishes it, is a material irony that has settled in it: aboomerang – whoever digs a hole for others will fall into it

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

Our flash fictions, short stories or anecdotes are overwhel-mingly based on precisely this non-reflected concept of theincident, this overvaluation of human action and this labouredcausalism. Rather than demanding experiments, its brevitygenerally exposes the old frame better than ambitious novelsthat allow the stereotyping of their narrative logic to beslightly overlooked due to the duplication of sub-plots. Theperplexity arising from the punchline of the short storiespublished on flourishing websites over the past ten years isprobably due to its mechanical aspect: the «point» of thesestories is too blunt.

ASSASSINATION.

Félix Fénéon’s «Nouvelles en trois lignes» on the other handaroused hopes of something entirely different and in the gapthat they made in the narrative prose they opened up a viewof something entirely different. This was to be nothing lessthan 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 whichsomething follows that I will call an «anarchistic caesura» inthe history of the short story. In 1892, after banal clashesbetween activists and police officers in Clichy a first waveof assassinations shocked Europe. The bomber and anarchistRavachol was arrested and was guillotined in July of thesame year. The following year it was Vaillant’s turn; hecommitted a bomb attack on the French Chamber of Deputies.One year later a nineteen-year-old Italian anarchist stabbedand murdered the French President, Marie François SadiCarnot, because he had not pardoned Vaillant. (The weapon’shandle was red and black.) As is widely known, it was thisera – which drew to a close as the police stopped the BonnotGang in 1913 – that led to the emergence of an embodimentof the devil, which lost nothing of its phantasmal aura, namelythat of «terrorists». However, it is less well known thatanarchism was fashionable at that time with a section of theliterati and artist milieu – the same circles from which theavant-garde emerged in the 20th century. As diverse writersas Oscar Wilde, Maurice Maeterlinck, Paul Verlaine, Octave

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Mirbeau, Émile Zola and even the barely progressive FrédéricMistral openly announced their support for this. The anarchistmagazine «La Révolte» attracted prestigious writers at thevery moment when Laurent Tailhade wrote a commentaryin his supplement about the attack on the French Chamberof Deputies and entitled this with the famous phrase, «Whocares about the victim, if the gesture [of the violent act] isbeautiful»? Although this literary fashion did not last long, inhis chapter on the «Poetics of the Bomb» in his remarkablebook «Fictions de l’anarchisme» Uri Eisenzweig convincinglyexplained how the intellectuals did not give way «in spiteof», but «because» of the murderous assassination attempts.In fact, this was never stronger than at the culmination ofthe attacks around March 1892. How can this be explained?

Sympathy for anarchism was even more pronounced whenit went hand in hand with aesthetic decisions. Fénéoninvented 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 smallunforeseeable and inconsequential explosion. The «Nouvellesen trois lignes» or «news in three lines» column publishedin the newspaper Le Matin, contains genuine miracles of«emaciated prose».

- The insolent soldier Aristide Catel with the 151st regiment apedthe gestures of Corporal Rochesani. The military council of Châlons

sentenced him to two years in prison!

The conciseness stimulates his inventiveness in expressivepunctuation and rhythm.

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

metres.

The fait divers becomes a social hieroglyph: a striking, figuralsign 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

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in them «signs whose meaning remains uncertain, [...] richin causal deviations». André Gide inherited this fascinationwhen he wrote legal chronicles or even Robert Musil with thearbitrary literary beginning of «The Man Without Qualities».Yet it is Mallarmé who supplies the key to this fascinationin his «Grands faits divers» (1897). He declares scandalously,«Let us go straight to the future assassination», since theassassination like the «fait divers» seems to occur outsideof causality like an absolute event. It happens somewhereand sometime, arbitrarily. Its murderous violence destroys it– he confesses his pity for the «maimed onlookers», yet hepraises the light of epiphany, the non-causal brightness that abomb casts over the city. In a reversal of perspectives, whichone may call idealist, the implacable rejection of social laws,which anarchist assassination expresses, is for him merelythe picture of rejecting aesthetic conventions that are thebasis of their practice. For the author of concise prose, whichhe was too, this rejection is precisely one of causalist, he-roic or naturalist narration aimed at morality; a rejection ofrepresentation both in art and politics and of what he calls«redactions». Enough of the novelist mimesis, of these linearnarratives and the leaked descriptions that have a whiff ofhistory 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, whichwas borne of this violent incision (or this C-section) ofanarchist terrorism, is an art of the «non sequitur» – anart of narration of events without any cause and withoutany final purpose. Fénéon’s work was merely the embryo ofthis. To release oneself simultaneously from every aetiologicalbelief and every moral intention will always be determinedby a risk, almost insanity. It means a veto of every story.«There are no stories. There have never been stories. Thereare only situations, having neither head nor tail; withoutbeginning, middle or end.» Jean Epstein’s dictum has beenappropriated by all, or almost all 20th century avant-gardistsin art. All of them, or almost all, were against the novel. Thisdidn’t especially disturb the novel, like a weeble toy, it isalways ready to begin with another lurch forwards. Yet theavant-gardists were at least mistrusting of long, continuous

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narratives because they were better than society as a wholeat judging the traumatic and powerless nature of historicalexperience that was peculiar to the 20th century from thesecond decade when an assassination heralded a catastrophe.Teleology, the light at the end of the tunnel fades, whenthe replay of an event is no longer concerned with thetransmission of a useful experience. «Experience», wroteWalter Benjamin in 1933, «has been devalued and that in ageneration which in 1914–18 had one of the most monstrousexperiences of world history.»

Although they look like fables there is nothing less upliftingthan Kafka’s short stories, perhaps with the exception ofWalser’s «Berlin Stories»,which Benjamin instantly understoodas convalescent, indeed, post-traumatic. There is nothing lesslike a novel, insofar as one does not suspend it, as helater attempted, than the «Epiphanies» written by Joycein the early 20th century to narrate the emergence ofa consciousness in the violent chain of a simultaneousstream of feelings and thoughts. The absence of any kind offinal purpose even became a demand in Beckett’s «Storiesand Texts for Nothing» and his late short prose writings.These new-fangled short forms unify seemingly contradictoryqualities from the viewpoint of meaning, which Barthesidentified in the haiku and its narrative cousin, which hecalls the «incident». They are immediately clear, but theyalso suspend «meaning» in the elevated sense of significativeimportance and final purpose. By emphasizing the ridiculousaspect of their content, they complete an epoché, a suspensionof anticipated meaning. According to Barthes they are anti-allegorical forms.

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

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He jumped – often on a bicycle – from one hour, onesubject, one incident to another with amazing grace andsimplicity. Sometimes the real incident of the narrativehappened outside, in the hiatus between two sentences, andone only experienced it afterwards, following an emergencystop. Antonio Pizzuto achieved the causal drives of languageitself much more artfully, more acrobatically and ostentatiouslyfrom his hyper-concentrated, most concise prose that hedevoted himself to at the end of his life. From his «Pagelle»and «Paginette» of a single piece conjugations, articles andconjugated verbs progressively disappeared and made spacefor an explosive stage on which objects, persons and actionscollide with each other and from one another on an equalfooting.

These accelerations, concentrations, clever interruptions areperhaps the «future assassination» divined by Mallarmé.In contrast to the anarchist bombs, they didn’t arouse anyattention; many individuals in the literary field know nothingabout their existence. They only reported events that werehardly memorable. The canary died in his cage. A boygave his neighbour a persimmon fruit. It rained for threedays without stopping. In Soseki’s «prose haikus» or laterin Kawabata’s «Palm-of-the-Hand Stories» the event, whichhas no moral or causal importance whatsoever, was no longereven embellished with the ornament of the extraordinaryor 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 Boveor Henry Green who really show curiosity for small, banalincidents. At first sight they appear disappointing, thoughthey are perhaps the invaluable secret of the everyday, ofwhat Georges Perec called the «infra-ordinary». Somethingminiscule, inconspicuous and ridiculous, something that is notperceived or only unclearly – something has happened. Anevent that belongs to everybody and nobody and which allhave in common.

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

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miniscule peripeties thanks to this random and sticky bindingagent. These are rare and already old examples. Not solong ago in an underrated book Michelle Grangaud joinedtogether several hundred shattering micro-events, gesturesthat became a «gesture», an epos of the everyday. However,that remained an isolated case.

The extremely sparse emergence of these narratives, whichare not unscrambled and not resolved particularly in the genreof contemporary «flash fiction» leads me to conclude withtwo 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 eventdisrobed of its old heroic prestige and reproduced beyond anyfatal linking and any moral lesson? It will not have escapedyou: the more precisely that the idea of «today’s short story»is composed, the more the difference is minimized with theprose poem. True, it can and is no longer admissible asan allegorical work like the prose poems «Treasurer of theNight» («Gaspard de la Nuit») or «Paris Spleen» («Le Spleende Paris»). Above all, it would still be a narrative, even ifthis must be a betrayal of Maurice Blanchot, who ended hislast story with the words, «A story? No. No stories. Neveragain.» However, I believe that the essential genre distinctionbetween the shortest story and the prose poem is basicallyineffective and even damaging for poetry as well as for thenarrative. Some fledgling magazines like «Double Room»,which are actively working for its elimination, produce textsthat are more stimulating than all «smokelong stories» andperfect their plot and punchline in vain. Today’s short storiestend to be found more in the unspecific, hybrid and brokenforms than in the polished miniature novels that are trimmedto a specific text length for social networks.

My second and final question relates to the chain, the seriesof these shortest stories – the «fix-up», as they say on «flashfiction» websites. This is obviously less serious. Creatinga book, compiling an anthology is by no means of crucialimportance. By definition abundant media forms are suitedfor conciseness. Posted, thrown on the Internet, co-alignedin magazines, read aloud in less time than it takes to smokea cigarette, they can assert their lightness to ensure the«evanescent thoughtfulness» that according to one expert

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is typical for readers in the underground. Nevertheless,their assembly can equally produce a new form, or rathera new experience. The juxtaposition of autonomous shortstories results in an unsystematic complexity that inspiresimagination and thought. The collections of classic shortstories promise a genre of symbolic or thematic unity. Butother collections can sketch a landscape, a fresco, a mosaic, apuzzle, a more or less close-meshed web, a constellation, afractal or net-like structure; ultimately, the map of a world inwhich incidents happen everywhere without cancelling it, aworld in which suspense has withdrawn behind suspensionor leaving things in suspense. Exactly one hundred andfifty years ago somebody had a precise premonition of theparadox of such tortuous fantasies, namely, Baudelaire in hisdedication in «Paris Spleen»:

«My dear friend, I send you here a little work of which noone could say that it has neither head nor tail, because, onthe contrary, everything in it is both head and tail, alternatelyand reciprocally. Please consider what fine advantages thiscombination offers to all of us, to you, to me, and to thereader. We can cut wherever we like – me, my reverie, you,the manuscript, and the reader, his reading; for I don’t tie theimpatient reader up in the endless thread of a superfluousplot. Pull out one of the vertebrae, and the two halves ofthis tortuous fantasy will rejoin themselves painlessly. Chopit up into numerous fragments, and you’ll find that each onecan live on its own. In the hopes that some of these stumpswill be lively enough to please and amuse you, I dedicate theentire serpent to you.»

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

Original contribution c© Pierre Alféri, 2015

Lecture of Pierre Alféri<a href=«http://www.readme.cc/book-tips-readers/author/showauthor/8036/» </a>(Paris). Thekeynote lecture of the International Literature Festival ErichFried 2015 on the theme of «Facts and Fiction. LiteraryReportages», 6 to 11 October 2015, was commissioned asa cooperative initiative of the Internationale Erich FriedGesellschaft/Literaturhaus Vienna und ELit Literaturehouse

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

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WORLD NOVEL – TALK WITH PATRICK DEVILLE

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

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

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

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

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

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

Patrick Deville: Of course, that’s a simplification! The purposeis to emphasize that all characters, all locations, all dates,all events can be verified. However, of course there is alsoa narrator, and what really distinguishes the novel, is thelanguage, the form, the formatting on just a few pages,because these are relatively short novels, i.e. 220 pages forevery one-and-a-half centuries. What then makes it a novelis precisely what ultimately interests me about this methodof working, namely, that I can make use of all literary genres.These books consist of relatively short chapters, which allhave one subtitle, and make it possible for me to switch fromone 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 interviewsand sometimes I need a press badge; yet they also featuretravel reports because mainly I don’t write about places thatI haven’t been to. So I travel absolutely everywhere. Thebooks also contain studies about the press as well as – andthat involves plenty of trips to the library – many writers,great writers from the past, but also those who are stillalive today. No matter where, I’m starting to read literatureeverywhere and to meet the relevant writers. So this containsall these literary genres, including autobiography, as thereis also a first person narrator who is aging. This meansthat the writer who accompanies the Sandinistas in the20th century is naturally much younger in the report, yet itconcerns the same narrator who later on during the Khmer

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

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

B: It could also have been 59 or 61, but in the year 1860something happened. Now, I know this year all around theglobe as though I had experienced it myself. That’s themoment when for the first time all peoples, all civilizationswere in contact with each other and when... when no eventshappen any more without any global effects. We’re talkingabout the second industrial revolution. At this point in timeprimarily England, France and Germany are in competitionwith each other. It begins quite horribly and in a capitalistway with the idea that come what may the entire planetmust be Europeanized, yet without Europe existing at allin European literature. The English are convinced that theentire planet must be British; the French that it must beFrench and the Germans that it must be German. At thesame time there are movements like Saint-Simonianism inFrance with this «pre-Socialist» idea of making all the planet’sresources count for something so that everyone in the worldcan profit from the development of the sciences, technologyand medicine. This is therefore what is meant with «Peste etCholéra», the book, which I dedicated to Louis Pasteur and hisschool. 1860 is the year in which Pasteur scaled the glacierin Chamonix, taking pure air samples and proving that thereis 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 asevere defeat, instead of celebrating victory and the plunderof the summer palace – in London and Paris they’re happyto forget this, but not in Peking. Because history is long,and so is that year and this is particularly important whenFerdinand de Lesseps developed the Suez canal that, in turn,is the moment when the planet moves closer at one fellswoop and of course this changes everything. In 1860, thefirst passenger steamers are also built with iron hulls and

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they navigate the Suez. Of course, this means that the planetsuddenly becomes very small and this influences all events.And you see «Pura Vida» ends with the execution of WilliamWalker on a beach in Honduras. William Walker’s intentionof conquering Central America and building a transatlanticcanal in Nicaragua was the reintroduction of slavery. If hehad won, the whole history of the 20th century would havelooked entirely different. The people in the southern stateswould have taken Central America and California with them.1860 is the year when Lincoln was elected and also the startof this civil war in the United States. After William Walker’sdefeat, France lets Lesseps develop the transoceanic canal inEgypt and encounters resistance from Great Britain and theUnited States, so France gives up and instead puts Maximilianof Austria on the throne in Mexico. The fact that in CentralAmerica the canal was moved to Panama has historical,not technical or geographical reasons. Maximilian of Austria,Emperor Maximiliano of Mexico, means another failure, sinceas you know in 1867 he was shot by Benito Juàrez’ men.At this time, France gives up Mexico, founding Cochinchinaand Saigon instead, since in 1860 the French researcher HenriMouhot also discovers or rediscovers the Temple of Angkor.The history of South-East Asia unfolds from the discovery ofAngkor Temple to the trials of the Khmer Rouge starting in2009. It’s a straight line; sometimes it’s drawn with the bestintentions, at other times with the worst, yet it’s an absolutelystraight and terrible line leading to the Khmer Rouge.

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

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

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they lead to the catastrophe of colonization and then to bothworld wars, to the wars of decolonization, to the Cold Warand the dreadful consequences of the Cold War in several ofthe world’s locations, up to the end of the 20th century andtoday’s reconfiguration which is... well, different. 1860 is agood moment to look through the telescope and to take a lookat today and to determine any parallels. What particularlyinterests me are the revolutionary dreams, the utopias, that is,working for a better future for the world and its peoples. Andthere are revolutions that are oriented towards the future aswell as the past, and one can also read our planet in this way.For example, young men who led the Sandanistas’ revolutionrisked their lives and died for Nicaragua’s freedom. On theother side we have the Khmer Rouge, their revolution for thereturn to simplicity. The Khmer Rouge wanted to return tothe 12th century to the heyday of Angkor civilization andso they destroyed everything that was between the 12thand 20th centuries. Of course, on the one hand that includedcars, books, libraries, tin cans, and on the other hand alsoschools, hospitals, and everything that didn’t exist in the 12thcentury. In fact, within four years from a quarter to a thirdof the population perished. And today with Daesh in theMiddle East there is also the urge for revolution and with theIslamic Caliphate for the return to purity and everything thatstands between these two has to be destroyed. The pointis to understand where all of this comes from. The bordersof the Middle East are colonial borders between France andEngland. The borders between Lebanon, Syria and Iraq areinherited colonial borders from the European mandates.

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WORD AND IMAGE - TALK WITH MARGUERITEABOUET AND YVAN ALAGBÉ

Christian Gasser: I begin with a question to Yvan Alagbé.The older of the two books, which we have selected, isentitled «Nègre Jaune». This was first published in 1995. It’sa very complex story set in France. For you, at the age of24, it was quite natural to concentrate in your comics on thesubjects of migration and exclusion. That’s something whichwas extremely rare back then. How did this need arise towrite about the immigrant scene in France?

Yvan Alagbé: That all happened more by chance. At the timewe were working on a magazine, which I edited togetherwith a friend, Olivier Marboeuf, with whom I had foundeda small publishing house. Then, something happened in mysocial circle and I had the idea of processing it in the formof a comic. It wasn’t autobiographical; it wasn’t about mybiography, but there were true stories happening around me.The book, which I had just finished beforehand, was slightlysurrealist and poetical with totally white figures, as white aspaper, and then came what was going on around me, andthat 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 doingsomething similar in the comic book genre. So it’s theinterplay of various things that happened then. The culturalmilieu in France in general is not really influenced by itscultural and ethnic diversity. So Olivier, whose mother isFrench and father was from the Antilles, and I wanted totell the story about – well our – universe that we didn’t findin books. When «Nègre Jaune» was finally published theconcept of sans-papiers wasn’t even current.

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

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

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and didn’t know my neighbours. They were all white andI wanted them to open their door to me and I can say tothem that I’m totally normal and nice and that they can livetogether very well with me. So I began to tell stories aboutmy country, about the people who live in my country, and Ineeded to emphasize that we’re the same as the people inParis. Don’t be afraid of me; I speak French, even if I had athick accent back then! I loved sausage baguettes, in Franceespecially. My mother had said to me: don’t cry, in Franceyou’ll be able to eat sausage baguettes, your favourite dish. Ithought that all French people are white, almost naked andwell, I was very disappointed when I arrived in Paris. So Itold the story about a happy land, totally normal people inAfrica...

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

Marguerite Abouet: Verbally, in the first instance, becauseI had no claim whatsoever to be published. Writing is nota passion; it’s more a therapy for me. Incidentally, what Iwrite is very nostalgic. I come from a country or at least afamily in which people told each other stories; they didn’tread stories aloud to us. My parents never held a book intheir hands... that’s not part of our culture. But I had amaternal grandfather who invited us to his house every twomonths during the long holidays; there were about thirtygrandchildren waddling through the village with our parents.They were rid of us for two months and back then ourvillages still had no electricity, no running water and also notelevision. And this grandfather gathered us around the fire –it’s a massive cliché, but I’m sticking to it. Our grandfatherwas our television; he told us stories, tales in which peopleand animals live together, and in the end there was always amoral to make us better... This grandfather taught me how totell stories and I’m grateful to him for this. When I arrivedin France and only saw white faces, I wondered: Will youlike me? So I told stories, for instance, that I chased lions inthe forest with my grandfather, and I showed them my snakebites...

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

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

Christian Gasser: «Aya» is set in the 1970s and not in today’sAfrica. Why did you need this distance? Couldn’t you narratethese stories in Africa today because the Ivory Coast haschanged 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 needa visa to come to France. We had this freedom to comeover. Ivory Coast was a country that was thriving, wherethere was compulsory education with good healthcare andthe great crisis only happened in the 1980s and 1990s. Fromthis time onwards the borders were closed.

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

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

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

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Africa wants to come to Europe. And I wanted to say that. Ilove this country; I have my life here, but as an immigrantthese images of Africa disturbed me. They have betrayed mycountry and the population that goes about daily life here.I’m not pessimistic because I come from a country whereone... laughs about everything, even about what isn’t funny.The people live; the people are happy and I don’t know howyou tell sad stories. But I’m making a political statementwith «Aya». Because I’m talking about education and femaleemancipation, about immigration...

Christian Gasser: Ivan Alagbé, how much personal experienceis 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. Whennarrating stories, of course, then it’s also about experiencing adifferent reality. I’ve never had the idea of making somethingabout myself. I prefer trying to put myself in other people’sposition and to try to approach them from within. So he’spart of me, indeed, he’s... everywhere; he’s included in allthe figures, for example, like Flaubert and Madame Bovary.When reading «Nègre Jaune» some people recognized meagain in the male main protagonist, but I can equally identifywith him and with his girlfriend who incidentally possiblyemerged from real persons... and also from experience withmy own girlfriends, so all of this is a mixture, there are noreal dividing lines.

Christian Gasser: That means it’s highly complex, even inthe book «L’école de la misère» there are different narrativelevels, plenty of possible ways of reading it. In «L’école dela misère», in particular, the relationship between a whitewoman and an African man is the focal point as well as theparents’ colonialist past. How do you develop this style ofnarrative and how do you find the language or rather theright 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. Mymother had me very... I don’t know... on my parent’s weddingphotos there are my grandmother, my mother’s sisters, myother grandmother, but not my grandfather. And well, that

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never shocked me, but the fact that my grandfather wasn’tthere is because he didn’t agree with this marriage and withthe fact that his daughter married a black man... That wassomething that he couldn’t accept. On the other hand, heaccepted us, i.e. I never had any problems with him and thatdidn’t necessarily taken on a dramatic dimension. So I alwaysfelt happy in my mother’s family. But it wasn’t automatic andthat was difficult for my mother. And that’s simply a storythat is very present within me, and I would say is also verypresent in reality. These various levels are what get veryclose to me. I’m not an immigrant. I was born in France.My father on the other hand was an immigrant. I don’t seemyself from this perspective. But I try to approach thesesubjects with the tools of fiction, an artistic creation. Whenone reflects that actually these are fairly complex things, forexample, the figure of Claire, a young white woman who hasfallen in love with an illegal African immigrant who has noidentity papers. In «L’école de la misère» she finds out thather grandparents, that is, her grandfather spent... part of hisyouth in Africa and so she finds out by chance that she hasa much older connection to Africa then she thought. A reallyexisting 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 thatin her family there were members with this connection. Sothings come quite naturally... it happened in exactly the sameway 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 whowanted independence. His actual tragedy was that he wasequally rejected by France and was dropped. Then he comesinto contact with illegal African immigrants, until one dayhe says I’m also black. I’ll try to join in with them. So heopens himself to a kind of panorama of colonial history... it’ssomething that’s very strongly anchored in French reality. It’sjust the way it is.

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

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Yvan Alagbé: To borrow Patrick Deville’s words... we don’thave the right to be pessimistic. No, I’m not at all pessimistic.How often have people told me that what I’m doing hasnothing to do with a comic because comics are there toentertain. For me it’s the other way around. What I reallywant is to work on this kind of subject. But I don’t find thatmorbid or pessimistic. Books are just not real life, so you canafford to explore something...

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

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

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

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

So I think the famous question arises: why do you leaveyour country? In the hope of a better life or out of curiosity?In my book I wanted to show that not everyone comes onlybecause he or she... because back home there is poverty orwar... Innocent lives in France because he says to himself:for me the white people have the freedom primarily to beallowed to be homosexual. While in Africa that’s taboo. Butin France at least at that time it was just as difficult to behomosexual. So Innocent, you could say, is my Candide whois 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 otherhand I’m Innocent. Michael Jackson emerges because I wasa 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 inFrance very unhappy because I didn’t want to go to France. Ithink I’m the only immigrant who didn’t ask for this, at leastnot to come to France. I was torn from this country againstmy will – this beloved country, torn away from this familyand in the beginning I had to talk myself into everythingbeing super great. Innocent arrives and of course the Frenchare very, very nice. Everything’s going well and he uses theescalator. All Africans stumble on these escalators... Andthey get lost in the Paris Metro because they spend their timefinding the right way. Then Innocent also arrives with thisAfrican culture where one meets older people respectfully...we call them all the old woman or the old man... and henotices that here you don’t call the old people old people,but that this is more derogatory, so he somehow discoversanother culture. He has to get involved with it all... Taking itoptimistically 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 conceptthat I don’t like, but I really like acceptance because peopleaccept each other. People are not obliged to like each other,but at least to respect and accept each other. So Innocentdoes 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.

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

Marguerite Abouet: So «Aya» to tell the short anecdote waspublished in France and at the book signings only whitepeople stood in line and waited for a dedication – I alreadyfound that really alarming. The illustrator of «Aya» was awhite man and so only white people waited in the queue.Then mixed couples gradually turned up and then towardsthe end people with different skin colours. And one day Iwas signing in Abidjan and it was just the same – onlyexpats were standing in the queue. I told myself – it can’tbe true, after all, I’m in Africa and only expats are comingbecause the book is expensive and those who could afford itwere expats, or perhaps even Ivorian children who attendedFrench schools. I was already slightly frustrated, so I returnedto Paris and met Gallimard and said to them that we hadto do something... it’s actually very strange telling such apositive story about Africa without the Africans being able tobuy it. So we created a reasonably priced paperback formatfor Francophone Africa. And suddenly «Aya» had a massivepresence in Africa, but it wasn’t enough because parentscame to me and complained that 4,000 francs, 4,500 francswere still a lot of money... and 4,000 francs... how much isthat – that’s eight Euros – that’s a lot, and we can’t give thisto our children as gifts. Then I said to myself, if I can’t gift«Aya» to every African household then I can simply set uplibraries where all kinds of books, not only «Aya» are availableto these children. So I established the club «Livres pour tous»and now two large libraries in the Ivory Coast. They areyouth libraries and aimed at age groups from nursery to theAbitur and they are located in the simple workers’ districts.And it’s unbelievable what’s happening there because thereare plenty of supervised activities, about 1,600 children areenrolled here and I have two others in Dakar. And my aim isto open even more in other African countries.

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

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

Marguerite Abouet: Well, first of all, I find it appeals to allgenerations. The comic is something that you read with yourchild, then the child reads it alone, then the book matures,at least the comic. At the outset I wanted to tell my storyto the children, but anyone who says child of course alsosays parents because the parents are the ones who readthe stories to their children at the start. Plus, the picturesare very impressive. And because I really wanted to showeveryday life of the Africans, by using pictures you can showthat they have cars, that they have nice houses, that theydon’t all wear clothes like Kirikou. Personally, I needed thepicture and I found that the comic is a very interestingmedium because it makes it possible to describe exactly. Italso interested me because I think that if I had written anovel, then this novel would have gone under in a floodof other novels and the pictures are what make the comicinstantly attractive.

Christian Gasser: How are you working to create thesepictures, 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. Heisn’t African...

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

Christian Gasser: How do you work with him to create thisAfrican 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 theIvory Coast and thanks to its immigrants from the Dimitrovcountries this country developed. And Senegalese, Cameroo-nians and all kinds of people were living in this district.My illustrator had to experience the atmosphere personallybecause there’s something here that is very different fromother African cities... In Abidjan at least there are all thesemade-up females, so he had to sit among these made-upfemales and drink beer and to experience flirting from all

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these young girls... he did a really good job of capturing themin pictures. Exactly, he really had to be influenced, at leastby this heat... I always have a notebook with me when Iwork, I don’t just write... I do the first division, so I alreadytranslate what I want to narrate into pictures; I define thebackground scene in each case and I take plenty of pho-tos. Because everything that Clément illustrates is based ongenuine background scenes and we use a lot of photos asmodels. Incidentally, I work in cafés. I like working in theMetro – it’s a source of inspiration for me. In Paris there’sa Metro line that runs from the Mairie de Montreuil rightacross Paris as far as Pont de Sèvres... Mairie de Montreuilis a workers’ district where you encounter the whole world,then around the République and Oberkampf area there is theBobo district, and the further you travel on this line, number9, 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 theircourse. You see this mix of the population, a mother fromMali alongside a woman wearing a fur – that’s brilliant andthe stories emerge within me; I need these people to beable to write. The novels of this world are more solitary,more cerebral... loneliness, no,... for me at least this noise isvery 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, beforeI went to the cinema or got interested in painting. Actuallythat does play a central role. I already drew as a child.First, I copied characters that I liked, and at some point Istarted to devise scenes or to draw the same figure severaltimes, I wanted to develop something further, so that’s reallymy natural means of expression. I never asked myself thequestion whether I should do something else. On the onehand, I wouldn’t have the self-confidence to sit down andwrite, and to create a book that only consists of words –incidentally, the same also applies for images. I have neverdone illustrations or painting. I don’t do any illustrations.I don’t draw, or virtually not at all, apart from narrative

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

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


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WAY AHEAD OF POLITICS:LITERARY BRIDGE BETWEEN BELGRADE AND PRISTINA

by Saša Ilic – Nov 29, 2015

With a thirty-year delay, on 25th August 2015 the PrimeMinisters of Serbia and Kosovo signed four agreements inBrussels, as part of the Brussels negotiations on normalizationof the relationship between Belgrade and Pristina. Namely,the following agreements were signed – on Association ofSerbian municipalities in Kosovo, on telecommunications, onpower supply systems, as well as on the bridge over Ibar inthe divided town of Mitrovica. The bridge is a border ratherthan a link, representing communication breakdown betweenAlbanian and Serbian communities in Kosovo. We have yetto see if these agreements will bridge the existing gap, buta much more stable bridge between Serbia and Kosovo hadalready been built some time ago, before political negotiationsbecame part of the Brussels agenda.

The fabrication of negative stereotypes between Serbs andAlbanians has a long history. In Serbia, it dates back to1844 and Ilija Garašanin’s «confidential» document whichshaped both Serbian domestic and foreign policies in the19th century, through to Vasa Cubrilovic’s memorandum in1944 for resolving «The Problem of Minorities in the NewYugoslavia», all the way to the Serbian Academy of Arts andScience’s Memorandum in 1986. It’s worth mentioning thatthe author of 19th century programme was the then Ministerof Internal Affairs, and that the Memorandum from the late20th century was the work of academics and social scientists.Given that the very essence of the two documents – in theideological terms – is almost identical, it should be questionedhow it is possible that the Serbian intellectuals in the 80swere thinking pretty much in the same vein like the Ministerof Police – or in many aspects even more negatively – 150years earlier.

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

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the Second World War. Radovan Zogovic was the firstauthor published in Albanian (Poems of Ali Binak) in theliterary magazine Novi život/New Life. The first translatedbooks from Serbian were children’s books (1950). The firsttranslated novel from an already established author was«Impure Blood» by Borisav Stankovic in 1953, and fromcontemporary writers it was «Far Away is the Sun» byDobrica Cosic in 1954, the year when Cosic received theNIN Award. Books by Branislav Nušic, Ivo Andric, MešaSelimovic and others were translated shortly after. On theother hand, Albanian writers were represented for the firsttime in Serbian language in the anthology from 1951 Kosmetwrites and rhymes. In 1962 a selection of poetry Poems, bitterand proud by Albanian poets was translated into Serbianby Esad Mekuli. The last more comprehensive selections ofliterature from Kosovo written in Albanian were publishedin the 70s: Rain in a Legend – contemporary Albanianpoetry in Kosovo, selected by the great poet Ali Podrimjefrom Kosovo and published in 1972, and Trees – selection ofstories by Albanians in Yugoslavia, selected by Hasan Mekuli(1977).

However, after the mass prostests of Kosovo Albanians inPristina in 1981, the interest dramatically declined on bothsides not only for the literary production, but for the culturalproduction «on the other side» in general. During the 80s,one of the rare Albanian writers still published in Serbiawas Vehbi Kikaj. His children’s book «White Palace» wasincluded in the primary school literature curriculum. Thelast edition of this book was published in 1989. Fromthat moment up untill Slobodan Miloševic’s regime wasoverthrown, only two more books by Kosovo Albanians hadbeen translated into Serbian. Both are poetry collections –one is «Call me by your name» by Flora Brovina (2000), thepoet who was imprisoned in 1999, and the other is «Freedomof Horror» by Dzevdet Bajraj (2000). In the 1990s all culturalexchange between Belgrade and Pristina was halted. Inline with Slobodan Miloševic’s repressive policies in Kosovo,not a single book was translated from Albanian during the1990s. However, there was one book that was translatedfrom Serbian into Albanian: the diary of the Miloševic’s wife,Mirjana Markovic’s «Night and Day» (1996), whose translationand distribution was financed directly by the Serbian Ministry

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of Foreign Affairs. In such impossible circumstances, onlythe Center for Cultural Decontamination managed to organiseand host an exibition of contemporary artists from Kosovo in1997.

A «new wave» of literary translations had to wait until2011, when the Belgrade’s publication Beton and QendraMultimedia in Pristina collaborated on two anthologies –«From Pristina, with love» (selection of contemporary literaturein Kosovo) and «From Belgrade, with love» (contemporaryshort story in Serbia). International Literature festival POLIP(https://polipfestival.wordpress.com) was founded in Pristinain 2012, where the authors from the two anthologies metfor the first time. Also, writers’ residence programmes inPristina and Belgrade started bringing together two literaryscenes, something that was unthinkable until recently. Thecollection of poems «Beasts Love the Fatherland» by ArbenIdrizi, Albanian poet from Kosovo, was published in 2013 byBeton in the TonB series. Idrizi’s poetic voice is one of themost authentic on Kosovo’s contemporary literary scene. Hewrites poetry in the aftermath of the 1999 conflict – abouttransition and the horrendous shadows of the war. As acontributor to Pristina’s newspaper Express, Idrizi causeduproar in 2013 with his sharp critique of Kosovo’s recentpast. At the same time when Idrizi’s book was published inBelgrade, Miloš Živanovic’s exquisite poetry collection «Poetryof Dogs» (translated into Albanian) was out in Kosovo. Thetwo poets participated in POLIP and their joint interview waspublished in newspapers, both in Pristina and Belgrade.

By publishing the anthology of contemporary plays «OneFlew Over the Kosovo Theatre» (LINKS, Belgrade) and thememoir «Kosovo and the Demise of Yugoslavia» by ShkelzenMaliqi, the leading intellectual in Kosovo, the process of peace-building and understanding has been continued between thetwo, until recently, separated worlds. This year’s «Romeoand Juliet», the Serbian-Albanian theatre collaboration andcoproduction of Radionica integracije/Integration Workshopfrom Belgrade and Qendra Multimedia from Pristina, had itspremiere in Belgrade and it was then shown in Pristina too.This theatre collaboration may be seen as an event madepossible by the literary bridge that was established in therecent years between Belgrade and Pristina.

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THE FUTURE OF OUR LIVING LITERATURE:EUROPE AS A CONTINENT OF COLLABORATION

by Steven J. Fowler – Mai 7, 2015

I’ve said this often, and often to consternation, but I believepoetry, & literature in general, lends itself to collaborationas language does conversation, for it is in poetry we arerenovating the living space of communication, and this initself is a collaborative act. I believe the poet comes upagainst something other than themselves in the writing ofevery poem, and in the shaping of every fragment of languagethere is a response taking place. What I’ve tried to do, toinculcate cross-European collaboration, is to bring about andshowcase original, dynamic examples of what is producedwhen the other in question is the equally avid mind ofanother poet, and not a fleeting experience or emotion. Andspecifically, in the case of the Enemies project, another poetwho happens to be from a place different than our own.

Since our first event in 2010, the «Enemies» project hascurated 100 events, 9 exhibitions, in 16 nations, involvingover 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 andmany others have seen new poetic collaborations, tours andreadings across Europe. These dynamic and ever shiftingengagements have emphasised local writing communities,bringing together core touring poets with locally basedpoets, all of whom are collaborating and creating brandnew work. The Enemies project has thus taken its ideasaround the continent, travelled them, in physical space, alwaysemphasising the importance of openness and exchangethrough collaboration and originality.

The fact is the tradition modes of «translated» poetry are thebedrock of literature exchange across our nations, throughfestivals, readings and the tirelessness of translators, butthis is no longer enough in a new age of easy traveland rapid communication technology. Beyond these rarefied

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remakings of literature across our continent’s languages,where some countries are open and some, more decidedlyclosed (I am looking to my own shores here...), there liescollaboration. New works, written over and under languages,in new forms, shapes and styles. Even if one rejected theaesthetic possibilities of collaboration for an artform not oftenassociated with it, what cannot be denied is that collaborationsucceeds in building human relationships that last. Theycreate immediate dialogue, they bring communities of writerstogether and they build friendships. This, more than anything,is the aim of the Enemies project, a name for a projectpioneering experimentation, innovation and collaboration, withits tongue firmly in its cheek, for what must we keep closerthan our Enemies?

As the next year unfolds, and British poets collaborate withCroats, Austrians, Welsh, Slovaks & more, under the guiseof the Enemies project, I hope to write further on this blogabout what foundations can be laid between our nations andcultures through our literature made new in collaborativewriting.

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YES, IT DOES WORK! ON THE ARTE SERIES «WRITERS OFEUROPE»

by Katja Petrovic – Nov 2, 2015

It’s well known that literature and television are difficult toreconcile. When you’re reading you embark on a quiet andleisurely journey to an imaginary realm, but the TV viewerexpects 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» theyoung, attractive Austrian writer Vea Kaiser – she landed abestseller with her novel «Blasmusikpop» («Wind Music Pop»)set in a mountain village in her home region – is seen withthe backdrop of an Alpine plateau. (1)

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

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

Currently, Michel Houellebecq probably rejects this kind ofproduction in the most radical way. This summer he rebuffedthe left-wing liberal daily Le Monde, which wanted to publisha six-part summer series about him, and wrote in an email,«I’m not talking to you», and threatened a lawsuit if anythingwere to be published about his private life. On the «cc» list,from Michel Onfray to Bernhard Henri Levy, he included allreputable Paris intellectuals whom he also asked to refuse totalk to the newspaper. That’s because Houellebecq has longsince taken over his own production, as shown in his film,«Die Entführung des Michel Houellebecq» («The Kidnappingof Michel Houellebecq»), which was presented at the Berlinalein 2014. Self-ironical and with Houellebecq’s own style ofpoetry the writer puts himself in the hands of amateurishpetty criminals whom he befriends and openly chats aboutpolitics, society and literature. It’s an enthralling writer’sportrait. (3)

Currently, the documentary series «Writers of Europe» pres-ents much less comic, through extremely informative profilesof the lives and experiences of writers in which popularauthors talk about their home (4). Bernhard Schlink, OrhanPamuk, Petros Markaris or Jorn Riehl explain how they seehistory and the present-day in Germany, Turkey, Greece orDenmark – without relying on the usual clichés. And HenningMankell, Katarina Mazetti, Sara Stridsberg and Jonas Khemiriput the picture in context that many Europeans have ofsnow-white Sweden, the land of equal opportunities, wherethe economy is booming, and unemployment or xenophobiahardly still exist. In contrast, Jonas Khemiri, who became wellknown for his novel «Das Kamel ohne Höcker» («The Camelwith Two Humps», filmed in 2007), reveals his experience asa half-Tunisian in Stockholm where he was arrested on thestreet because of his long black hair.

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

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interested in the critical consciousness of many writers abouthistory, politics and society in their country. Perhaps theydon’t explicitly write about this in their work, but naturally ithas an influence on their language.»

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


(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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NOVELS WITHOUT FICTIONSby Jürgen Ritte – Oct 19, 2015

As the French writer Patrick Deville occasionally muses hisstories are basically «novels without fictions». Deville isthe author of brilliant continental investigations, reportages,historical novels, there is no real conception of his genre. Oneexample of such a ‘novel without fiction’ is his «Equatoria»(2009, a cultural-historical and political portrait of Africa and itscolonizers). Although Patrick Deville may not be representedin this rentrée (and this brings to mind Ricco Bilger’srecently released German translation of Deville’s hithertomuch underrated novel «Kamupchéa», a magnificent journeythrough time across East Asia), he seems to have suppliedthe key word. Rarely have French writers quit the world offiction in such numbers, and with such appetite for narratingstories, 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

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surprise success of«Rien ne s’oppose à la nuit» («NothingHolds Back the Night», translated by George Miller 2013),a novel that already left behind pure fiction too, the writergrappled with the pressures of fame. She now recounts this«true story» – but how true is it? Perhaps, autofiction orautobio fiction are appropriate words – in this genre, ofcourse, Christine Angot is relevant again («Un amour impos-sible»/An impossible love). She has the eternally recurringsame story (mother doesn’t notice that daughter, i.e. Angot,was abused by father) and her eternally same style – «as dryand unenjoyable as a zwieback on a cruise ship» («Le Canardenchaîné», the satirical weekly) – but in the case of PhilippeJaenada things are entirely different.

In «La petite femelle»(The little female), he tells the tragicstory of Pauline Dubuisson both grippingly and also keepinghis distance. In 1953, Dubuisson was sentenced to deathin France for the murder of her lover; she was treatedas Messalina, as a «femme fatale», by a sensation-seekingand misogynous press. French cinema had already taken aninterest in the material: in Henri-Georges Clouzot’s film «LaVérité» (The Truth), Brigitte Bardot plays the character ofPauline Dubuisson. When she was fourteen Pauline alreadyhad a relationship with a German navy marine during theGerman occupation of her native Brittany. Later in Dunkirkshe was a German military doctor’s lover – he was decadesolder than her. After the liberation came the all too familiarscenario: a furious mob pulls her onto the street, rips off herclothes, shaves her head, tattoos her body with swastikas– and she only narrowly escapes the lynch mob. Jaenadaallows justice for the fate of this woman, and in doing so healso illustrates the atmosphere in post-war France. Frenchcritics call this genre ‘exofiction’ where writers assumereal-life destinies.

In «Eva», Simon Liberati conjures up another woman’s fateboth as a victim and unattainable object of desire. Thesubject is the real Eva Ionesco, who even as a young childwas fixed up by her mother as an erotic photo object, andafter much erring and straying in the Parisian nightclubjungle at some point landed in the arms of the writer whoworshipped her. A danger of this genre is naturally that oneor the other individual may feel his or her personal rights

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infringed upon. So Eva’s mother then also turned up andwas asked to appear in court but was dismissed. This kindof frustration should be spared with Belgian writer PatrickRoegiers, even if he gets dangerously close to a holy cow. Inhis thrilling narrative, «L’Autre Simenon»(The Other Simenon)we make the acquaintance of the embarrassing brother of bigGeorges. His name was Christian, and he was a member ofthe Rexist government, the Belgian version of the fascists,and Nazi collaborators. In 1945 after the liberation he wascondemned to death because of his participation in shooting27 hostages (including the town priest in Charleroi). He fledto France and found sanctuary in the Foreign Legion; hewas killed several years later in Indochina. An addendumto this episode from Europe’s dark past was that over atwelve-year period Christian’s granddaughter Geneviève, adoctor, faced prosecution in a Brussels court for of the murderof her partner. As ‘explanation’ of her deed she cited, amongothers, that her great-uncle Georges Simenon was guiltyof everything and that all the bad influence in the familyoriginated from him. True, the inventor of Inspector Maigretalways tried to flee the irritating shadow of the past andcarefully covered the tracks of his early years...

Xavier Mauméjean’s fantasy «Kafka à Paris»seems moreharmless in its bid to tease out something – with extremelydubious results – from the meagre evidence of Max Brod’sand Franz Kafka’s Parisian journey in September 1911. Abulky illustrated volume by Hartmut Binder with exhaustivematerial on this topic has been around for a number of yearsand this offers enough information for dreams and speculation.Yasmina Khadra («La dernière nuit du Raïs»/Dictator’s LastNight) and Bernard Chambaz («Vladimir Vladimirovitch») focuson the truly big, yet also disproportionately more dangerousfish. Khadra spends the last nights inside the brain ofthe Libyan dictator Muammar Gaddafi and serves up, withexquisite skill, a multifaceted distillate from the life andthought of the revolutionary leader. Chambaz dares to tacklePutin – and the subject of Russia in general, perhaps aprogramme that is too vast.

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

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The title, an allusion to a famous essay by the great linguistRoman Jakobson, sounds like an album from the classicFrench comic hero Blake & Mortimer. The two heroes, abourgeois inspector – think: a cheap version of the brilliantMI6 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 Frenchintellectual milieu of the early 1980s. They all feature –Foucault, Derrida, Althusser, Kristéva... –, even politicians likePresident Giscard d’Estaing and President-in-waiting FrançoisMitterrand... Barthes didn’t just collide by accident with alaundry van on 25 February 1980, but he was deliberatelyrun over! And this is about the only fiction, the intentionalityof the ‘accident’, which Binet grants himself. The rest isvouched for in one or the other form. That the entire episodebecomes supreme fun is because Binet, as a teachable pupilof semiology, has first learned to read and lay tracks (andtherefore he can write a crime thriller), and on the otherhand presents all of the acting characters in their signfunctions, as ciphers, even as labels, as we perceive them intoday’s intellectual landscape, not as psychologically complexcharacters. They are characters of an intelligent comic inwhich the familiar figures of Dupond und Dupont from Timand Struppi appear with their umbrellas and disguised asBulgarian killers.

This rentrée has a wealth of highlights in store: MathiasEnard’s confrontation of the real Orient with the Orientof our dreams in «Boussole» is splendid and masterful. Itis a veritable journey through the sleepless night of aViennese musician and oriental music expert. It allows placesand encounters to march past the reader in an eminentlypresent Orient. A good read and original, as always, is DianeMeurs’s research into the wide-branching genealogical treeof German-Jewish enlightenment thinker Moses Mendelssohn(«La carte des Mendelssohn»). Sorj Chalandon’s gripping,touching and burlesque tragicomedy Profession du père isespecially noteworthy. According to the writer this workteeters on the threshold between «res factae» and «resfictae» and is motivated by facts and fictions, thus openingup the intermediate realm. Set in the 1960s this is thestory of a terrible domestic tyrant, who at times claims tohave been a companion and friend of Charles de Gaulles,

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

And taming history can be an undertaking with a definiteoutcome: Boualem Sansal, Peace Prize Laureate of the Ger-man Book Trade in 2011, comes up with a dark extrapolationof the present, a negative utopia, which already reveals itssource of inspiration on the book cover: «2084». This simpletitle 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 thepeople have all voluntarily submitted to all the absurd banson thinking and thought commandments. This is depressinglyclose to the present – and will rank the writer, who is asupremely courageous contemporary, a few places higher onthe black list of the murderous zealots...


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IS THE POLITICAL MAKING A COMEBACK?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 assessand evaluate them, and finally you say what these novels,short stories and poetry collections share in common andwhat they reveal about current trends. Feuilleton editorsoften steel themselves for this task, announcing in leadarticles how German writers increasingly turn to privatematerial, to humour, the family or politics. This research intoliterary trends rarely has a long shelf life, since it ignores theproduction process of literature. What is published collectivelyon spring or autumn fiction lists is then related to quitedifferent evolutionary circumstances. A writer like Ulrich

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Peltzer, for instance, takes time and eight years flash bybefore he releases a new novel. Another writer like GerhardHenschel needs barely two years to add another 500 pagesto his autobiographical novel cycle.

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

Let’s stick with observations or insights that stimulate theimpression of being more than just chance impressions. Let’sstart with the simplest, the sudden awareness of a genrethat is permanently marginalized – with poetry. It’s a com-monplace attitude that poetry is the worst-selling kind ofliterature. People often add that poetry events (and by nomeans just poetry slams) are extremely popular in literaturehouses or other venues. A writer like Nora Gomringer, forinstance, who turns her own poetry and that of her colleaguesinto stage events, has occupied this performance niche foryears. For her and many of her peers, poetry lives from perfor-mance, from the live stage event, not necessarily from writtenand rigid text. When the jury of the 2015 Leipzig Book FairPrize first included a poetry collection on the shortlist forfiction – Jan Wagner’s «Regentonnenvariationen»(Rain BarrelVariations) – 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 systematicallyand announced Jan Wagner as the prizewinner. Wagner, avery pleasant and eloquent advocate of his craft, snow hadto be available on all media channels to offer answers to thequestions. He was invited countrywide to give readings and –a true miracle – he could look forward to sales soon reaching50,000 copies. It was also clear before Jan Wagner’s awardthat plenty of German-speaking poets – Silke Scheuermann,Mirko Bonné, Nora Bossong, Ann Cotten, Daniela Seel, UlrikeDraesner and many more – are worth listening to. Time willonly tell over the next few years whether or not the poetryboom, which Wagner has inspired, will last or will just be aflash in the pan. But this is all good.

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As far as prose is concerned in 2015, the trends of theprevious decade continue. The crime thriller – the bestsellinggenre, not only in Germany – is by no means stuck in the‘entertainment’ category. As Heinrich Steinfest or Wolf Haashave already proven in previous years, crime stories existwith literary ambitions, and at the same time this speaksvolumes about our society. Friedrich Ani («Der namenloseTag»/Day Without a Name), Melanie Raabe («Die Falle»/TheTrap) and Jan Costin Wagner («Sonnenspiegelung»/Reflectionof the Sun), for instance, have published these types of booksthis year.

The family and generational novel enjoys continued popularity.At the latest since 2005 and 2007 when Arno Geiger («Esgeht uns gut»/We’re Doing Fine) and Julia Franck («DieMittagsfrau»/Lady Midday) won the German Book Prize withtheir experience-saturated and character-rich sagas, the storieshave been springing up from everywhere. From whereverthere are grandmothers blessed with memories, trunks disco-vered in attics and diaries emerging from nowhere, there’s awelcome reason to combine private realities with contempora-ry stories and to produce a bouquet of the family novel. Thetedium cannot be overlooked thanks to churning out thesenovels. In 2015, original books were also published in thiscontext such as Matthias Nawrat’s «Die vielen Tode unseresOpas Jurek»and Vea Kaiser’s «Makarionissi oder Die Insel derSeligen».

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

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The most striking feature of the literary year 2015 is un-doubtedly the way that many writers turn to the politicaland economic events and the attempt to understand currenttrends from the history of the 20th century. This is becausein the highly topical case of Jenny Erpenbeck’s «Gehen,ging, gegangen» (Go, Went, Gone) the refugees’ stories aredepicted, 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»(TheForest) arrates the story of a woman, who loses her securemiddle-class life due to the financial crisis, or Annika Reich in«Die Nächte auf ihrer Seite» (Nights by Her Side) includes the2011 Cairo demonstrations on Tahrir Square. While historicretrospectives in texts by German-speaking writers are, ofcourse, 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» (ASunday’s Child) or Alain Claude Sulzer’s «Postskriptum» (Post-script) – numerous writers with a «migrant background»whom the feuilleton often praises, ensure that the timelineextends beyond the National Socialist era. Feridun Zaimoglu’sbumper novel «Siebentürmeviertel» (Seven Towers District),set in Istanbul in 1939 and 1949, or Dana Grigorcea’s «Dasprimäre Gefühl der Schuldlosigkeit», which dates back topre-revolutionary Romania, are also included.

Where complaints arise everywhere that politics lacks visionand only responds to emergencies in the short-term, literaturesuddenly seems to reflect what were previously utopias orrealistic ideas about how our society might look. In «DasLächeln der Alligatoren» (The Alligators’ Smile) MichaelWildenhain asks how terrorism could emerge in the 1970s.Frank Witzel also follows up this topic in what is perhapsnarratively the smartest novel project this year in «DieErfindung 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 lifestory of Communist thinker and politician Antonio Gramsciwhich she confronts with the banality of a contemporaryGramsci researcher.

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

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In «Das bessere Leben» (A Better Life) on the one hand heaims to shed light on what the early 21st century capitalistworld decides, and on the other hand to make comprehensiblehow their main players became what they are. Withoutestablishing a superordinate narrative authority, in rapidsuccession Peltzer changes the perspectives of almost eightdecades of his comprehensive material. The protagonists ofthe plot – at times set in Turin, at other times in Sao Paolo,or occasionally in Amsterdam or the Lower Rhine – are twomen in their fifties who successfully internalized the riskycapitalist business world with real or unreal assets: SylvesterLee Fleming, who deals in obscure insurance policies on aninternational level, and Jochen Brockmann, a sales managerfor an Italian company, who sells ‘plants for covering andlaminating mixed goods and substratum’, in the end mainly inLatin America. Peltzer combines their ingeniously interlinkedstories with what, for him, are the central markers of the20th century, for instance, the date 4 May 1970 at KentState University in Ohio when mass shootings occurred afterstudent protests against the American invasion of Cambodia.In view of the conduct of financial market jugglers and thepolitical disasters of the past one hundred years, the questionof what could be called a ‘better life’ is a subject that thisepic novel strives to describe.

It’s obvious, indeed you cannot overlook that the literary year2015 is difficult to pin down to one common denominator.However, some trends and main themes can always beidentified and their effects don’t seem so haphazard.


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THE HUNGARIAN WINDOW IN VIENNAby Wilhelm Droste – Oct 8, 2015

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

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Bigger publishing houses survive from top-selling mass editi-ons. Bolstered with this reserve they courageously ventureinto «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 theladder in these protected niches. Only then did they grow upinto giants. This astonishing success of Hungarian literatureopened numerous doors for upcoming writers. Nischen Verlagalso benefits from this today. However, the publisher is goingthrough tough times. It is reliant solely upon its expertiseand on establishing one ‘niche’ on top of the next. This is afairly adventurous, risky and unconventional way of creating asubstantially taller Hungarian tower of books that merit evenmore accolades and admiration.

The author of one of the publisher’s books, «Der Verruf» byGyörgy Spiró (b. 1946), calls into question the myths andeveryday romanticizations of Hungarians. This book is aboutthe pseudo and angst-ridden period after the 1956 uprising.This writer, who would prefer to stay out of the paralyzingand entrenched political battles in his country, attracts wildopposition and furious indignation with all his books andplays. Showered with a bunch of national prizes he is stillthe eternal troublemaker. For thirty years, as one of thegreats, he has been on the threshold of German editors andpublishers, always in the front row, yet it’s like a curse. Forincomprehensible reasons he is not allowed to enter therealm of German-speaking literature. It is as though the IronCurtain were still in place, as if there were no tolerance forany opening. Now, this book finally marks the transition. WithNische, a German text has been made out of the Eastern andCentral European secret. The publisher shows decisiveness.A short story volume by Spiró has also been released, maybethe big novels will also follow later. Nonetheless, that will faroutstrip the volume of the previous books.

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

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artefact of street language and elevated literature. Parti Nagyexperiences and listens to the world as a linguistic orgy andgives back this tonality. The writer unifies characters, whichare normally far offset from each other, and never come to-gether. A poet by profession, he is captivated by a passion forplay; his language seems cast adrift and carefully withdrawnfrom any worldly influence in the ivory tower of his strivingfor expression. At the same time, however, he is preciselythe one who vehemently and rigorously despises and outlawsthe collapse of political morals in Hungary today; he listensto how the populists and the people really talk, hence theemergence of his linguistic outpourings. He repeatedly writesfrom this strange mix of biting satirical fairy tales, whichhe then not only publishes, but broadcasts on the airwaveswith his wonderfully deep, smoky radio voice. It is a mixof horror and warning with subversive humour; a politicalpoetry that was, until now, unprecedented. Hated by those inpower, he is the reliable dissenting voice. Now, this voice hastwo very distinct tonalities in German, as his book «MeinesHelden Platz» (My Hero’s Square) was already published byLuchterhand in 2005 in a translation by Terézia Mora. Inmulticultural Berlin this worked in entirely different languageidioms to do justice to the Hungarian word escapades. Thiswas a happy coexistence, since both translators faithfullyrender the Hungarian original with their spectacularly diverselanguages.

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

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The publishing house has stayed loyal to its philosophy. Here,books appeared and appear that do not politicize, yet they areintrinsically highly political, unintentionally and with a strongwill.


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

The Slovenian novel began in a tavern. This doesn’t meanthat Josip Jurcic wrote continuously drunk. (Although thatis how most of early Slovenian poetry came to be.) Thefirst Slovenian novel, «The Tenth Brother», literally starts ina tavern: «Narrators have, as is claimed by famed novelistWalter Scott, the ancient right to begin their tale in a tavern,that gathering place of all travelling folk, where diversecharacters reveal themselves to one another directly andhonestly alongside the proverb: in wine, there is truth.»Here Jurcic explicitly emphasises its application as a literaryconvention, explained by the tavern being the only place ofits kind for public and social life in rural areas, where allkinds of people meet and where (only) after a glass or two, aperson shows their true nature.

Today, the Slovenian novel happens in a dive bar of a differentsort. A place where courage does not require wine – since,hidden behind a more or less fabricated nickname, nobodysees you, nor does it cost you anything. The worldwideweb is a growth medium for opinions, where all kinds of«originals», as Jurcic would describe them, get to speak up,and where one can endlessly debate the euro crisis, thecondensation trails of airplanes, the cuteness of the newestcat sensation... and books. In Slovenia, the latter debate takesplace, aside from the rare blogs dedicated to reading (e.g.this or this, alas, both only in Slovenian), mainly in the contextof the Kresnik Prize, the prize for the best Slovenian novel ofthe past year, a debate I intensely followed in the last twoyears while participating in the awarding of the prize as oneof the four jury members. A little out of curiosity, a little outof world-weariness, with a little hipster distance, and with alittle love.

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I won’t claim that an extensive part of the Slovenian publicdebates the read, unread, and later (not) nominated books;one sometimes even gets the feeling that behind the variouspseudonyms, there hides one and the same person. Yetthese debates have the unmistakeable flair of popularity. Thepeople that make themselves heard are people that readmuch more than the sad Slovenian average, but at the sametime do not themselves write, study, or in any other waydeal with literature. (Well, to be honest: sometimes thereappears an author and anonymously contributes how muchhe liked his own novel.) Their comments thus vary fromnaked «likes» to more detailed analysis, from one or twosentences to extensive essay-like outpours, e.g. how thereader was touched by the characters of the novel, how heliked them or hated them, how he read the author’s style andwhere he began to get bored and put the book down... Aninsight into how the anonymous public experiences individualliterary works can be exceptionally interesting – as a studyof the reception of the modern Slovenian novel. But moreimportantly: it is part of the debate on literature that isnecessary if we are to speak of literature as a vital part ofsociety. The book is dead if people aren’t reading it, but itisn’t any less dead if it is read in silence and nobody talksabout it.

The other part of the debate exhibits the passion of readersthat cheer on their favourite writers and books. And from thispoint of view, it is certainly a smaller ego-trip for individualauthors who have the most or at least the most ferventfollowers; personally, I have my reservations about this. Notso much because I was, as a jury member, berated as well asinsulted – especially last year, when we awarded the prize tothe somewhat excellent but less communicative work «Bodiesin the Dark» by Davorin Lenko – but because I fear that inthis way, the dialogue on art, too, is being transformed intoa battlefield, just as is happening in all other social areas,and that it no longer is a dialogue but a monologue of thetypical internet troll. For example, to claim that some novelis the best without having read all others (and you certainlyhaven’t, unless you are also completely insane – which byitself somewhat reduces the weight of your opinion – since100 new original novels are published in Slovenia every year)or at least having read all those that have been nominated

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(of which there are initially ten and later five), is simplyregular trolling. To criticise the jury that it selects «novelsfor literary critics» and not for readers is akin to yelling atan empty bottle of brandy for having made us drunk. That,after all, is the point of a jury – to select the novel that isbest, of the highest quality, and most complex, as these termsare understood by a professional reader. Why would a jurychoose the novel that would be most enjoyed by the averagereader? Average readers do this by themselves, with a juryor without, and nobody stops them, nobody censures them –in the library system Cobiss in Slovenia, we can continuouslycheck which books are the most borrowed. And why all theoffense 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 literaryprizes, but there is no need for it to be included in otherdiscourses about literature. Conversations about books arerare enough as it is, and it is a shame to waste most ofthe energy going into them on cheerleading and on thingsincidental to literature, which for the individual bookwormliterary prizes are. The latter are in any case the black holearound which the literary system revolves, to the extentthat it hasn’t been sucked in entirely – on literary prizesdepend the financial survival of the author, his relationshipto his publisher, the media attention devoted to the book, onthem depends whether a work is worthy of a translation ornot, or whether it will be treated at university or not... Forthis reason, it is nonsense that conversation about literaturecondenses around prizes, when books could and should betalked about always and everywhere.

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

It would be very difficult for me claim to have ever beeninfused by a feeling similar to national pride. I love Ljubljana;I like the fact that I can be in Trieste in one hour, in Zagrebin two, in Venice in three, and in Vienna in four. I havenever felt the need to explain to strangers why my homelandis something special or why it differs, in this or that, from

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

Naturally, this philosopher has a complicated relationship withhis homeland, and his homeland, too, has not (always) viewedhim favourably. Although he is often seen on Ljubljana’sstreets, he rarely lectures on domestic soil. Two years hadpassed since his previous public appearance (which seemslike 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 TheatreDrama together with Mladen Dolar and Alenka Zupancic, withthe common thread of the evening being the lie, the thematicfocus of this year’s literary festival Fabula within which theevent took place.

Tickets for the lecture by the three Slovenian Lacanians weresold out in just a few days. Not even the additional seats thatfilled up the stage of the central Slovenian theatre institutionwere enough. The media used the phrase «philosophicalspectacle» increasingly often, which, together with the scentof spring that arrived in the city at the time, felt refreshing.On the spectacular evening itself, Mladen Dolarand AlenkaZupancic spoke first. They held magnificent lectures thatincluded almost everything: Francis Bacon, Bertrand Russell,the Epimenides paradox, the cat on the mat, the CheshireCat, 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 feelthe audience hold their breath: Žižek is next.

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

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

Žižek’s performances are distinguished by that which is acrucial characteristic of good literature and art in general:sincerity. Žižek does not try to embellish himself and does nothide behind the veil of intellectualism; he does not distancehimself from the audience but instead comes ever closer. Heoperates according to a tried and tested recipe: the moreyou talk about yourself, the deeper you go within yourself,the more you speak about everything and everyone. Farmore than through worldview or level of education, we areunited by what we most often conceal: lower passions, fears,the trivial, the banal. With equal ease, Žižek quotes Hegeland a pilot from an episode of Crime and Investigation anddoes so without giving the audience the feeling that he isashamed of it. And why should he be? We all have ourceremonies of bad taste: we gossip, we read the yellowpress, we stalk strangers and friends on social networks, welisten to bad music, we cry during romantic comedies orcheer passionately during reality shows/when «our» athletescompete. With Žižek, even intellectuals can relax in public:for a few moments, they forget about the stress of everydaypretension, the pointlessness of their posturing, and the needto take themselves seriously at any and all cost. They smileat the political incorrectness (and by the way, we all knowthat political correctness is the mother of all lies, don’t we?),they laugh at the jokes, and they feel relieved at the thoughtthat they aren’t the only ones watching crime series in theevening. When Žižek’s lecture is over, the intellectuals glanceat each other in slight shame and remark that Žižek cannot betaken seriously, not really, but he is amusing, isn’t he, and suchan interesting phenomenon. After this, they feel some moreshame for having had a good time – since, as we all know,nothing fits an intellectual worse than having fun. And it isprecisely this which renders them hollow; Thomas Bernhardwould say that whoever can’t laugh doesn’t deserve to betaken seriously, and Umberto Eco probably meant somethingsimilar when he noted that there are no serious scholarswho don’t like watching television (he himself adores crimeseries).

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Eco’s latest novel («Numero zero», 2015), which instantlypropelled itself to the top of Italy’s book charts, was releasedabout the same time as Žižek’s sold-out lecture in Ljubljana’sDrama took place. Although Žižek and Eco may at firstglance not have much in common, attitudes towards themare similar: those that take themselves too seriously mockthe apparent lightness of their narration and accuse themof lacking depth, on occasion even of being trivial. In doingso, they forget that it is precisely because of humanistssuch as Žižek and Eco that philosophy and history exist andpersist among people as something living, something theycan talk about and something which enriches their lives.People are fond of them because they are able to attach themost abstract of ideas to the most everyday of things: fromtelevision series to (romantic) relationships. Many can waxpoetic about eternal truths and redemptive ideas, but rare arethose who can give meaning to the paradoxes of intimate life.And as we all know full well – in art and the humanities, wefirst seek an explanation of ourselves and only then, whenwe have ourselves at least partly figured out, can we attemptto understand the world.


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THE ANGST OF GROWTHby Christian Gasser – Apr 30, 2015

Picture the scene: your job is in an area that will haveexperienced growth – and more, and more growth – for almosttwenty years. Yet, by now your biggest worry is nothing morethan this boom.

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

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This has consequences, which have been noticeable forseveral years, – for many publishers as well as writers. Thebookstores are flooded with new releases whose lifespanis getting shorter and shorter. The average editions havecollapsed. Anyone who sold around 12,000 comics beforehandis now happy selling several thousand books. Fewer andfewer writers and illustrators can live from their work andeven high earners have had to make concessions: even ifthe 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 than300,000 copies.

And then there’s the recession. The big publishing groupsDelcourt-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 confrontsmedium-sized and small publishers lacking financial reserveswith existential problems: enterprising and artistically advan-ced publishing houses like Rackham from Paris and Atrabilefrom Geneva have cut back their publications to the basiceconomic minimum. After the furious start, the publisherL’Apocalypse (Paris) has taken a break for over a year andeven L’Association, France’s leading publisher for authors, isreducing its production and recently refocused its programmealong more commercial lines. Several years ago this approachwould have been unthinkable.

The Big Three seem unconcerned about this – last yearDelcourt-Soleil alone published 778 comics, the same as MédiaParticipations (with Dargaud, Dupuis and others), even if theyultimately deprive their own authors. But the collapse of theindependent publishing scene, which emerged in the 1990s,could have major consequences – the essential innovationshappened and happen here. No L’Association? That meansno «Persepolis».

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

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solutions. A growing number of comics, even in France, supplyscripts for real and animated films and the collaborationbetween comics and games is reinforced. There is alsoanother outlet for this link: in 2013, for example, in France,the potentially record-breaking 200 literary adaptations werepublished.

As France is the only European country where the comic iscommercially and culturally relevant, and continues to set thepace as well as being the main trendsetter, the situation inthis country also influences other European comic markets.The German-language market is a case in point: even if we’reway off the 5,400 new publications mark, here the numbernot just of comic innovations, but also publishers handlingcomic books has mushroomed. Now, German comic publishersare also realizing the ominous cocktail of overproduction,competition and recession – even a publisher like Reproduktis cutting its production and orienting its programme alongmore commercial lines.

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

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


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WRITING IN SPACEby Beat Mazenauer – June 11, 2015

In the 1990s, hyperfiction pointed new ways into the literaryfuture. Mark Amerika’s «Grammatron» narrated a Golemstory through short text particles, which were interlinked, andoffered alternative narrative pathways to reading. Yet thetrend was short-lived – the new narrative forms were barelyacceptable for traditional literary criticism. Today, what is left

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is the complaint that hyperfiction has not managed to createany relevant works.

This criticism may be valid, yet it is still unjustified. Firstly,it compares 500 years of book culture versus 20 years ofdigital aesthetics. Secondly, the critique is based on normativeaesthetic ideas that are, thirdly, often aligned to a lack ofknowledge about what emerges on the internet in themarginal spheres of literature and art. The web universe«Désordre» by Frenchman Philippe de Jonckheere is just thiskind of project. Since 2000 Jonckheere, originally a graphicdesigner and photographer, has been writing and working onan omnibus packed with text and image excerpts that arelong since unmanageable, and they are based on «disorder»as a working title and principle. The basic form is a record ofthe artist-writer’s everyday experience. He recounts what heis 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 assignedvarious category headings. These include playful applicationslike a series of travel photos that website visitors can thensend 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 isthe primary design principle. «Désordre» defies any readingplan, even the author never knows for sure which narrativethread he is clicking on via the website’s welcome page. Inrecently compiled «Instructions for use», Jonckheere writes:«From the very beginning, even in the early planning anddevelopment stage for the website «Désordre» one of thedesign aims was to lead the visitor astray, by deliberatelyarranging all the generic rules of navigation so that they goagainst the grain.» This is achieved by leaving navigationpurely to algorithmic chance. In this regard, the website’sstructure based on information technology is «a miracle oforderliness».

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

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

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


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THE WORLD MUST BE ROMANTICIZEDby Peter Zimmermann – Oct 25, 2015

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

The world must be romanticized. Only in this way will onerediscover its original senses. I return at this point to thisfamous maxim of Novalis, written in the early 19th century,since despite all the efforts to drive out its sensuality, art andespecially literature never grows tired of comprehending artand 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 nervousdisorders and will-o’-the-whips between religiousness andanarchy. And yet their message was nothing more than aboutthe existence of a depth of consciousness – the concept ofthe unconscious was already in circulation at that time aswell as the notion that this could only be founded throughpoetic intuition.More than 200 years later the question concerning how art

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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 reflecton their activities, things always revolve around this singleproblem: what role do we play in society? Do we play anyrole at all?

Romanticizing the world means also means perceiving it asa continuum where everything is connected to everythingelse, Novalis also claims. This has nothing to do withcandlelight dinners and flattery, but with cognitive ability andthe analytical power of literature which – and that’s the keypoint – all of this is of its own accord. In other words, a textor a literary work is not made meaningful by the desire tobe contemporary, not by poise or commitment, but by the actof writing per se – and I’ll now liken this to the attempt atskimming off fragments of the self within the unconscious.This «I» is in fact part of the world, part of society, part ofimmediate reality; it has grown up, been made and deformedin it. I don’t need to cloak what I draw from within myself inanother 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 therole of literature to a highly influential degree – the focus wason composure and commitment. This restricted perspectivemade people like Grass, Walser, Enzensberger successful, butthey laughed at Celan. Celan was no committed poet, hewasn’t suitable as a moral authority instructing people howthey had to behave from the «Stunde Null», the «zero hour»onwards. For Celan there was no Stunde Null; nothing wasconcluded for him because he knew about the «conditionhumaine». You cannot state that evil has been cleared fromthe world by means of an artificial demarcation. And he wasa survivor who didn’t suddenly want to feel guilty becausehe was still there and he was writing about the fact that hestill existed.

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

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time or posture; in a kind of subterranean river course theyconnect humans with each other who live in different timesand under different conditions. But the foundations of humanexistence are unchangeable. And literature is great when itcreates a connection on an existential level.

Fortunately, the European Literature Days are not held in thespirit of the Group 47, although they can feel similar to sittinga school exam. Now and then in the discussions and lecturesthe superficial is switched for depth, for instance, when animmediate response is called for due to political eventsand their media depiction. Then substantial overestimationof the writer’s role comes into play. This may even bearfruit on the book market, at least for one season. However,when we’re talking about literature, about its value, about itsfuture, 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 humanbeings human. What each individual makes of this is his orher own business. As a writer you must be resilient to thisuncertainty; you never know whether you’ll find like-mindedpeople. In Wachau we probably also talked about this: theloneliness of writers. These moments make a difference.And they will endure.


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BEAT MAZENAUER: TRENDS NO TRENDS

In Switzerland, at the close of 2015 an old book has beenreleased in a new format: «Rosa Laui» by Kurt Marti appearsas an audio CD recorded by Guy Krneta and others. The newedition is of regional significance and no multi-lingual editionwill be published. Germany’s Luchterhand Verlag originallypublished Kurt Marti’s poetry edition in 1967. Back thenits pioneering novelty was that Marti presented poems inlocal dialect. This had already happened in Austria in 1958with H.C. Artmann’s legendary edition «Med ana schwoazzndintn» («With Black Ink»). In the Bavarian Wikipedia thereis an entry about this in Viennese dialect: «Es haundelt sichdabei um experimentölles, expressionistisches Weak» («It’sabout an experimental, expressionist work.»)

Local dialect and world literature to a certain degree definetwo mutually repellent entities. While the former is aimedat the regional context, the latter is disseminated globally.In this case, regional literature possibly has an easier job ofretaining its unique qualities, while global literature fizzlesout under the influence of free market trends. The Nordiccrime thriller, a fascinating speciality in the 1960s fromwriters like Maj Wahlöö and Per Sjöwall, has long sincebecome 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 hasa continuing influence today on literature in the German-speaking part of Switzerland. Dialect has emerged from beingimmersed in the traditional sphere. What we understand by‹spoken word› is heavily influenced by local dialect. This issometimes experimental and sometimes ultra popular, butfar from conservative language cultivation. With his novel«De Goalie bin ig» (English title, «I Am the Keeper») PedroLenz has landed a socially critical bestseller. Beat Sterchiexperiments with the Bernese dialect in all its variations, andMichael Fehr fathoms out the musical rhythmic potential fromdialect to standard language («Simeliberg»).

What does all this tell us?

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

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micro trends that develop nationally or regionally. Bothaspects belong together. The shift to dialect might wellremain a specifically Swiss factor, which is also historicallyjustified, for example, in the turn away from overpoweringstandard language that became the epitome of politicalsuperiority from 1933 to 1945. However, something similarprobably exists in most countries in Europe. We shouldbe cautious about being too quick to assert literary trendson a transcultural basis because this tends to level outidiosyncrasies – until finally the only thing we have left isthe ‘great American novel’, which merely serves as a modelfor film versions in the home culture. All too often, however,it gives the impression that in a host of different countriesall critics encounter the same international discoveries, whichthey have pressed upon them by large publishing housesbecause they have to bring in their high number of licensededitions.

How we pose the question whenever we look for trendsaddresses the specific and regional factors, perhaps eventhe national dimension because like any good vegetable,literature also grows from the bottom up. If you think of itin this way, it’s often not the juiciest bulbs that reveal theexciting trend, but the inconspicuous stems, which first haveto be nurtured in order to flower. In Swiss regional dialectcurrently one can sense an experimental furore that is absentin other sectors. This furore will calm down again; it willbecome normal and make way for something else. That’sprecisely what we have to devote our attention to. Thisneed not contradict in any way the fact that transnationalmovements must play an important role in this. The scenarioof ‘trends no trends’ is crystallized in the dialectic of nationand transnation. Globalization only plays a marginal rolehere.


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3. INNOVATIONS IN THE DIGITAL FIELD

«Online first» was a catchphrase in the media world. Is thisnow arriving in the book sector as well? More and moreestablished publishing houses are setting up e-book imprints.More than half of the top 100 titles on the Kindle bestsellerlist are by self-published authors. The serial novel and smallerformats are enjoying a digital renaissance. Crowdfundingand joint authorship of texts are being tried and tested.Book publishers are setting up subsidiaries to release gamesand Apps. Distributors are launching flat-rate models fore-book reading. The digital transformation of the marketplaceappears to be advancing at a fast pace. On the otherhand, there are clear differences between the Americanand European book markets where digital growth has nowsignificantly slowed down and the market share of electronicbooks is not nearly as big as predicted just two years ago.What can be learned from the development of Scandinavianbook markets for the Spanish and Italian market? Are thereany opportunities for Polish or Czech writers in Englandor the US, if they self-translate their books and offer themon these markets? Does it change writing style, if authorsincreasingly become their own marketing managers on socialmedia platforms?All these and many other questions arise, if we think aboutinnovations in the digital context and attempt to learn fromeach others’ different linguistic areas and cultures, as wellas from our mistakes, yet above all also from what we nowregularly call «best practice».

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SZILARD BORBELY: ABOUT CHANGE AND DIGITALOBLIVION

I am searching on the internet. I am searching for theword «change». The most important change to shape thetechnology of research is the fact that now we alwaysstart with the internet. Myself included. The internet doesnot recognize change since all the details of a particularconfiguration preceding a change immediately disappear fromwebsites. Thus, change as such is not what it used tobe. In the sense that, before the internet, we still had thechance to observe a difference in the liminal space betweenthe stages of before and after. Change consisted in theknowledge 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 isreplaced. It is updated. The only trace of this occurrenceon the website is displayed through a date. Last updatedon, and then the year, month, day. The previous layoutdisappears without a trace. And soon everybody forgetsabout it. The act of updating is the metaphor of forgetting.Refreshing your memory, the memory of a network, meansthe deletion of a previous state. Digital oblivion. Thereis no old and new anymore. The Quarrel of the Ancientsand the Moderns, one of the great overtures of the modernage, is no more on the agenda. That is the most radicalsymptom in the development of our understanding of whatchange is. Because there is no change. Change has becomeimperceptible. Updating is the self-eliminating change of themeaning of change. But that is not change anymore. It issomething else. It is updating. Which is just a metaphor.

In any case, change rarely leaves any trace. As a rule, ittakes the form of metaphors, expressions, and words. Inthe past, technology was supervised by rhetoric. Today itis controlled by digitalization. That is why one of the mostimportant kinds of knowledge is the knowledge concentratedin the humanities – due to its attention to change. Due toits wish to know the meaning of something before a changeoccurred. Due to its practice of observing and signaling thetransformation of meanings. The study of change means astudy of the control over the meaning of things and a study

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

I am searching on the internet. I would like to learnabout the cultural history of the encyclopedia. Or just simplyabout the history of the encyclopedia. I am not interestedin one specific type, but encyclopedia in general. That iswhat I am searching for. Because the meaning of the word«encyclopedia» changes. The meanings of words constantlychange. The paradox here is that without the help of theword «change» we cannot describe change. But what doesthe word «change» even mean? It denotes nothing, it justsignifies. It points out that one thing is not what it wasbefore. Yet it does not say anything about what it was orwhat it is. The words «change» or «to change» are emptysignifiers and reveal nothing about themselves. Or about thethings they address.

«Say yes to change!»; «We need to push for change, becausechange is good.» These sentences say nothing to us sincethey fail to communicate anything about the two differentstates of a thing, about the stages of before and after. Theyjust record the fact that any given thing is not one, but two.At least. And that these two are not the same. However, weshould not confuse the qualification of «not identical witha previous state» with that of «not similar with a previousstate.»«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 goodor a bad way. By saying it we simply indicate that we are inbetween two stages. That we have knowledge of an old andof a new state of affairs, but we are still on a journey fromthe former towards the latter – trying to understand.

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

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is: language dominates the knowledge about change. Yetthe word «language» signifies an abstract generality. Thereis no such thing as language. There are only people whospeak to each other. People who declare that there is nosuch thing as change. Or that there is, indeed, such a thingas change. Because change is a linguistic category. Weeither believe it, or not. Language has the power to make usbelieve or not believe it. Language dominates change. Thisis why classical rhetoric managed to formalize our access toit through the four categories of change.

The word «change» remains imperceptible if change actuallytakes place. It becomes evident only if there is no change.Which is, of course, a contradiction. Since, in this case, onlythe word is being emphasized. There are only words, shapes,and figures. Repeated and re-shuffled. Classical rhetoricsupervised it. With the onset of modernization, the discoursesof power appropriated it. And now digitalization eliminatesit. The new name of change is updating. It suggests thatthere is no change happening: things just moved throughtime. They overtook the past. The future stepped into thepresent. And became the past.

(Translated by Szabolcs László)

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ABOUT WRITING AND READING

IS TECHNOLOGY A HELP OR A HINDRANCE FOR WRITERS?by Sam Sedgman – Sept 28, 2015

The internet can be a real problem. Or at least that’s howmany writers, including Zadie Smith and Nick Hornby, someti-mes feel. They are two of a cohort of writers who confess tokeeping their working habits in check by downloading soft-ware like SelfControl and Freedom – programs which blockaccess 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. Everywriter has their process, and who am I to judge it? Andlord knows the internet is full of distractions. But on theother, haven’t there always been distractions of one kind oranother? Magazines; laundry; phone calls from friends. Isthe internet really so much more ruinous? To say nothing ofthe irony of the whole thing – that we need to downloadsomething from the internet in order to stop ourselves beingtoo caught up in the internet.

It’s impossible to divorce ourselves from technology, whetherwe like it or not. Muriel Spark may have been able toget away with writing complete novels longhand into anexercise book, but today’s publishing industry is much lessaccommodating. Typewriters? No thank you. If the worldwants.docx files with track changes from our editor, thenthat’s what we have to work with. As the world has adoptedtech, writers have had to follow suit. And while there havebeen all kinds of boon in this digital revolution, there havebeen downsides too.

Take software. Most of us make do with popular, mainstreamprograms like Microsoft Word, which is built to please everyo-ne, but ends up pleasing no-one. Say what you like about thefailings 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 embedspreadsheets. Like relying on a Swiss Army Knife when allyou want is a pair of scissors, having a wealth of choices canoften be a burden to a writer, and get in the way of theircraft.

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And writers have it easy. Think about software that supportsother creative industries like graphic design, photography orfilmmaking – software that sometimes requires a trainingcourse – 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 craftsof oil painting, screen printing or mastering an album thanthere are to writing – the brushes, microphones and bottlesof white spirit dwarf the writer’s plain old notebook and penjust as Photoshop’s selection tools tower over Word’s ‘bold’,‘italic’ and ‘underline’ buttons. The challenges of each craftare different, and need to be met in different ways.

Thank goodness, then, for the abundance of software designedspecifically for creative writers. Scrivener does its best toserve novelists who like to plan ahead and jump around,Celtx & Final Draft help you write a script to the demandingstandards of professional screenwriting, and there are plentyof apps out there to monitor and incentivise how often orhow fast you write.

A lot of this software is wonderfully helpful – as essentialto 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 theway a writer’s head works when they want to flick betweennotes, chapters and pages of research. But it’s not muchcop 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 reallyunderstand the quirks of writing for a particular form, butalso be open-ended enough to allow us to make up our ownforms from scratch. Something like Word is the closest thingwe have to a free-form piece of software that transcendsgenre. But even that still has its restrictions.

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

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our preponderance for distraction. Writing has always beena struggle – with form and with ourselves. No amount oftechnological innovation will ever be able to change that.

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BOOK TALK – YESTERDAY AND TODAYby 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 readand forget; about phrases that would stand the test of time,and stories that had become my own; about pages that weretorturously waded through like walking through deep snowin winter, and memories that were still a vague feeling. Booktitles appeared, mingled with front cover pictures, and theletters of the writers’ names illicitly changed the order. Oneof us was holding her mobile phone in her hand; Amazonwas 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 wholived part-time with us. He was an engineer, and I neverdid have or now have many engineer friends, except for him.He read. I read. That’s how the friendship worked. We lefteach other books by the door that we’d finished reading. Atweekends we rummaged around for hours in book storesand flea markets, returning home in the evening with ourprize, heated a Gorgonzola pizza and flung about writers’names and book titles, read paragraphs out loud to each otherand compared underlined sentences. If we hadn’t seen eachother for a long time, the first question was never, «How areyou?», but «What have you read recently?» I inevitably readwhatever he recommended and I hurled insults at him aboutthe tips, which I didn’t like.

So here I was sitting with two friends and Amazon tookover this job. I entered a name and Amazon spewed out fiveothers: you might also be interested in... Customers, whopurchased this book... and so on. I typed in the first threeletters and Amazon spat out the writers’ names. My friend’sshopping list told me what she had read and her wish listrevealed what she was in the mood to read. I was annoyed,

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more as a matter of principle than out of conviction; I foundit incredibly practical. For the first time in months I had tothink 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 youread, and how the coffee was spilled because you couldn’tput the book down at breakfast. But you can cope without abook lover that gives tips based on algorithms.


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HOW TWO YOUNG DUTCH ENTREPRENEURS ARE SHAKINGTHINGS UP IN THE MEDIA INDUSTRY

by Henning Kornfeld – Oct 15, 2015

Two Dutch entrepreneurs in their late twenties who aremore comfortable wearing hoodies than formal suits havesucceeded in achieving something in Germany where evenreputable media organizations have failed. They have setup 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». Thetwo entrepreneurs are Marten Blankesteijn and AlexanderKlöpping, founders of the start-up Blendle, which launched inGermany in mid-September. The important thing about theirnew online kiosk is that readers purchase a single articlerather than full newspaper or magazine editions. Publishersset their own prices for articles that cost from one cent fora short notice in a regional newspaper and 1.99 Euros for aheadline story in «Der Spiegel».

During its first few weeks the German media’s responseto 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 ifthey’re unsuitable.But anyone who expects Blendle founders Blankesteijn andKlöpping to rescue print journalism or even the media in-dustry will probably still be disappointed in half a year or

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so from now. The «Rhein Zeitung» from Coblenz, a regionalnewspaper with a circulation of 187,000, has just reviewedits early venture with Blendle. According to this, two weeksafter its launch it had sold 100 individual articles throughthe online kiosk. That’s equivalent to sales worth 49 Euros.These are very low absolute figures, but there’s also somegood news for the «Rhein Zeitung». Thanks to Blendle itcould boost its overall number of purchased articles by 15 %.Obviously, there are plenty of people who appreciate anduse a product like Blendle: they’re comfortable in the digitalworld, they’re interested in excellent journalism apart fromthe 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 affectedby the confusing pricing of publishers. Many of their articlesfor sale on Blendle are also available free of charge on theirown 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 subscribeto the full edition of a newspaper or magazine are happyto purchase just a single article. Yet the opposite is alsotrue – thanks to the wide range of Blendle options infre-quent newspaper readers can also become regular readers orsubscribers.

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

Pit Gottschalk, former editor-in-chief and manager at AxelSpringer, already arranges contracts between writers andPocketstory through his Mediapreneure company. He hopesthat Blendle will soon make this option available as well.

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Gottschalk has noticed that nowadays most writers still findit difficult to slip into a seller’s role and actively promotetheir own articles. At the same time, he observes theirincreasing 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 andsimilar platforms are a big experiment for all those involved.


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ARE YOU PAYING ATTENTION? HOW SOCIAL NETWORKS ARECHANGING HOW WE READ

von Sam Sedgman – 16. März 2015

Reading a book is refreshingly anti-social. It’s hard to reada book when someone is talking to you. It’s hard to read abook when you’re thinking about something else. It’s one ofthe few artforms we have where you have to pay attentionthe 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 intoa good book. And with the rise of social networks, this dividehas been made far clearer. Whether it’s the comment sectionbelow a news article, the official hashtag for a TV show or awhole social network built around photography, social culturehas got a lot more social. Reading, on the other hand, seemsto have resisted this charge: it doesn’t fit this social model.

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

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

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

This isn’t the preserve of journalism. eReading services likeKobo Reading Life now allow readers to add notes, readannotations, and share favourite lines to social networkswhile they’re reading. Because, as Kobo puts it, «the onlything better than reading something amazing, is sharing itwith others». Or, as a friend of mine put it, «the only thingbetter 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 eachbook, so users can comment while they read. And this isn’tsome internet backwater: 100,000 new stories are publishedthere every month, by authors including Margaret Atwood,being read by tens of millions of visitors. It was a platformlike Wattpad where E.L. James began writing the fan fictionthat would turn into Fifty Shades of Grey. Plenty more bookswill follow suit – though Wattpad itself is the main placemany of its (mostly young) users get their reading material.

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

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

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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 thatdoesn’t mean there won’t be good stuff along the way, andit’s not like commercial interests would be a new thing forthe book industry.

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

Social reading won’t look the same as the reading I didwhen I was a child, but it won’t be better or worse – it’ll bedifferent. Maybe focused attention and a sense of solitudearen’t as crucial to the reading experience as we previouslythought. I guess we’ll see. But if they’re not, we’ll start to seewriters exploiting these new possibilities – and writing thingsdesigned to be experienced in this new way. We will seewriting that’s different – that’s innovative, and challenging,and new. And I think that’s a good thing,

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SOCIAL READING – QUIET READING TIME TOGETHERby Beat Mazenauer – Dec 3, 2015

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

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

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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 discussbooks. In the days of analogue media, reading societiesand reading circles existed for this. The newly createdonline reading salons could become a counterpart in thedigital world. In 2014 the Süddeutsche Zeitung (http://www.sueddeutsche.de/thema/Lesesalon) opened this type ofsalon on a trial basis and currently the Frankfurter AllgemeineZeitung (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 selecteda book from the choices can mark sections of text and addcomments, which other readers can add their comments on.But just one text sample is available free of charge. Anyonewho wants to read more must buy the ebook – the hardbackedition at home is no help.

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

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

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


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ABOUT LIBRARIES AND ARCHIVES

PROVIDED THEY STILL EXIST, WILL TOMORROW’S LIBRARIESRESEMBLE APPLE STORES?

von Jacques Pezet – 30. Juli 2015

What are the libraries of tomorrow going to look like? Lastmonth, 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 throughthe pages of books will be an extinct species in future, asprinted books are going to disappear and will be replacedby e-books. If you share my opinion, you must admit thatbuilding new libraries makes no sense in a world withoutbooks. So I answered Michael sceptically, «Do you really thinkthat libraries will still exist in the future because you canalready download all of Stieg Larsson’s books at home onyour iPad?»

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

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

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

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

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computers, but the first public digital library opened in SanAntonio, Texas, in September 2013. The promotional videoclip (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QtvytxreYlc) showssomething that resembles a 4,000-square-foot Apple Storewith orange furniture. Thanks to five hundred e-readers,forty-eight computers and twenty iPads, the users can accessas 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 promotingliterature or being a convivial place for reading books, butsomething radically different. The video presentation statesthat San Antonio’s «BiblioTech» supports the local populationwithout any Internet access to get online to write a CV oranswer job ads. Maureen Sullivan, President of the AmericanLibrary Association, emphasized the facility’s social missionas she wrote in Time in September 2013: «The library is nolonger the place where you walk in and the thing you paymost attention to is the book collection. It’s now a placewhere, when you walk in, you’re immediately attuned to thevariety 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 worksat ENSSIB and has an expert knowledge of the importanceof digital books in the French and European libraries, andasked her if San Antonio’s bookless library was to becomethe standard for tomorrow’s libraries: «In my opinion,» sheanswered, «a variety of libraries will exist in the future: withand without printed books, specialising in old or new titles,borrowing books or not. In a word, the libraries will diversifyaccording to their technical, social or political orientation.Anyway, even if we’re doubtlessly living in a transitionperiod, I don’t believe that the generation born in the firstdecade of the new millennium will renounce printed booksand their symbolism. This will be true even after digital booksare in general use.»

So, there’s no reason to be worried: our children, and possiblyeven our grandchildren, will still experience that feeling ofanxiety that takes hold of you when you didn’t return thatlibrary book, which you borrowed, on time.

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DIGITIZATION BOOSTS THE LITERARY SELECTION AT THELIBRARIES

von Lise Vandborg – 8. November 2015

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

Since 2002, danish libraries have been running a collaborativewebsite on literature called litteratursiden.dk. The growthhas been explosive and today it has more then 200.000unique visitors every month. Content is primarily beingcreated by a bunch of dedicated editors and writers, but asa registered user you can write blogs and post commentsor join an online reading society to discuss your readingexperience with authors and other users. Its in importantfocuspoint in the strategy of not only giving acces to booksand information. The live conversation on literary subjects iscontinued via Litteratursiden and the social media.

Ebooks and audio books have also become a part of thelibrary. Through a platform called eReolen Danish librarieshave given acces to loads of ebooks and audio books since2011. As a part of this solution eReolen have a currentdialogue with publishers on different business models. Thepopular and numerous borrows are by some publishers seenas a thread to the commercial market but obviously thechallenge seems to be digitization itself, and not the libraries.

LITERATURE IN DIGITAL FORM

Today, literature is not only contained in books as we knowthem. This is shown by the experiments of digital publishingdevelopment. Sms-short stories, literary apps and digitalliterature is co-existing side by side with paper-books. At thesame time the circuit of traditional publishing has literatlybeen revolutionized by all this technology: Today the distancebetween author and reader has diminished into one singleclick. Also, certain kinds of literature are living in closedenvironments and are hard to encounter without guidance.It is the duty of the libraries to expose and make visibleall literary forms, digital as experimental. Some years ago

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

It has clearly become more difficult to navigate on theinternet. Large and complex currents if information makes ithard to choose what to read and what to believe and thereis no longer a limit between those who publish and thosewho doesn’t. Therefore it is more important than ever, thatlibraries take action upholding the role as one of the lastinformation filters of our time. In my perspective, librariesmust inspire people to read the many good books buriedin the shadow of bestsellers. It is crucial that libraries actdifferent than commercial players of the market by choosingcertain books from others and sharing their knowledge onthese books both in the digital and physical library.

THE LIBRARY AS CURATOR

Deep reading experiences are easily missed when you focuson one type of literature and we are kept in the same kindof reading even more if we use the «customers who boughtthis book also bought»-function on amazon. It automaticallyfinds the bestsellers and makes it a lot harder to cross theline into unknown lands where reading surprises you. AtLitteratursiden we see an increasing demand of lists entitled«books similar to Jo Jo Moyes» (or other popular writers). Thegood thing about these recommendations is that they arehandpicked 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 acurator who brings literature up front through different digitalplatforms. In collaboration with authors and other parts ofthe literary society interaction between readers and works ismade possible – sometimes the reader/user is even asked toco-produce becoming a part of literature itself. In this way,development of digital technology is helping us creating moreconversations and meetings at the library with literature as

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the main subject and at the same time it ensures a betterand healtier society in times when gathering around literatureseems more essential than ever.

(Translated by Thomas Vang Glud)

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RE-BOOK, A EUROPEAN E-BOOK PROJECT FOR PROPOSALvon Renata Zamida – 12. Dezember 2015

With the exception of a few countries, European libraries havebeen slow at adapting to change and modernization. Thismeans that the introduction of e-books is in many librariesmerely one of many future plans. The situation can partiallybe blamed on the considerable turbulence in relation to thematter when it comes to the American experience wherethere has been constant disagreement in the relationshipsbetween libraries and publishers without a system that couldcater to the needs of both in site.

Most large service providers impose their own conditions thatoften place libraries in a subsidiary role and are thereforeperceived as unjust or unsustainable. Adding to this, certainsales systems totally bypass libraries or even take over theirrole. What is raising concern is that these systems arethreatening the basic mission of libraries, as their substantialpower allows them to far more promptly respond to changesbrought by the development and advances in technology.This means that users are now offered a number of payingservices that offer e-book borrowing. With large publishinghouses generally standing behind these systems, users areable to choose from a great range of front-list and commer-cially interesting titles than available to public libraries thatmostly have access to older and commercially less interestingworks.

The European Union in its outlook (Digital Agenda andEurope 2020) clearly defined public access to cultural contextsas one of its basic priorities. Being one of the primarygenerators of a reading culture, the public library systemcontributes greatly to the development of the Europeancultural area. Irreparable damage is being done with librariesunable to effectively carry out their primary activities.

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That is why we came together to establish a EuropeanProject for Proposal that initiates the collaboration betweendifferent countries to share the experience and know-howof establishing a user-friendly, public libraries based e-booklending program.

Re-Book: Who and Where?The project joins 6 countries and 6 organisations from thewider European region: Slovenia (Beletrina Academic Press),Belgium (Bibnet), Denmark (Copenhagen Main Library), Latvia(Culture Information Systems Centre), Serbia (Biblioteka gradaBeograda) and Czech Republic (Charles University Library).The partnership joins three partners with already establishedpublic e-book lending programmes and three who are still inthe process of doing so, in order to maximize benefits of theproject 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 (partnerswill be sharing and implementing various promotional andinnovative audience development tools evolved in the partnercountries with the aim to broaden the range of e-booksusers in public libraries and stimulate e-reading of Europeanliterature in Europe and beyond.)– To support analysing and designing appropriate businessmodels and policies including e-books in public librariesbased on a study that was conducted by Bibnet (one ofthe partners to the project) from Flanders, Belgium andBibliotheek.NL from the Netherlands.

The project’s aim of establishing cross-European sharing ofgood promotional practices will be implemented through thecreation of an open source archive of creative and innovativesolution for e-reading promotional campaigns. This archive ofpromotional tools will be open to any other country interestedin e-reading promotion, not limited only to partner countriesof the project. During the three years of Re-Book project allpartner countries will use each other’s promotional activitiesin connection to their ongoing e-book lending models.

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The project will therefore help to cross-fertilize the expe-rience, expand the dialogue and develop suitable businessmodels and unified European policies which will outline possi-bilities for successful development of e-book platforms in thefuture. Most public lending models are designed in a waythat enables remote e-book lending to the end user (librarymember) free of charge. Nevertheless it could be hardlyclaimed that inter-institutional licensing settlements havebeen so far developed in a manner that would allow librariesan establishment of attractive e-book catalogues. Projectpartners will work closely with publishers during the projectperiod and several business models (time-limited licenses,loan-limited licenses) will be tested in order to discover theones that render the best results in audience development.

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

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WRITERS’ HELPby Beat Mazenauer

iTunes shows how it’s done. An extensive catalogue ofmusic tracks, games, books and of course Apps is availableto users. Anyone who has stored his or her credit carddata obtains the desired products in seconds. This speed issometimes even consolation for the fact that books are linkedwith exasperating DRM editions that only cause hassle. Sup-pliers of audio books give iTunes credit that competitors likeaudible.de (from Amazon) may well make similar promises,but they load their service with prohibitive costs. iTunes isalmost fair as regards its costs for suppliers, so they say.

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

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profiteers. The whole point is entirely different: part of theonline 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 isvia a publishing house or web portals. But spoken-word.chtries to override the disconnections between performanceand literature, and to create a common pool for this. Theplatform is open to all writers with stage experience and theability to produce technically flawless tracks. If they publishon spoken-word.ch, they can keep most of the revenue. Onlythe future will tell how far consumers are also willing to takeup such offers.


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«GOOGLING» WITHOUT GOOGLEby Beat Mazenauer

Trapped in its own algorithms Google increasingly turnsup exactly what we were expecting anyway. To put itprovocatively: Google manages its own knowledge, andanything beyond this goes undiscovered. To make it moreaggravating, this knowledge often comes with lists of lists oflists, but no real content.

Some time ago the frustration with such experiences moti-vated an Internet project called literaturschweiz.ch. This hasnow been finalized and is available in a new version 1.5:www.literaturschweiz.ch. The web portal for Swiss literatureaims to function more efficiently than Google within closelydefined niche parameters. For this purpose the old conceptof the catalogue search has been linked with full text search.Basically, literaturschweiz.ch is a meta-search engine thatdoesn’t search the global net, but concentrates on a catalogueof pages stored in a database. These pages are selected forqualitative content and are continually supplemented. Purebook lists are not considered. Special websites incorporatingdatabases are integrated by API interface, so their contentsare 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

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

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

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


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ABOUT E-BOOKS

THE PARADOX OF DIGITAL TRANSFORMATIONby 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 ofhumanity are near. Apocalypse notwithstanding, the Ameri-can author – known for gluing off his laptop’s modem portso as not to let himself be tempted by the internet – waskind enough to accept the invitation to be the guest of honorfor the 22nd International Book Festival in Budapest. Hetook part in several genuinely interesting and entertainingpublic discussions, gave a number of interviews, endured thephoto sessions, signed a whole army of books, and then wasfree to finally do a little bird-watching in the Hungariancountryside.

Of course, the irony is that like most of the audience membersat the discussion, I found out about his visit through thechannels of what Franzen called the «infernal machine oftechnoconsumerism.» We were informed about the event, hisbooks, his background, his obsession about birds, etc., onsocial media; then we shared these with our friends andinvited them to attend the festival; and later on, read hisinterviews on the various literary websites which function asa dynamic network for culture in Hungary. Thus, it is quiteeasy to see how the digital and technological element waskey in the realization of a very direct, personal, and (if youwill) «traditional» literary experience. All that was missingfrom this symbiotic – part digital, part personal – encounterwith a remarkable writer and his world of fiction was to readthe book, The «Discomfort Zone», which was newly publishedin Hungarian. For all the usual reasons (mobility, ease ofaccess, storage issues, and in case of Franzen’s books, weight)I would have preferred to purchase the e-book version, butthen I remembered: this was not an option. Just like it isnot an option with many of the books published in Hungary.

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

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and perhaps in the whole of Central and Eastern Europe.The wide-ranging and effective online promotional measuresof the publishers, and the up-to-date media savvy of the(granted: urban, middle-class) public are not matched by ane-book production process or marketing strategy – whichcould complement the market for print books. The Hungarianliterary scene has all but embraced the digital ways of theonline realm. A forthcoming book now gets an early Face-book page which is widely shared and liked online, thenexcerpts and cover images start to appear, and a short traileris made for Youtube by fellow filmmaking artists and actors,all building up to the book launch which can be live-streamedand tweeted. Afterwards come the online news reports, thesometimes clickbait-sounding, but insightful reviews, and (atrend which is becoming highly popular) Face-book photoswith fans holding the book in various settings and holidaydestinations.

Recent data on the Hungarian book market indicates that the-se strategies might have led to success, since the continueddecline in book sales after 2008 finally turned in 2013, andthere was a 2% increase for 2014 (as reported by the Hunga-rian Publishers’ and Booksellers’ Association). Yet, while printbooks and authors are promoted through online and digitalmethods, there is almost no initiative in creating an e-bookmarket. Although the main publishing houses have slowlystarted to produce e-book versions for a small fraction of theiroutput, the two websites for e-book commerce (ekonyv.hu anddibook.hu) have very low visibility. Making matters worse:the websites of the publishing houses do not even have linksleading to the e-book stores. In such circumstances, a coupleof hundred sales for an e-book seems already a success, andthe total market-share remains under 1% (a meager 130,000euros 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 culturaland partly bureaucratic. There is no denying the fact that inHungary (and in the wider region as well) there is a strongculture of internet piracy, based on the almost unquestionedprinciple 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

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one e-book in their lives, but that 42% of them downloadedit illegally. Of course, it is safe to assume that the actualnumbers for the use of piracy are much higher. Resultingfrom this is the other reason for the reduced scale of e-bookproduction, namely that the author’s royalties for e-booksare quite high: as opposed to the 6–12% for print books, itrises to 25–50% for the e-book editions (unofficially meant tocompensate for the loss caused by illegal downloads). Butmost important of all, the underdevelopment is caused bythe famously unfair EU tax legislature which deems e-booksas «electronically supplied services,» and keeps their taxrates of VAT at 27%, in contrast to the 5% on print books.Unfortunately, as the recent ruling of the European Courtof Justice against both France and Luxembourg showed, taxreforms for this domain are not likely to take place in thenear future, maintaining relatively high prices for e-booksthroughout the EU.

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

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THE E-BOOK MARKET: HOW ENGLISH IS DISPLACINGSMALLER LANGUAGES

by Renata Zamida – Sept 3, 2015

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

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Therefore, traditional providers of content will, at most, be ableto be hosted on these platforms under conditions determinedby their owners. In the case of e-books, one of the mostpainful limitations for lesser used languages is precisely thelinguistic limitation or the globalisation of English that hasbeen going on for many years. It has squeezed its way intoall fields: let us take a look at only the academic field, whereit is the norm that scientific papers are written in Englishand that all other languages are not only worthless but caneven be a barrier. And not only the academic book but alsoliterature in English is, through e-reading, taking over globalprimacy. The more demanding electronic reader is a userof e-books for a generally far longer period of time than, forexample, there exists an online platform for the sale and/orlending of e-books in his own country and language. In theyear 2009 or 2010 such a user considered and bought the backthen most hip and simple e-reading device, the Kindle. He isnow married to the Amazon family. But if this user is Polish,Hungarian, Slovenian, Croatian, Russian – then he simply doesnot have access to literature in his mother tongue on thisdevice. In the 21st century, based on available data, morethan half of readers wish to read electronically as well. If theydo not have access to e-books in their language, this doesnot mean that they will stop being e-readers, but that theywill not be e-readers in their mother tongue – in Slovenian,Croatian, Hungarian, etc. In Slovenia, the number of frequentusers of the biggest online platform that offers access toe-books in Slovenian (Biblos) numbers around 12,000. Theyhave access to around 2,000 e-book titles in Slovenian. Yetthis is still ten times too few e-books in Slovenian to turnSlovenian e-readers away from the increasingly wide reading(and buying) of e-books in particular in English. This is alsodue to the fact that the most popular titles, bestsellers, arenot available in e-book form in lesser used languages, sincethe rights for their release in e-form are priced so highlythat they simply do not represent a viable investment forpublishers in smaller book markets. It has become morethan obvious that we are losing in this field. Amazon offerse-books in only a handful of world languages and manylanguages, above all Central and Eastern European as wellas Asian (with the exception of Japanese) languages, willnot be among them for a long time. The Kindle is in this

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way a victim of its own technological progress – if Amazonwishes that the confirmed languages work flawlessly on theoldest generations of its reader (the first of which were puton the market in the far-off year of 2007), the technical testingof each new language costs quite a lot and takes a longtime. If, for example, Slovenian publishers wish to sell e-bookson Amazon, then these cannot be in Slovenian. And theSlovenian e-reader slowly but surely takes on the habit ofreading the new crime or romance novels or Nobel laureatein English – on his e-device.

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WHO’S AFRAID OF THE E-COMIC?by Christian Gasser – Mai 11, 2015

The «e-book» has been the slow-burner for years at bookfairs. At Comic Festivals, of course, events are organizedabout the e-comic, although the approach is comparativelyreserved and tentative. Facing up to the digital revolution– sooner or later this will also impact on the comic – is nothappening as consistently as it should.

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

However, there is a more important aesthetic and content-based reason for the latent suppression of the subject. Whiledigitizing a prose text is straightforward, keeping largelythe identical form and being launched on the market asan improved PDF, digitization of the comic raises somefundamental questions, or more accurately: it places thecomic, 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 thedesign of the comic page, which is the most important andcoherent element of comic syntax, makes any sense on adigital reader device because only a handful of readers havebig enough screens. Possibly, a dynamic comic-page layoutwith panels of varying widths and heights, with full-page

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and double-page or trimmed images will become a sequenceof individual images. The comics’ narration and sequencingmust now be revised, indeed even invented. Besides, manyauthors will want to use the additional possibilities thatthe e-Comic offers: animations, sound, 3D perspectives andinteractivity.

That will create a new expressive form that combines ele-ments of the comic, animated film and computer game. Thisdevelopment has been upcoming for years; currently, thename for these hybrid forms is «motion comics». Althoughthe science-fiction writer Philip K. Dick already described thefirst motion comic in 1964 (!) in his novel «The Zap Gun», tomy knowledge until today no convincing motion comic hasappeared, and not a single approach has established itselfas forward-looking. On the contrary, these «prototypes» ofa new form of expression predominantly combine – to putit provocatively – the weaknesses of their components: poorimage narration, rudimentary animations, cheap sound effects,infantile interaction and all in a terribly tame, non-dynamicand non-user-friendly way. That inspires nobody. For thisreason, 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 likewatching an animated film.

Another reason for the lack of interest in the e-comic isnaturally the fear that the comic, as we knew and lovedit, might become obsolete because of the new medium.Digitizing in the comic sector will have a much more lastingeffect on the narration and reading of comic strips than onprose texts. The media transfer will fundamentally revive theexpressive form. In the long run, the comic book and e-comiccannot survive as two media for a largely identical work. So,it’s questionable whether the comic and e-comic can havea long-term parallel existence like the e-book and the book,or like vinyl and mp3 – presumably, writers and publisherswill have to decide from the outset whether they want toproduce a comic or e-comic – the one at the other’s expense.

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


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IS THE E-BOOK BOOM ALREADY OVER?by Dirk Rumberg – Oct 20, 2015

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

In Germany the industry association for companies in thedigital sector, Bitkom, published a survey according to whichthe number of e-book readers rose by just one per centcompared with the previous year. 32 per cent of 14- to29-year-olds read e-books, whereas this was 30 per cent for30- 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. Intotal, only one quarter of Germany’s citizens reads e-books.On the other hand, 39 per cent basically rules out readingany book on a screen.

In Great Britain, a book and e-book market that many conti-nental European publishers have eyed up during recent yearswith many assuming their own development would progressas it has done here, e-book sales (of publishers) have evendeclined – while the sector has grown as a whole. Accordingto a study by Nielsen market researcher, BookScan, from thestart of the year until August, sales of print books in theBritish book market have increased by 4.6 per cent – the firstrise since 2007. Also relevant is that British book retail chainWaterstones (with about 300 branches in Great Britain andIreland) will in future no longer sell the Kindle e-reader inits branches – it would prefer to use the space for sales ofprint books again. Waterstones’ experience with poor Kindlesales is no exception, for instance, Blackwell’s books recordsmarkedly weakening business for the e-reader Nook. A trendin Great Britain therefore continues that already emerged in

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2014 in the most developed e-book market – in the US. In2014, for the first time in quite a while the number of soldprint books again increased by a respectable 2.4 per centcompared with the previous year.

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

Nevertheless,many publishers are preoccupied with two majorconcerns with regard to digital offers. Firstly, the monopolisticsales structures, or in practice the absolutely dominant marketrole of Amazon. Secondly, increasing competition from self-publishers.

This year was the first year that Amazon attended theFrankfurt Book Fair. It was represented with a big stand inHall 3.0, just a few metres from major mainstream publishinghouses. The industry giant awarded (with a star-studded jury)a lucrative prize for a self-publisher who picked up a printbook contract with Lübbe in addition to 30,000 Euros prizemoney. Plenty of managers from Seattle and Luxembourgattended – they were prominent and had obviously travelledsome distance. All in all this was a clear signal that one ofthe leading industry players is no longer hidden away here,even if it continues to clam up when it comes to sheddinglight on any figures. However, discussions with other industryparticipants lead to the definite conclusion: the giant fromSeattle/Luxembourg accounts for more than 50 per cent (somethink 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 whereAmazon has significantly expanded its value added chainthanks to KDP, and for which the giant is by far the mostimportant sales channel.What has definitely already motivated the digital opportunityof creating, selling and reading books is an even broaderand even more confusing range of offers – along withfalling average prices. The Bitkom study already mentioned

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also shows that in Germany now more than half of the100 best-selling e-books originates from self-publishers, inother words from writers who don’t sell their works viapublishers (and generally for markedly lower prices thanthese). Every fifth interviewee admitted to having alreadyread e-books from self-publishers once. This ‘democratizingprocess’ in publishing will not vanish, and in future surely thiswill present established publishers with one of the biggestchallenges.

It’s also worth glancing at the US, the source of thesestudies, which not only predict that print book sales haveagain outstripped those of e-books, and mainly also indicatethat after a decline by eight per cent in 2014, this yeare-book sales are due to collapse by up to a quarter (24per cent). However, this only applies to titles that arereleased by publishing houses. The e-book market as a wholecontinues to expand – even in the US, yet the growth isexclusively 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 alsobeen active for a while with its Neobooks. All the rumoursand information now prove that other publishers (like Piper)also offer markedly improved e-book terms.On the eve of thebook fair Random House (together with BoD) even announcedthat it was founding its own self-publishing platform calledTwentysix. In the relevant forums and blogs, the industrygiant already largely earned mockery and ridicule for this– and in particular, for the rumoured terms and conditionspackage. Indeed, it’s questionable whether it can succeedwith these types of offers in winning any substantial share ofthe self-publisher market.

In conversations and during tours of the exhibition hallsin Frankfurt as well as at publisher parties, there wasplenty of talk again of digital developments and challenges.Subscription models were the source of equally controversialdebate, like the latest verdict that the economic viabilityof scientific publishers is under threat by offering librariesextended rights for digital «loans». Nevertheless, leavingthe fair you had the feeling that for the foreseeable futurebook publishers and the book trade (unlike other media

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organizations such as newspaper and magazine publishersor even music labels) will do their main business with printbooks – simply because the readers want it that way.


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DIRK RUMBERG: INNOVATIONS IN THE DIGITALFIELD

(2015, Attempt at an Overview)

Twenty years ago, Google didn’t even exist and the samegoes for Wikipedia. In the US, for the very first time Amazonsales went into three-figure millions but the company wasn’ttrading yet in Europe. The trio of Amazon, Google and Wiki-pedia along with smartphones stands for the revolutionarytransformation that was, and still is, influencing our mediaworld in recent decades.

Judging by the revolutionary changes, which these firmsand technologies achieved, 2015 was more a year of quieterevolution and technical innovations in the digital field. Atleast, retrospectively at the year-end this appears to be thecase today. Who knows in what garage, teenage bedroom orshared student house the next big thing was dreamed up sothat twenty (or rather five) years from now we’ll say: thattotally changed our world.

Regarding today’s obvious trends during 2015 three majorthemes can be identified that also played a role in our blogentries 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 copyrightissues, which are generally relevant beyond the generalpublic’s attention span, plus they are regarded as specialistthemes.

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

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and libraries. One can listen to music «in the background»(and in over 95 per cent of all cases this is exactly whathappens), even if occasionally this activity is perhaps goingon while driving the car or washing up, ironing or doinghomework – music really is being listened to. Television isalso increasingly becoming a «sprinkler system» that goeson «in the background»; and surfing on the net goes on inparallel, talking to friends, chatting, telephoning and cooking.You can’t read a book while doing something else. You canneither drive a car nor surf on the net while reading a book– and when cooking at best it’s one glance at a recipe, notreading the latest crime thriller or most recent non-fictionbestseller. That’s just about still possible while reading «inthe background».

Reading (not only books) nowadays competes with evenmore alternative activities than 20 years ago. Anybody whotravels with his or her eyes open on a city or commuter trainsees that. When boarding aircraft most passengers moreoften than not leave the stack of newspapers untouched – inany case the stack has become smaller. Sitting on a bus orplane people then play on a smartphone or watch a film on atablet. Reading is (still) a rare pastime here.

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

In relation to books at first glance, in 2015, one can make outsomething like a changing trend – apparently,the unstoppableadvance of ebooks appears to have slowed down, and ebooksales are stagnating or in decline. Even in the US more andmore print books are being sold. Evidence can be suppliedfor these trends virtually worldwide. At least, that’s truewhen one only observes the book market, which has beencreated and dominated by (traditional) publishers. However,

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increasingly this is no longer the entire book market. For along time in plenty of key markets more titles are offeredby self-publishers (mostly only as ebooks, or even more viathe print-on-demand solution) than are released by publishers.The sales figures of most are homeopathic. But time andagain there are outstandingly successful examples – and theebook sales charts of Amazon – both in English-speaking aswell as on the German market are dominated by such (cheap)self-publisher offers. Traditional publishers certainly take thisseriously, as one can see by the fact that nowadays almostnone of the major publishing groups survive without theirown self-publishing platforms. Meanwhile, there are famousexamples (of former) self-publishers who now have publishingcontracts (and critically monitor whether this makes themreally sell much more than they hoped in order to make thisworthwhile due to the evidently lower share of royalties percopy).

For a long time, self-publishing has also no longer been anactivity for frustrated would-be writers who have troublefinding a publisher. By now, as the book trade only swingsinto action for a few titles – and on behalf of publishers –established writers also prefer to take their writers’ destinyinto their own hands. «Marketing and PR is overseen by thewriter» is a phrase that, in 2015, agents and writers had tohear 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 alsofaced by somebody else beforehand. We have to take a lookat how they solved it, at what we learn from it and how weadapt the answers to our circumstances and what we cando 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, itmeans being open for incentives from other fields (the musicand film industry, yet also the gaming industry to mentionjust three examples). Yet this need not mean treating eve-rything that’s available here as automatically good withoutany kind of critique. For example, given good arguments youcan treat flat-rate models, which are a success in the musicsector, as the wrong avenue in the book market.

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The other approach to learning (in traditional and unavoidablyheavily language-based and therefore often national) bookmarkets is to risk looking more closely than before beyondnational garden fences. For instance, to observe what’s hap-pening in Slovenia in the libraries sector or to focus on howin a non-Amazon country like Sweden people deal with thetopic of self-publishing. Additionally, and precisely becauseof the language barriers the usually more challenging looktowards Asia may offer plenty of interesting and inspiringideas. Not only in China, but especially also in Japan or SouthKorea 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’sstill possible to find life in plenty of small niches.

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Illustration: Yvan Alagbé

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APPENDIX ELIT LITERATURE HOUSE EUROPE

The ELiT Literaturehouse Europe establishes an observatoryfor European contemporary literature focusing chiefly on: re-search, discussion and publishing results concerning literarytrends across Europe, as well as the inter-cultural communi-cation of literature within Europe and the dissemination ofliterature among the diverse cultural spaces within Europe.It enables writers to introduce their works in other linguisticareas and to discover new opportunities for publishing basedon digital media. It develops innovative forms of communica-ting literature for young people from different south easternEuropean countries of the Danube Region Strategy who getto know Europe’s shared heritage through working on aliterary 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 – theannual highlight – the European Literature Days in the Wach-au/Lower Austria. ELiT Literaturehouse Europe promotesliterary transfer in Europe with guest appearances by Euro-pean writers in other countries. Particular emphasis is on thedissemination of the multilingual aspects of European litera-ture. ELiT Literaturehouse Europe organizes reading tours bywriters as well as workshop sessions in Wachau. It focuseson inviting EU Literature Prize winners as well as hostingevents for them in European partner organization countries inLjubljana, London, Budapest, Paris and Hamburg.

At the European Literature Days successful writers meettheir prospective counterparts in workshop sessions. Theyrelate their experiences of writing, publishing, networking,their approach to readers and media and engage in dialoguewith the young adults about writing, publishing, networkingand meeting readers as well as the new opportunities andrisks of digital media. Thanks to its workshops in London,Budapest, Hamburg and Ljublujana, ELiT makes it possiblefor young writers to benefit from digital media for publicationand transnational exchange also in other European countries.

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

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experts, centres and events as well as setting up cooperativeprogrammes within Europe. It upgrades the professionalitiyof it’s work and currently sets up a programme for writersand translators-in-residence. The European Literature Daystake place in Spitz, a little village in Wachau, an outstandingcultural 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 anddiscuss texts on European issues in cultural policy.

AUTHORS AND EDITORS

Marguerite Abouet, After spending her childhood on the IvoryCoast, Marguerite Abouet has lived in Paris since she wastwelve. Her graphic novel series «Aya» is among the mostsuccessful comics in France and has appeared in multilingualtranslations.

Yvan Alagbé, born in Paris to a French mother and a fatherfrom Benin, Yvan Alagbé is a member of the publishingcollective Frémok or FRMK, a joint-venture of the belgiangroup Fréon and Amok, the publishing house he created withOliver Marboeuf in the early nineties.

Pierre Alféri, French writer, poet and essayist. He is amongstthe most innovative voices in France. Alféri is also wellknown for his experimental films and theatre studies, visualpoetry and tone pieces as well as for his picture books andposters (www.alferi.fr).

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

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

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

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the Maison des Écrivains Étrangers et Traducteurs in SaintNazaire.

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

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

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

Rosie Goldsmith, british multimedia journalist whose specialinterests are art, literature and international affairs. She hasworked for BBC Radio around the world, and now directs theEuropean Literature Network in London.

Lena Gorelik, German writer and journalist arrived with herRussian-Jewish family as a «quota refugee» in Germany.She publishes novels, short stories, essays and articles forDeutschlandradio Kultur as well as writing on current politicaland social affairs in the Süddeutsche Zeitung and Die Zeitamong others.

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

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

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

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

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

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writes prose and poetry and in her novel among other thingstackles 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 medianews service kress.

Jamal Mahjoub, the British writer of Sudanese heritage nowlives in Barcelona after numerous changes of residence. Hisnovels notably include In the Hour of the Signs (Die Stundeder Zeichen) – a historic novel set in Sudan in the 1880s. Onecould think of being a witness to the contemporary visions ofthe IS Caliphate.

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

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 journalistin Paris.

Jacques Pezet, French-Honduran journalist based in Berlin.

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

Ilma Rakusa, a winner of the Swiss Book Prize for her novelMehr Meer (More Sea), the acclaimed writer, translator andpublicist is a European par excellence. She grew up and livedin Budapest, Ljubljana and Triest, and studied in Zurich, Parisand Saint Petersburg (Leningrad) and is among the leadingexperts on Russian literature.

Manca G. Renko, Slovenian historian and the editor-in-chiefof the AirBeletrina literary journal, published by BeletrinaAcademic Press.

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

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

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

László Szabolcs, studies in Bucharest and Budapest. Editor forCentral European University Press and member of the JózsefAttila 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 culturalcorrespondent for the leading Arabic newspaper Al-Hayat, andregularly writes for the Süddeutsche Zeitung, Neue ZürcherZeitung and Die Zeit. His novel Bagdad Marlboro describesthe war in Iraq from an Iraqi and American perspective.

Renata Zamida, Slovenian literature expert. She works atBelletrina-Academic Press, is Director of the Fabula Festivalin Ljublanja and is involved in setting up the book lendingplatform Biblos.

Peter Zimmermann, writer and journalist. Features and culturaleditor for ORF/Radio in Vienna, responsible for the book showEx libris on Ö1.

THE EDITORS

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

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

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THANKS

Thanks to transkriptwunder.com, to the translators ClaudiaCarrel, Michelle Hartmann, Suzanne Kirkbright, Szabolcs László,Svetlana Rakocevic, Friederike Ridegh, Marcel Saché, ThomasVang Glud, Renata Zamida and to the team of ELiT LiteratureHouse Europe Daniela Freistetter, Albrecht Großberger, JochenGruber, Klaus Moser, Barbara Pluch in Krems and BirgitPolitycki in Hamburg.

Planning and Organization ELiT Literature House Europe

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

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INDEX

Abouet, Marguerite . . . . 81, 162Alagbé, Yvan . . . . . . . . . . . 81, 162Alféri, Pierre . . . . . . . 61, 62, 162Büchler, Alexandra . . . . 31, 162Borbely, Szilard . . . . . . . 124, 162Deville, Patrick . . . . . . . . . 76, 162Droste, Wilhelm. . . . . . .106, 163Fowler, Steven J. . . . . . . 95, 163Gasser, Christian . 81, 114, 149,

163Goldsmith, Rosie . . . . . . . 24, 163Gorelik, Lena . . . . . 40, 129, 163Grond, Walter . . . . . . . . . . . 7, 165Harmalov, Aljoša. . . . . .109, 163Humaydan, Iman . . 45, 51, 163Ilic, Saša . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .92, 163Kennedy, A.L. 6, 15, 24, 28, 29,

51, 163Kim, Anna. . . . . . . . . . 28, 41, 163Kornfeld, Henning . . . . 130, 164

Müller, Herta . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 55Mahjoub, Jamal . . . . 28, 31, 164Mazenauer, Beat 116, 121, 134,

142, 143, 165Moritz, Rainer. . . . . . . . .102, 164Orzóy, Ágnes . . . . . . . . . . . 46, 164Petrovic, Katja . . . . . . . . . 96, 164Pezet, Jacques . . . . . . . . 136, 164Rahimi, Atiq. . . . . . . .28, 52, 164Rakusa, Ilma . . . . . . . 24, 44, 164Renko, Manca G. . . . . . 111, 164Ritte, Jürgen . . . 13, 76, 98, 164Rumberg, Dirk . . . 151, 155, 165Sedgman, Sam. . .127, 132, 165Szabolcs, László27, 34, 145, 165Vandborg, Lise. . . . . . . .138, 165Wali, Najem . . . . . . . . . . . . 36, 165Zamida, Renata. .140, 147, 165Zimmermann, Peter28, 118, 165

MATERIALSAMMLUNG

Insbesondere möglichst große und heterogene Datenmengen sind für Rokfor interessant – unabhängig davon, ob es sich um Text oder Bild oder beides handelt. Wir analysieren das Material auf explizite als auch implizite Zusammenhänge. Zentral sind dabei Fragen wie: Welche Ordnung führt zu Wissensgewinn? Wie kann via Struktur eine Narration aufgebaut werden? Welche Stich- wörter verbinden den Text? Ziel ist es, dem Leser mehrere Zugänge zum Inhalt zu verschaffen.

INHALT, ALGORITHMUS, FORM

Rokfor betrachtet automatisiertes Design als einen alternativen Zugang zu Gestaltung. Durch automatisierte Prozesse ergeben sich neue Begründungen für gestalterische Entscheidungen. Ideen für Regeln, auf denen automatisiertes Design basiert, beinhalten unter anderem Zufälle und Unschärfen durch algorithmische Positionierung und Skalierung einzelner Elemente. Zusätzlich beeinflussen klassische Raster- und Layout-Systeme die Entwicklung von Algorithmen.

ERGEBNIS

Im Zusammenspiel von Gestaltung und Programmierung werden die Layout-Templates entwickelt. Das letztlich maschinell hergestellte Dokument kann so immer wieder neu generiert werden – mit unterschiedlichen In-halten und veränderten Regeln. Rokfor stellt die Arbeit des Gestalters nicht infrage, sondern gewichtet den Arbeitsprozess anders. Die Arbeit verschiebt sich von der Gestaltung einzelner Dokumente zur Gestaltung eines einzigen Regelwerks für das komplette Ergebnis.

ROKFOR

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

METHODE

Das Material fließt in eine Datenbank, die online gesteuert wird. Inhaltliche und formale Strukturen werden als Regeln formuliert, die logisch nach- vollziehbar sind und Algorithmen entsprechen. Um Inhalte zu katego- risieren, können verschiedene Tools eingesetzt werden, z.B. Listen, Stichwortmasken oder Selektoren. Rokfor besitzt auch die Fähigkeit, semantische Zusammenhänge als Netzstrukturen darzustellen, um komplexe Abhängigkeiten zwischen Materialien abzubilden.

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MATERIALSAMMLUNG

analysieren

Konzept

Verlag Geldgeber

Produktion

Algorithmus FormInhalt

Inhalt Form

Datenbank

Layout-Templates

Neugier

Kompetenzen

Interessen

Gestaltungsregeln formulieren

ROKFOR

NEUSTART

Methode

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PRODUKTION

Ein Klick auf Vorschau oder Document Export erzeugt ein PDF. Die modulare Struktur erlaubt es auch andere Formate, beispielsweise Webseiten, zu produzieren.

ROKFOR

EDITION ROKFOR

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 denRöschtigraben

B5.111 HG. VON WALTER GROND, VERONIKATRUBEL & BEAT MAZENAUER;Ich und die Politik. EuropäischeLiteratur-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 zumtaz-Kongress

W5.105 BEAT MAZENAUER UND VERONIKA TRUBEL(HRSG.);Neues Lesen neues Lernen. EuropäischeJugendbegegnung 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 imTraum

W5.107 HG. VON VERONIKA TRUBEL & BEATMAZENAUER;Wo sind wir denn zuhause. EuropäischeLiteratur-Jugendbegegnung 2014

B3.115

Literary trends 2015 - European Commission

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