Berlin Verlag Founder Leaves

The Bookseller reported not long ago that the British publishers Bloomsbury will be adopting a "global structure" - effectively operating everything out of London: "four basic divisions of adult; children’s and educational; academic and professional; and information and business development," supported by "a sales, marketing and rights division, and a production division." All in London. All run by Brits.

The official reasoning is that they consider taste is becoming globally homogenized, especially in fiction. And the Bookseller piece gives three examples, all of which were written in English. Unsurprisingly. All very well; these people are running a business after all. Whether English books are published out of London or New York is perhaps largely unimportant nowadays - although I would expect there to be differences in the marketing, and I would think American editors might have a better feel for what US readers like. So no doubt jobs will go, which is sad but not unusual, but at least that great overarching value, literature, won't suffer all that much.

Except for one thing: they also happen to own the Berlin Verlag. As Gregor Dotzauer points out in the Tagesspiegel, Berlin Verlag is nominated for three awards this year at the Leipzig Book Fair. With three titles that would almost certainly not have come about under this "global structure". A German novel, a German literary non-fiction title and a translation of Peter Esterházy. Bloomsbury does not publish Peter Esterházy in English. Nor does it publish Berlin Verlag's biggest German authors, Ingo Schulze and Elke Schmitter. In fact, while Bloomsbury does some very fine books, I'd wager that next to none of them are translated from German. Which is up to them and certainly not an unusual phenomenon, but you'd think they might take advantage of the little jewel they have in the Berlin Verlag.

The people in Berlin have a genuinely excellent children's book list, some outstanding German writers (Anna Katharina Fröhlich and Henning Ritter are the Leipzig nominees, plus Rada Biller, Keto von Waberer, Jan Peter Bremer and a whole slew of young talents like Thomas Klupp, Daniela Dröscher, Leif Rand). They even put out the occasional poetry collection (Jan Wagner, Ron Winkler, Björn Kuhligk, Gerhard Falkner). The publisher Elisabeth Ruge recently set up Berlin Academic, "with special focus on digital developments and Open Access". And of course they publish translations of Bloomsbury writers like Margaret Atwood, Tobias Wolff and William Boyd, to name but three from the first page of their catalogue.

So the relationship has been in one direction all along, but now Berlin seems to have lost all independence. The company's founder Elisabeth Ruge is clearing her desk and leaving as of 15 March. And who can blame her? I can't read between the lines of all the press releases very well and have no internal insight whatsoever, but even I can see things don't bode well for a German publisher if it's being run from London.

Frankly, I resent the idea that literary taste is globally homogenous, and I don't want to read one-size-fits-all fiction. Some of the strengths of Berlin Verlag in recent years have been discovering new German voices that go against the grain, fostering unusual talent and organising great events in Berlin. So this is, without exaggeration, very bad news for German book-lovers.

Update: Richard Kämmerlings tells us in Die Welt (which I tend not to read because the opinion pieces get me too upset) that Birgit Schmitz is taking over from Ruge. According to Schmitz, who is about my age, the German book market is so different to the British market that she'll have to maintain "a certain amount of autonomy". And she apparently intends to make her mark on the catalogue. Good on her - I suspect it's her doing that Berlin Verlag has so many good young writers right now - but I'm not optimistic.

Dancing the Sarrazin

My head's still humming from last night's huge launch for the anthology Manifest der Vielen. I don't know about you, but typically I expect a book launch to be about twenty people sipping at white wine in a bookshop while a writer sits at the front and reads a bit. Instead, last night every last seat in the Maxim Gorki Theater was occupied, eight people read, three people were interviewed, there was a dancer and a slide show and live electronic music and a music video (which I'll come back to in a moment). There followed copious drinking and - yes! - actual dancing.

The book, which I've been bigging up for a while now, is a collection of pieces written by - as it says in this fascinating interview with the editor Hilal Sezgin - thirty German intellectuals with international backgrounds, in response to Thilo Sarrazin's mega-selling book Deutschland schafft sich ab. Its subtitle is "Germany reinvents itself". I haven't actually got a copy yet because of cashflow issues last night, but judging by the readings it covers a lot of ground. From Deniz Utlu's fiction to an interview with the actress Pegah Ferydoni to straight personal essays, the writers share their views on multicultural Germany, being a Muslim or not being a Muslim in the country, and just generally how they live their lives.

Not all of it was new - people have been saying for years now that the never-ending calls for integration are offensive and unreasonable, that they are essentially a demand for a homogenous society - but it's good to say it again. Several of the authors talked about how the debate has forced them to think about their own position in German society, how they define themselves. And in fact the event made me start thinking along the same lines, something I hope to come back to here.

But what was most unexpected about the event was that it was genuinely funny. A number of the writers have contributed humorous pieces, laughing rather than crying over what is often a ridiculous situation. And it was all held together by a really funny guy called Ali Aslan. I had to check that because he didn't introduce himself on stage and when I asked someone later she said, "Oh, you mean Ali?" Which was of limited use. Anyway, speaking of unexpected things, the guy is apparently known as the George Clooney of the German interior ministry. I couldn't see the resemblance, but then I was a very long way from the stage and when I saw him close-up later I was far from sober. Anyway, Aslan managed to get a lot of laughs out of some pretty serious subject matter, including the fact that one of the authors - the academic Naika Foroutan from the Heymat project - has received death threats for her part in revealing Sarrazin's misinterpretation of the statistics.

So, thus heartened, we all retired to the bar. Or in fact the canteen, where there was wine and beer and pretzels and rice pudding. And DJ Imran Ayata in the corner, who was having technical problems. But still, the beautiful people danced and danced - my favourite was a version of Oh Carolina in some unrecognisable language. And there were lots of sort of famous people there and I said hello to two of them and one of them even recognised me back.

And here's the most amazing thing I noticed. On one point, Sarrazin is right. A survey by the Süddeutsche Zeitung found out all sorts of interesting things about his readers. My favourite one: they responded negatively to the idea of "enjoying life to the full". Also, they're mainly men and the over-60s are overproportionately represented. So in fact, Sarrazin readers probably are having fewer babies than Manifest der Vielen readers. Because Manifest der Vielen readers are all very, very attractive and enjoy life to the full. Manifest der Vielen readers will reinvent Germany, populating it with attractive, intelligent, fun-loving little brown babies.

To finish off, a link to the video, a song by Volkan T. that plays on a text by Selim Özdogan.

More Culture Funding, Please.

The European Union has a small programme that funds the arts and culture. Right now, national governments and EU policymakers are taking decisions on the next EU budget that will influence the next ten years of support to cultural activities. I'm a firm believer in state funding for the arts - it ensures that artists don't have to serve the market all the time and have space to experiment without starving to death in their garrets. And it benefits the rest of society as well by, you know, making the world a better place.

If you'd like to exert a little pressure on policymakers, you can sign a short manifesto written by Culture Action Europe at:

www.wearemore.eu/manifesto

Sarrazin, Broder and British Debating Culture

I have never been a great fan of the British university debating club. The one at my university attempted to invite Enoch Powell to speak to students, back in the early 90s. As I recall, it was a small group of ex-public school pupils with pretensions to the Conservative back-benches. I see they are still going strong, in fact, with a debate tabled for March with the title "This house believes that it is time to close the borders to economic migrants." The idea is that two people say very contentious things to each other in a witty manner, while students watch for cheap entertainment. A centuries-old tradition, free speech, fostering public speaking skills, bla bla bla. Not to my taste at all, as there are things that I consider too important to reduce them to their mere intellectual entertainment value. But at the very least, there are some kind of rules of balance that are intended to ensure a fair debate.

So students at London's LSE were not only dismayed to see that the German Society had invited everybody's favourite German racist Thilo Sarrazin to an event. They had also failed to find anyone to stand up to him on equal terms. Alongside Sarrazin on the platform was Henryk M. Broder, not a man known for airing his views on Islam in particular in an unprovocative manner. The students felt that the "contra" side was too weak, with the critic Hellmuth Karasek and Ali Kizilkaya, Chairman of the German Islamic Council, who "may very well speak for his religious community but cannot be expected to represent the great diversity of German immigrants and their children." They wrote an open letter to the German Society from which this quote is taken. Their campaign was picked up by the press and anti-racism activists, whereupon the event was moved from the LSE itself to a nearby hotel.

There have been some amusing accounts of the ensuing events in the German press, the best of which is in the Tagesspiegel (although they seem confused about the demands of the open letter). As it turns out, not even Karasek argued against the anti-Islam front. The event was topped off by an exchange in which Broder called a student who mounted the stage an
unmoderate double huge arsehole. And Der Freitag has a few words from one of the organisers of the open letter (my translation):

As a former colonial power, Britain has a much longer and more intensive history of integration. The majority of the guests at the Hilton had therefore noticed that "there was something very dodgy about Sarrazin." Compared to the quality of the British discussion, the London audience will have seen Sarrazin and Broder and presumably also Karasek as provincials at best. Sarrazin, says Fathollah-Nejad, "hardly got any applause anyway."

Back in January, it was another venerable British institution that first gave Sarrazin a platform in the English-speaking world. As Spiegel Online reported, he was invited onto the "discussion programme" World Have Your Say on the BBC World Service. Here's what they said:

For 50 minutes, Sarrazin -- whose book has been at the top of Germany's bestseller lists for weeks -- held forth on his opinions about Muslims. He discussed his book with callers from Great Britain, Germany, the United States and elsewhere in the world -- and didn't seem concerned that his ideas sound even crasser in English than they do in German.

Again, the format was part of the problem here. While most of the callers were apparently critical of his ideas, Sarrazin was in the studio as the main guest and therefore automatically in a privileged position to state his views. Sarrazin was presented as the expert while the people
countering (or indeed supporting) his arguments were presented as laymen. He also had more airtime than any other individual. Hardly a triumph of fair debate, no matter how crudely he came across.

Now just to get my position clear, I would rather nobody offered Sarrazin a public platform for his unscientific and plainly racist views. However, for a country that is so proud of its tradition of fair debate, these two events are an absolute embarrassment.

I'm looking forward to Thursday's launch of the Manifest der Vielen in Berlin - a collection of pieces by the very people Sarrazin dumps on in his mega-selling book. Because when the other side doesn't play fair, why should we bother? Dance the Sarrazin!

Update: my friend Karen Margolis sent me a link to an FAZ article by two of the signatories. Maria Exner and Max Neufeind are rightly annoyed at the German press coverage claiming they wanted to have the event banned, and the way Broder is treated as a harmless clown.

Clemens Meyer, All the Lights

The fine upstanding people of And Other Stories have announced it in their newsletter, so I don't have to keep it to myself any longer. I've been biting my tongue for weeks and weeks now, so here goes - I'm currently translating Clemens Meyer's second book for them, Die Nacht, die Lichter. It's a collection of excellent short stories that won the Prize of the Leipzig Book Fair when it came out in 2008. I sincerely think it's some of the very best German writing around, and I'm not just saying that because Meyer took me to the races last summer.

Translating the stories is tricky but incredibly rewarding. At times I find myself gazing into space, marvelling at how good they are and how lucky I am to be working on them. But most of the time they suck me in and make me frown in concentration, suspending real life all around me. I have to stay at home to work on them rather than translating in my office where there are other people present, partly because the work is quite draining. And it actually helps sometimes if I have a slight hangover.

The book should be out in the autumn of this year. If you can't wait (and who can blame you), there are two stories published online, at The Guardian and Brooklyn Rail.

We're changing the title slightly, because the literal translation, ummm, rhymes. And while And Other Stories are pretty damn daring publishing translated short stories (not a terribly fashionable thing to do), even they don't want to go as far as launching a book on the British public with a rhyming title.

Asymptote Journal

A kind reader pointed me in the direction of a new online international journal on literary translation and contemporary writing, by the name of Asymptote. The first issue showcases poetry, prose and non-fiction from a very wide range of languages, plus a translator interview and feature articles. Thomas Bernhard fans will be pleased to see an extract from - well, what exactly? I assume Prose, published by Seagull Books - translated by Martin Chalmers.

It looks like it should be a very interesting resource, using different media. Despite including the term 'smorgasbord of languages'.

DIY Anti-Nuclear Litfest in Hamburg

Sponsoring is a tricky subject. There's only so much you can organise without paying people, and corporate sponsoring can be one way to pay writers and employees at literary festivals. Or indeed to pay award-winners a sum of money, as with the Best Translated Book Award, which is underwritten by Amazon. In this case, the sponsor gets the tax benefits, the feeling of supporting international literature above and beyond their own efforts, and the positive publicity. Plus of course the negative publicity after Melville House publisher Dennis Johnson called for a boycott.

In Hamburg, people are angry about the energy giant Vattenfall's sponsoring of a local literary festival. A group of activists, writers, publishers, translators and other cultural bods came up with the idea of staging their own alternative festival. Here's part of their original statement (in my translation):

We have nothing against reading festivals. We have no desire to demonise a well organised literary festival simply because the organisers are trying to cover the costs with sponsoring. That is not the case here, though. In 2006 Vattenfall took over as sponsor of the "Hamburger Lesetage" (...). As is now unfortunately all too common in the field of sponsoring, the energy conglomerate is no longer presenting itself as a mere supporter of the literary event. Instead, the company holds the rights to the name and is allowed to call itself the "initiator, sponsor and organiser", thereby branding itself as culturally affine, as it is known nowadays. So that it does not blend into the background, since 2010 every writer is looked after by a "Vattenfall mentor" – a company employee who "introduces the author to the audience". The aim is for the company name and the cultural event to meld into a single brand – and the media are going along with it all too willingly: we can read the name "Vattenfall Lesetage" all over the place. We are supposed to link the event with the name of the company as often as possible and without even thinking. Vattenfall, Vattenfall, Vattenfall.

Said company is currently in the process of re-opening a dodgy nuclear power station and is a major player in the German nuclear power lobby.

So, the good people of Hamburg are organising readings during the same week as the corporate festival - with a number of interesting people on the bill - and encouraging people to change their electricity company at the same time. All under the name of "Lesetage selber machen - Vattenfall Tschüss sagen" (DIY Litfest - Say Bye Bye to Vattenfall). I like it.