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.

Life Before Letters, Chapter 8: 1968

At the 20th Frankfurt Book Fair, my first Book Fair as part of the organizational team, I participated only as an observer. As a new colleague in the exhibition department, I was not directly involved in the work of the Fair, though here and there I did my part with smaller tasks and errands. I could therefore look at the events on the fairgrounds with a certain cool composure.

It was quite the opposite for Sigfred Taubert, who despite all declarations to the contrary was deeply affected in his self-understanding as director of the Fair, something which in my opinion a few years later factored into his decision to take an early retirement.

I was cool and collected, but I was certainly far from being able to get a general picture of things. In my memory, I see myself drawn again and again into excited and wildly gesticulating discussion groups. Due to the crowded corridors in the Fair, it was not possible to be at all moments at the center of the action, and so most of the time I tried to find out in the offices of the Fair management when and where something had actually happened. However, hundreds of disgruntled exhibitors and Fair visitors were on the same mission. The result was that here as well as outside in the halls the chaos unfolded like a giant battle royale, in which otherwise well-mannered and respectable people suddenly lost their composure and advanced on the supervisors with wild screams in order to register their complaints, their problems and their demands.

Once I grabbed a well-known author by the arm as he insisted with choleric hiccups on seeing the fair director on the spot, followed by an old publisher who was foaming at the mouth. Then I started in with the words “whoever is screaming is wrong” in a counterattack on an excited contemporary (the author of The Revolution Releases its Children), whom the bookkeeper Ingrid Lenz was holding onto tightly. Snarling with rage, he then turned on me and would not let go of my jacket collar for a good ten minutes. An unholy bedlam reigned over the entire Fair, and hardly anybody could get on with business. What was the point?

Only at the end of each day of the Fair could we employees pry from a visibly exhausted Fair director just what had happened that day. On the following morning we received the accounts in the press that were played out with relish, but which seriously differed from the internal reports.

The Book Fair began on a Thursday, and went relatively smoothly with regard to the practical matters of the Fair. The supervisory board of the Exposition and Fair Company and the management of the German Publishers Association basically had the building on lock-down after the previous year’s spontaneous demonstrations against the right-wing publisher Axel-Springer and the occupation of the Greek national stall. The security arrangements were very intrusive. Every visitor was affected and had to undergo heightened security checks when entering the fairgrounds. Placards and signs were confiscated at the entrance.

The Fair management and the supervisory board had decided on another classic measure. They had hundreds of policemen stationed on the fairgrounds with all their standard equipment of police cars, paddy wagons, water cannon and riot shields.

On Friday the author, Minister of Finance and controversial politician Franz-Josef Strauss, insisted on giving an interview to German television at the stand of the Seewald Verlag. An apprehensive Sigfred Taubert accompanied the Minister through a below-ground entrance to the site of his appearance. Then, without any seeming provocation, he ordered the police to remove the waiting German and foreign journalists. Apparently in the group he had seen the two Socialist German Student Union leaders Daniel Cohn-Bendit and Hans-Jürgen Krahl and a half-dozen others who appeared to be protesters.

In his memoirs here is the way it reads:

I took the megaphone… and looked at the crowd, where Daniel Cohn-Bendit and Hans-Jürgen Krahl were setting the tone. I suffered under no illusion that I could achieve anything with my words. I was powerless against the crowd. In vain I demanded that the corridor in which the publishing booth was located should be kept clear.

While this confrontation was limited to the immediate area of the Seewald Verlag in the large Hall 5 (today Hall 8), on the following day, a Saturday, the situation got much worse in Hall 6, where German belles-lettres was located.

The Socialist German Student Union (the Sozialistische Deutsche Studentenbundd or SDS) had called for a teach-in on Saturday, September 21, 1968, at 4 PM, in Hall 6, stall 1148 of the Diedrich Verlag, a company which had published the works of that year’s recipient of the peace prize Léopold Senghor. The teach-in was to discuss his important role in his own country and the Afro-American revolution in general.

Taubert:

If we assumed the passive attitude of a well-intentioned Fair management, I could not count on the literary publishing houses set up in Hall 6 being able to withstand an hours-long SDS program. I also doubted how they might greet such a passive attitude from management. I finally settled on the tactic of direct intervention.

And so at 2 PM, the time at which the general public had access to the Fair, he had Hall 6 closed by the police. Whoever was already inside had to remain inside, and whoever was outside could not get in. Only exhibitors and journalists were exempted from this regulation. Only one person, who was neither the one nor the other, got into Hall 6 without being bothered by the police and soon left again – the chairman of the neo-Nazi NPD party Adold von Thadden, who had apparently gotten in with a press pass. It was obvious that this sideshow had great symbolic power, and it was played up by the press and by protesters with great fanfare.

Indescribable scenes played out at the entrances to the Hall. Whoever is familiar with the highly sensitive public intellectuals of our Fair can imagine the reaction elicited by such sudden restrictions on their freedom of movement.

When Sigfred Taubert finally understood that the teach-in under the given circumstances affected only small parts of Hall 6, he had the police withdrawn and the Hall reopened.

[Read the whole story at SeeYouInFrankfurt.com]

Life Before Letters, Chapter 7: Detours

Finally in the fall of 1966 the “Deutscher” was officially accepted into the family, and the engagement was celebrated. A palace was rented, a small one to be sure, but a palace nevertheless. Family members came from the whole country and from Norway and Sweden. For the first time in my life I wore a cutaway, a rented one, but a cutaway for real!

And then came the time in which my in-laws offered me a partnership in the company, but here I refused. My unsteady, forward-striving nature demanded that I determine my own fate. I wanted to go my own way, to seek out a career as a publisher and not to enter the harbor of security at the tender age of 27. My education at the Graphics Art Institute was soon to be finished, and I wanted to apply to a publishing house as a book production editor in order to provide for myself and my future wife.

One after another I applied to the Danish publishing houses of Munksgaard, Gad, Gyldendal, and Samlerens Forlag, but the salary that they offered me as a book production novice came nowhere near the sum that my in-laws had provided for my work in the bookbinding company. With a heavy heart I now looked south to my home country, to a threatening existence. Birgitte, my fiancée, was not enthusiastic – “For holidays perhaps, but forever?”

For me there was no going back. I placed an ad in the German Publishers Weekly in Frankfurt, and in the fall of 1966 with my secondhand VW Beetle I set off for the first time to the Mecca of all book people, to Frankfurt and the Frankfurt Book Fair.

There I was successful right away. I found a position as a production editor in the specialized medical publishing house of Georg Thieme in Stuttgart, with a reasonable salary that would make me independent and would put me in a position to support the family that I was about to start.

Stuttgart, on a sunny autumn Sunday in 1966 – I am lying on my Danish leather sofa in my apartment, brightly decorated with beautiful Danish furniture on Immenhoferstrasse, the middle of the Weinberg, and I feel awful. I have been feeling bad the entire morning and have no desire to see anything. I’m just hanging around, depressed; I don’t know why.

There’s the doorbell! I get up and open the door – nobody there. I press the buzzer for the house door down below, but no one is trying to get in. Finally I shuffle back and plop down on the sofa. I feel miserable.

There goes the doorbell again. Well, I think, somebody is pulling my leg. Once again there’s nobody at the door.

The same thing happens once more. And nobody who could have rung.

An inner tension, close to being torn apart. Nonetheless, this ringing doorbell arouses my curiosity. Am I hallucinating? I get up on a chair and unscrew the cover of the doorbell; I lie down on the sofa once again, but in a way so that I can see the doorbell.

I feel so depressed that I am nauseous. Once again the doorbell rings. I can clearly see the ringer beating against the vibrating bell.

Am I going crazy? I feel even more nauseous. I grab a candle, light it, climb back up on the chair, and put some soot on the body of the doorbell where the hammer strikes. I need to know – is this occurring in my head, or is somebody playing tricks on me? I also put a little soot on the doorbell button at the entrance to my apartment and on the one down below on the building door. Now I will know!

Once again I lie down on the sofa. I am sick as a dog. Then the ringer moves and it rings. I climb up – clear signs of the hammer on the sooty bell. I run down to the door – the two doorbells are untouched.

I am going to be sick.

I lean against the door of the apartment. It keeps ringing, the rings closer and closer together. I cover my ears.

Suddenly I know what is going on. I tear open the door of the apartment, and barge in on my neighbor, who is very alarmed when she sees the dismay in my face:

“May use your telephone to make a call?”

Read the rest of the story in Life Before Letters.

An excerpt from Life Before Letters by Peter Weidhaas

Chapter 6: Going Home Again

They say that life moves forward in seven-year segments.

My childhood, the period from birth to age 7, 1938 to 1945, I can call nothing other than “happy.” The war seemed to be an adventure. Thanks to my parents’ care, I didn’t suffer any need. The bomb attacks on Berlin up until 1942 were exciting events for a young boy, who several times stood alongside the shelter supervisor at the door of the air-raid shelter to get a good look at the lights from the so-called “Christmas trees,” artificial illumination that was dropped to light up the bombing targets.

Later, when my father had set up the family in a little house in Austria near the city of Braunau, I grew up in sun, garden and fresh air. Those years allowed the growth of a natural and healthy strength that I retain to the present day.

Those days held many wonders for me – the shots fired in our direction by the Americans during the last days of the war from the opposite bank of the Inn River, the nightly roaring of the American tanks, the goat that sailed through the air when a hand grenade exploded nearby, the low-flying fighter jets strafing children on their way home from school, the half-starved Russian prisoners of war who were driven in the thousands past our house into the woods nearby – as a child, I was amazed at all this, but did not take in its historical significance or human tragedy.

A friend of the family, a construction engineer and officer in the German army, visited my father often. The six-year-old boy, unconsciously infected by his parents’ conversations about the war and by the non-stop propaganda on the radio, stopped the “Uncle” dressed in civilian clothes at the garden gate with the cry, “Halt, who goes there? Password!”, all the while aiming at him with a wooden weapon, a simple club with a string attached. The “uncle” pushed the “rifle” aside, patted the boy on the head and warned him:

“Petie, never point a weapon at a person.”

With the cunning of an innocent child, I answered:

“But uncle, it’s only a piece of wood!”

“You never know,” he responded. “You never know whether such a weapon can shoot.”

He then asked me to put an empty bottle on the apple tree and rest a board behind it. I eagerly did what he requested with the clear knowledge that this experiment would be a catastrophic flop for the “uncle.” He took up a position about ten paces from the apple tree, slowly brought up my wooden rifle, and for a long time aimed at the bottle. Suddenly an ear-piercing bang broke the quiet, and the bottle exploded into a thousand pieces. Sorrowfully, he gave me my wooden rifle back. Later, after I had pulled a bullet out of the board behind the bottle, I took my rifle apart trying to discover the secret behind the shot.

Read the rest of the story in Life Before Letters.