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.

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 (more…)

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.

(more…)

Hung Chi-Sung will travel to Frankfurt attend the Frankfurt Book Fair. You can get a first look at his new book, The Sutra of My Heart, at Locus Publishing’s stand (Hall 8, Stall G907).

The Freeness-of-Vision Bodhisattva enlightens all and saw through the five skandhas, which were empty, while living in complete transcendental wisdom, and, so, was beyond suffering.

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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.
(more…)