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…)