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…)