1968 was a new departure that worked on us in quite stimulating ways. We were outrageous. We didn’t knuckle under as we had done in the past; we became rebellious, and many times we did whatever we damn well pleased. This was a new and magnificent experience. Suddenly everything had become open and boundless – the opportunities, the very joy of life!

At that time I was working at the scientific publishing house of Georg Thieme as a production supervisor. Suddenly an interdepartmental feeling of community reigned, which we had not felt previously and which surely doesn’t exist today. We celebrated; we celebrated day and night. We held together when the pressure from the company management increased. We shared information freely and helped each other with true camaraderie.

It was entirely in the spirit of the times that I asked my friend Helmut Gann, an assistant in company management and the only one of us to have access to the Publishers Weekly of the German Book Trade (Börsenblatt des deutschen Buchhandels), to be on the lookout for any job offerings up north, because I intended to visit some friends in the Ruhr region and while on the road I had in mind to look in on a few places.

This was not really a serious step toward a planned career. In the long run I actually envisaged myself in a publishing management position, but the prevailing wisdom of those days leaned more toward letting go and opening yourself up, and not so much toward targeted career moves.

Unfortunately, very little was available just that week. The Heidesheim Verlagsanstalt, a small southern publishing house in Swabia specializing in horse and rider literature, was looking for a director. And in Frankfurt, the Publishers Association of the German Book Trade wanted to have someone “who could get the job done.” I went to Heidesheim and came back with good chances of getting the job, but once I was back in Stuttgart, I immediately sat down and sent off a refusal. My feeling for life at that time called out for expanding my horizons, for opening them up. The road to Heidesheim would have led me even more deeply into the darkness of provincial Swabia. Stuttgart was bad enough!

But the German Publishers Association? Could the path to emancipation ever lead through an administrative apparatus that had such a bad name among those employed in the book trade as did that of our federation in Frankfurt? That gave me the shivers.

“No, no!” Gann advised. “Look them up! This isn’t the German Publishers Association; these are the people who put on the Fair – they’re really wild! Give it a try, even if it’s only to have a little fun. I also applied there once on a whim.”

At that moment Helmut and I had no idea that with the sentence, “This isn’t the German Publishers Association; these are the people who put on the Fair,” he was foreshadowing a conflict that would keep me engaged for decades.

So I went, not very enthusiastically, but simply because Gann had recommended it to me and maybe because it was on the road going north. Gann was right, “They’re really wild!”

When I called in at the office on Kleiner Hirschgraben Street, I was greeted by Klaus Thiele, who today runs a small publishing house in Mexico and who at that time was the director of the department for foreign exhibitions for the Exposition and Fair Company.

“Do you speak French?” That was Thiele’s first question as soon as I had introduced myself. I had to say no. I hadn’t had any French at school, though I had taken a year afterwards at Berlitz. There could be no question of my “knowing” French.

“Too bad, because you don’t have any chance at all then!” he answered in a distressed tone.

“Our director is a Francophile, and it’s quite likely that he will conduct the interview in French.”

Well, the die was cast, and I didn’t want to spoil a bit of fun for the boss. After a few minutes I was admitted to the director’s office, and as I had been warned, a beaming Sigfred Taubert came around his big desk and said to me, “Bonjour, Monsieur!”

Read the rest of the story in Life Before Letters.

Life Before Letters, Chapter 9: Nineteen Sixty-Nine

Then came Bucharest – Contemporary German Literature, a small book exhibit of 400 purely literary titles, which the Germanist Eberhard Lämmert had put together and which had recently been put on without complaint in Belgrade.

Three of us traveled together: Professor Lämmert, Günter Grass and me. Everything was well-prepared. The exhibit was supposed to be set up in the Casa Scriitorilor, the Writers’ Club. Grass was received in a very friendly manner by his German-speaking Romanian writer colleagues. But then delays set in. We could not come to an agreement on the time for the opening. Finally the order came down – the books by Alfred Kantorowicz, Uwe Johnson and Wolf Biermann were to be removed from the exhibit, as was the exchange of letters between Grass and Kohout, Letters over the Border. No reason was given.

This was the first time I had been confronted with such a censorship quandary. The decision to open the exhibit was in this case taken out of my hands. Günter Grass, scheduled as the opening speaker, immediately pulled out. I was very impressed by his attitude. This was the first time that I saw a person acting clearly and unambiguously according to standards which were not imposed from the outside.

The Romanian leadership, whoever they were, never came into view. Someone was standing in the background behind the Board of Directors of the writers union, and that individual must have been pulling the strings. Romanian writer colleagues averted their gazes and appeared to be quite embarrassed, but they kept trying to move us to a compromise.

It was decided to continue the discussions during a trip to the Romanian provinces. We left Bucharest in four black Volga limousines. The trip was interrupted again and again by stops at inns with heavy Romanian cooking (Grass had a sheep’s eye peeking out from under his bushy walrus mustache), ending with lots of Romanian țuică [plum brandy].

In the evening we were supposed to arrive for an overnight stay in Sibiu (Hermannstadt). As we got out of the cars in front of the hotel, in the midst of the confusion that occurs upon arrival, a little boy came up to Grass and asked:

“Are you the German poet Günter Grass?”

When Grass said yes, the little one took his hand and pulled him around the street corner. Grass, whom I had traveled with during the last leg of the journey in the same car, called to me:

“Weidhaas, come along. I don’t know what this little one wants.”

I joined the two of them. The boy pulled the poet around another street corner, into a building that we went through before emerging on the back side, around another street corner, again into a building, down some stairs to a basement, along the corridor, until we finally came to a door painted white. The boy opened the door. We entered a large vaulted room, in which about 100 people were sitting, looking at us expectantly. An older, white-haired man got up and with slow footsteps came to the three of us…

Read the rest of the story in Life Before Letters.

For the focal theme of Latin America at the 1976 Frankfurt Book Fair, I was successful in gathering behind our opening speaker, Julio Cortázar, almost all the important names in Latin American literature. Among them was the journalist, writer and novelist Eduardo Galeano, from Uruguay.

It was only then that I learned that Eduardo Galeano, publisher of the Buenos Aires left-wing cultural magazine Crisis, had been detained by the Argentine military dictatorship and was in great danger.

Through my good contact at the German Embassy in Buenos Aires, the cultural attaché Dr. Gottfried Arens, I was able to have Galeano, together with his wife, receive an official invitation and tickets to Frankfurt for the Book Fair, something that put him in a good position to leave the country.

Galeano and his wife soon were numbered among the good friends in my Latin American family, in that during the Book Fair they also got involved in our practical problems, such as babysitting!

With his book, Open Veins of Latin America, [published in 1973] Eduardo Galeano had created a penetrating historical survey of his continent from its discovery down to the present. Our introduction of Galeano at the Fair made his book a sensation in Germany, and since then its stature and popularity have only grown. In 2009, the book was once again catapulted onto the bestseller list when Hugo Chávez of Venezuela presented a copy of Galeano’s famous work to the new American President, Barack Obama.

Read more in See You in Frankfurt!

In May 2009, Eduardo Galeano sat for an hour-long interview with the news program Democracy Now:

A Three-Part Series from Abi-Sword.

Download now [48 MB]

Parts I, II and III of
The Inferno of Obsession from
Abi-Sword, Volume II: Awakening.
Download now [48 MB]

See You in Frankfurt!, Chapter 10: The Year of Latin America

Peter Weidhaas and Mario Vargas Llosa (1976).

(Read Part I)

Ruppert Schmidt, a clever fellow, always ready for a joke, was a book dealer from the Rhine city of Offenburg, quite close to France, and the owner and director of the Offenburger Dokumente Verlag. Schmidt had joined the French Resistance during the war, and since that time had maintained good contacts with French intellectuals, contacts which he had used since 1946 to promote the introduction of literature from Germany into France. Through him, I had established contact with the great Argentine author Julio Cortázar in Paris, and after a short period of hesitation he expressed willingness to take over the role that I had originally intended for Gabriel García Márquez. As it soon turned out, Cortázar’s name was a big drawing card on account of his literary works being known by practically every other living Latin American author, but also because of his exemplary political stands. Cortázar, an Argentine living in Parisian emigration, had spoken out decisively against the Argentine military, which in April 1976 had taken power in Buenos Aires and was on the verge of removing from its past anything that appeared leftist or critical of the new junta regime. Cortázar was also physically a larger than life figure, with his calm face under a frizzy beard.

We were successful in gathering behind Julio Cortázar almost all the important names in Latin American literature, such as Juan Rulfo (Mexico), Mario Vargas Llosa (Peru), who agreed to speak at the opening of the Book Fair, Jorge Amado, Osman Lins, Thiago de Mello (Brazil), Sergio Ramírez (Nicaragua), Eduardo Galeano (Uruguay), Manuel Puig (Argentina), Manuel Scorza (Peru), José Donoso and Antonio Skármeta (Chile), Adalberto Ortiz (Ecuador) and others.

Juan Rulfo was the author of only two books, The Burning Plain and Pedro Páramo, both written before the war but which appeared in German only in 1953 and 1955. These books were considered classics of the new Latin American literature, since the author employed an experimental style of storytelling in a masterly way, something that was becoming common in the literature of the continent only in the 1970s. I was soon bound to him by a hearty friendship. Rulfo, even then a convinced proponent of moving slowly, appeared as early as one week before the Book Fair in Frankfurt, and stayed on afterwards for another two weeks, which he spent principally with us, at our home, and with other friends.

Jorge Amado, the father of countless novels about his town Salvador da Bahia, was the creator of the most widely read novel of Brazilian literature, Gabriela, Clove and Cinnamon. Amado, whom I had missed very much in Bahia for my book exhibit in 1971, had the peculiarity of never getting on an airplane. He crossed the ocean by ship.

José Donoso’s novel The Obscene Bird of Night had fascinated me long before the Book Fair. In a park, Don Jerónimo founds a society of cripples and human monsters. Don Jerónimo himself finally gets into the park, but as a non-cripple he is considered by the inhabitants of the park to be too ugly. He is therefore killed. In this world of dread, which Donoso lays out, this is the symbol of the subjection of the helpless individual, violated by outside forces—a book that leaves a deep impression.

The Chilean Antonio Skármeta made a name for himself as a young author in Germany, primarily by his homage to the Chilean poet Pablo Neruda: the novel (and film) Ardiente Paciencia (which became the basis for Michael Radford’s Il Postino). Skármeta became a friend of our house. Later, when he had returned to Chile, I often met with him when I spent time in Santiago. Many years later he returned to Germany as the Ambassador of Chile.

With Open Veins of Latin America, Eduardo Galeano had created a penetrating historical survey of his continent from its discovery down to the present. Our introduction of Galeano at the Fair made his book a sensation in Germany, and since then its stature and popularity have only grown. President Hugo Chávez of Venezuela has called Open Veins “a monument of Latin American history.” In 2009, the book was once again catapulted onto the bestseller list when Chávez presented a copy of Galeono’s famous work to the new American President, Barack Obama.

Back then at Frankfurt, Galeano and his wife soon were numbered among the good friends in my Latin American family, in that during the Book Fair they also got involved in our practical problems, such as babysitting.

(to be continued…)

Publishing Perspectives has some exclusive interviews from the 2009 Frankfurt Book Fair.

Check out this post on SeeYouInFrankfurt.com, our site dedicated to the memoirs of Peter Weidhaas:

Publishing Perspectives on Youtube

The Taipei International Book Exhibition opens today, January 27th and runs until February 1st. The guest of honor this year is France.

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Attendees of the Frankfurt Book Fair 2009 are welcome to visit Locus Publishing for the duration of the Fair at our stand in Hall 8, Stand G907, for a preview of our new titles.

Our opening press conference will be held on October 15th, 2009 at 10:15am in the Press Center in Hall 6.2. Invited speakers include author and former Book Fair Director Peter Weidhaas.