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:

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…)

See You in Frankfurt!, Chapter 8: In the Land of Magical Realism

Max Frisch said, “An accident is something that is long overdue that finally hits you.” For many years I moved about in the literary world of Franz Kafka. I dug into all his stories, his diaries and letters, until I had finally had enough of the obsequiousness and assimilatory tendencies of the main character K, and was on the lookout for a new, completely different world. And so I hit upon Latin America, this tragic culture, something that grew out of conquest and destruction of the cultural identity of its Indian peoples, the Aztecs, the Maya and the Inca, by the European conquistadors from Spain and Portugal. These were just the thing for finding an identity for someone like me, who, like Kafka’s hero K, felt guilty but did not know why. The two cultural streams of the oppressed and the conquerors are still locked in a battle over values and influence in Latin American Mestizo society. They are still far from creating a homogeneous view of the world for the peoples who live there.

How could this not fascinate me? I was looking for something that had left me, that would fill in the deficits in my identity, and I had uncovered in their wake an attractive, controversial mode of life and culture. The Broken, the Unfinished, the Struggle for the meaning of reality, in which much that is human but also much that is magical stirs, fascinated me both in Latin American literature and in the Latin American people whom I met at my expositions in Buenos Aires, Montevideo, Córdoba and Santiago de Chile, as well in later trips to Mexico, Central America, the northern reaches of South America and Brazil.

There are two different ways to grasp a foreign country, a foreign culture, a foreign society, a foreign language. One way goes through literature; the other, through love.

When I first set foot on this continent, I was quite susceptible to both forms of adaptation. Boundlessly curious and open to everything that I ran into there, I was soon consumed by a powerful passion for a woman from Córdoba, in Argentina, someone marked by strong Indian features, and who on the basis of her powerful and exotic personality quickly drew my interest and then aroused my love. After only a few days I had decided to take her and her one and a half year old daughter to Germany, to my ponderous fatherland, to live with me.

In the years that followed, in trips both abroad and here at home, my dedication to the study of the Latin American continent never flagged. I felt myself guided by Latin American literature, which was published only sporadically on the German book market and was barely noticed, and which for the time being I could only read in German. The German reader could find very few aids in getting into a literature which seemed at first to be strange, magical, mythical, quite surrealistic, and often even baroque-sounding. In the 1960s various editions existed of the works of the great stimulator of the new Hispano-American literature, Jorge Luis Borges; of the two Nobel prize winners, the Guatemalan Miguel Ángel Asturias and the Chilean Pablo Neruda; and various titles by the Paraguayan Augusto Roa Bastos, the Cuban Alejo Carpentier, the two Mexicans Carlos Fuentes and Juan Rulfo, and the Argentine Ernesto Sábato. On my first visit to Argentina, Sábato had introduced me to the fascinating life of Buenos Aires through his book On Heroes and Tombs.

As part of the wave of politicization related to the student protests and the youth revolution of the end of the 1960s, the revolutionary situation in the states of the southern continent hit you right between the eyes. We took account of the political drive of the Latin Americans, and raised the charismatic prophets of the new age to the rank of idols, from Camilo Torres to Che Guevara and Ernesto Cardenal. However, it soon became clear that the interest in Latin America had a mere surrogate character. The interest was fanciful, and whenever it appeared it was superficial and on the surface only. The surest indicator of this was that very little attention was paid to the most reliable sources about the change of consciousness in Latin America, the self-discovery of the Latin American authors visible in the common traits of a literature that they themselves were devising.

In this regard, it is worthwhile to trace the story of the reception in Germany of the Latin American author, the Colombian Gabriel García Márquez, who like no other embodied the magical realism of Latin American literature in his stupendous work, One Hundred Years of Solitude. Immediately after publication, his books became global bestsellers, and were blessed with sales of several hundred thousand copies. In Germany, García Márquez first appeared in 1966 in a small novel in German translation, known in English as In Evil Hour (La mala hora), published by the East Berlin Aufbau Publishing House. The book was immediately taken under license for West Germany by the Sigbert Mohn Verlag in Gütersloh.

Still, this book was a flop in both parts of Germany, since, as Sigbert Mohn wrote to the head of Aufbau, Fritz-Georg Voigt, “… its completely unsatisfactory sales do not even cover the cost of storage, let alone promise any profit….” The book was sold at clearance. The East German publisher tried another book, No Letter for the Colonel (Coronel No Tiene Quién le Escriba). Since this too was unsuccessful, the Aufbau Verlag gave up.

In the meantime, the West German Kiepenheuer und Witsch got interested in the author, and in 1970 published García Márquez’s masterwork, One Hundred Years of Solitude. This time the West German–East German exchange went the other way. In 1975 the Aufbau Publishing House took a license to publish this book.

As the author once noted, he writes as his grandmother told stories, and does not analyze events. Nonetheless, or perhaps precisely because of that approach, like no other book the novel contributed to a “spiritual identity” of the splintered continent. Both in the Spanish motherland and in the United States, especially because of its success in Latin America, the book was a sensation. In France, the Académie Franċaise in 1969 named it the best foreign novel. Otherwise the reception outside of Latin America was restrained. In Germany, García Márquez did not make the bestseller list until the time when the Frankfurt Book Fair chose Latin America as its special topic in 1976. In the six years up until this marketing event, the Cologne publishing house sold only a few thousand copies, and the resonance among the general public was muted.

My strongest attempt to bring Latin American literature closer to the reading public occurred when the Book Fair and the German book trade in general got wind that they had a serious image problem, due principally to the over-commercialization of literature. In planning the first topical program of “Latin America” at the Frankfurt Book Fair, I had prescribed for myself a grand outing to Latin America, beginning in the middle of November 1975. By the end of December I wanted to visit nine Latin American countries, and convince them to bring their publishing houses and authors to the Book Fair in Frankfurt in the fall of the following year, with the aim of making their art and literature known the world over. I was armed with a film about the Frankfurt Book Fair and a Spanish language stump speech that I could revise as occasion demanded, all intended to convince publishers to participate. I planned on going to Colombia (Bogotá), Venezuela (Caracas), Cuba (Havana), Mexico (Mexico City), Peru (Lima), Bolivia (La Paz), Uruguay (Montevideo), Brazil (Sȧo Paulo) and Argentina (Buenos Aires).

This was a very strenuous trip, with lectures, TV appearances, press interviews, lots of official banquets, lots of alcohol, all with temperatures I was not accustomed to of around 104° Fahrenheit, and with elevations ranging from sea level to 12,000 feet above sea level (La Paz). The most strenuous thing for me was my internal tension. I was in Latin America, and—how can I say it?—I wanted to be a Latin American. I wanted to take hold of Latin America from the inside; my enthusiasm for being there was unrestrained. René Pacheco, Director of the Historical Commission of the Cuban government, invited me with my companion Manfred G. to Fidel Castro’s box seats in the theater for classical ballet (Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake; we were later treated to Lorca’s The House of Bernarda Alba and Strauss’s Salome). When the prima ballerina Alicia Alonso enraptured the public into storms of applause, the kind that we have only at soccer matches, tears came to my eyes about this successful mix of the European cultural patrimony with the Latin American temperament.

On the other hand, my shock was great when, in a Bolivian café, the Jew Peter Levi spelled out that the friendly gentleman at the table next to me was the old Nazi and one-time SS officer Klaus Barbie, alias Altmann. Barbie had been sentenced to death several times, most recently in 1954 in Lyon, for a massacre in St. Genis-Laval and for many executions in the Montluc Prison in Lyon. Here was the “Butcher of Lyon,” sitting as an innocuous passerby, an arm’s length away from me, enjoying himself with his bodyguard in unabashed contentment. Since 1964 he had been active as a consultant for the Bolivian military government. Beate Klarsfeld, the representative of the International League Against Anti-Semitism and Racism, had dug up this fugitive in La Paz and had publicized his stay and his activity worldwide, something that did not seem to disturb him at all as he sat there and savored his coffee and laughed.

So it popped up again, this burdensome question of identity that I was seeking to escape from in Latin America. Wasn’t I one of them; wasn’t he one of us?

to be continued…