Dangerous Petitions Mean the End of Florida Vacations

As reported in Der Spiegel, FAZ, The Local and other sources, the German writer Ilija Trojanow was denied entry to the US on Monday, when intending to attend a German Studies conference. PEN American Center have protested to the government on his behalf.  

Here's a press release from the group of writers he's been working with:

Tuesday, October 1, 2013

US Authorities Deny Entry to German Author

On Monday, September 30, 2013, at the Salvador da Bahai airport in Brazil, writer Ilija Trojanow was prohibited from boarding an airplane that was to take him to Miami, Florida.

 The writer Ilija Trojanow had planned to travel from Brazil to the USA to take part in a German studies conference in Denver, Colorado. His flight was booked via Miami, where he was supposed to change planes.

At the American Airlines check-in counter in Salvador, Brazil, Trojanow was told that the airline had been instructed to inform the US authorities of his arrival at the airport. Once his data had been reviewed, he was refused permission to board the flight to Miami.

Ilija Trojanow held a valid, officially accepted travel authorization (ESTA). Nonetheless, the US authorities refused to allow him to enter the country. No reasons were given.

For years Trojanow has been active in protesting security legislation in the USA and Europe, and co-initiated a petition demanding a reaction to the NSA affair from the German government.  In 2009 he and the author Juli Zeh published the book Angriff auf die Freiheit – Sicherheit, Überwachungsstaat und der Abbau bürgerlicher Rechte (Attack Upon Freedom – Security, the Surveillance State and the Dismantling of Civil Rights).

“It is more than ironic that an author who raises his voice against the practices of the surveillance states should now be refused entry to the ‘land of the brave and free’,” writes Ilija Trojanow, currently stranded in Brazil, in his first statement on the incident.

The undersigned colleagues of Ilija Trojanow demand that the German government investigate this case immediately.

Juli Zeh

Eva Menasse

Michael Kumpfmüller

etc.

During the election campaign, the writers had attempted to hand over a petition asking Angela Merkel to react more strongly to the revelations of NSA spying on Europeans, as The Guardian reported. Merkel didn't come out of her office to accept it publicly.You can see the full list of writers by clicking the "petition" link above (which doesn't mean you automatically sign it).

A few British writers - including Stephen Fry and AL Kennedy - have been involved in a similar campaign with a petition addressing European leaders, according to The Guardian. Let's hope enough people sign the things for us all to cancel our Florida vacations.

Hooray for Juli Zeh, Ilja Trojanow and Benjamin Stein!

There's been a great deal of hullaballoo in Germany recently about Urheberrecht. Which is like copyright only the rules are slightly different, I believe. First a musician-cum-writer gave an angry radio interview about people expecting something for nothing on the internet. There followed statements by groups such as scriptwriters, crime writers, and so on. Then several thousand writers signed an appeal against alleged calls to abolish Urheberrecht. I'd have linked to it except it keeps making my browser crash. That might (but probably doesn't) have something to do with the fact that anonymous activists got annoyed with them and published a list of their email addresses. Thus making the anonymous activists look terribly big and clever, but perhaps not helping the debate along hugely. A number of individual writers then presumably felt threatened by the nasty electronic media and wrote rather silly pieces about how the net is ruled by semi-illiterate idiots. Then came the counter-appeals, and so on and so forth.

I'd been holding out on the subject, to be frank, because it's a very complicated issue that I feel is something for people to work out who understand intellectual property law, i.e. lawyers. And although I was encouraged to sign the mass appeal I decided not to. I can understand why German writers are running scared, looking at the record industry's rapid decline transformation. I'm an old-fashioned girl but I know musicians and even record sellers who download tracks illegally. And then imagine you've just woken up to the existence of the e-book, like basically all of Germany, and think what a shock you'd get. Eavesdropping on countless Facebook conversations, I could see that even those writers who are actually on Facebook and thus, like, totally down with the kids, are worried about pirated electronic copies of their books.

The only point of my own I have to make, which has no doubt been made before but after a while I stopped following the debate, is that I know musicians now make up for some of the losses caused by illegal downloads through live appearances. And they're something that many writers shine at too, and which can already earn them a lot decent amount of money once they hit that point of people wanting to pay to see them. Especially in Germany, where they're paid as a matter of course. So calm down, will you?

Well they already have, but I still wanted to draw your attention to three writers who are saying things I think make sense. First of all came Benjamin Stein in his blog Turmsegler. He pointed out that criticism of the evil middle-men is exaggerated, because writers need someone to do their editing, printing, marketing, royalties accounting, and so on. And that customers don't necessarily want to get creative content for free, as the major success of iTunes proves - they want things to be reasonably priced and simple to get hold of. Yes, he says, reform Urheberrecht to reflect what the internet enables us to do now, but don't abolish it.

Then Juli Zeh was interviewed along with her publisher Klaus Schöffling (love german books German publisher of the year 2011!). That was in last week's issue of the weekly Die Zeit. And here, Zeh says that high pricing of e-books encourages illegal copying, while Schöffling says, well we're not a big enough company to start lowering the prices. A strange argument, considering he also says they only sold 270 electronic copies of a hardcover that broke the 20,000 margin. But neither of them are keen on punishing individuals for ripping off e-books.

And then Zeh - who's a lawyer, hooray! - and Ilja Trojanow had a terribly sensible piece in Sunday's FAZ. They point out that piracy is so far no real threat to German writers and they add some realistic calculations to the mix. They remind us that nobody's seriously suggested abolishing Urheberrecht anyway, no, not even the digital Blackbeards of the Pirate Party. And they suggest that the upshot of all this focus could be yet more surveillance on the internet.

Oddly enough, all three of these authors have made it into English. Benjamin Stein's novel The Canvas (trans. Brian Zumhagen) is coming out any day now from Open Letter Books - a tiny weeny publishing company that has done its bit on the innovative e-book pricing front, incidentally. Ilja Trojanow made it big, big, big with his Collector of Worlds (trans. Will Hobson), and Juli Zeh's latest English translation (by the wondrous Sally-Ann Spencer) is The Method - about a meddling state. My guess is that Stein's just incredibly internet-savvy - being one of the very, very few German writers who even blogs, and an IT bod aside from that (and apologies for these parentheses inside dashes, but I'd just like to emphasize my belief that a lot of German writers and indeed readers are still very shy of the internet in general, which is something I'll rant about on another occasion) - and Trojanow and Zeh have seen the future in the UK and US book industry and aren't afraid of it.

Certainly the whole debate hasn't shown many people in a good light. Now the political parties are gradually launching new position papers on intellectual property rights and the internet, safe in the knowledge that thousands of voters really are interested. Of course that's all much less sexy than signing an appeal - on a website to boot.

Four German Titles on Incredibly Long Impac Longlist

They've announced the 156-strong longlist for the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award. Titles are nominated by participating libraries, which I think is a fantastic idea. And there are four German books in the running for the €100,000 prize - which would be split 75:25 between the author and their translator, should a translated title win.

The books are:

Christoph Hein, Settlement, tr. Philip Boehm
Ingo Schulze, New Lives, tr. John E Woods
Sasa Stanisic, How the Soldier Repairs the Gramophone, tr. Anthea Bell
Ilija Trojanov, The Collector of Worlds, tr. William Hobson

You can see which libraries participated and which books they nominated, and a brief look shows something interesting. This time around, the libraries in Germany almost all picked at least one German book, while the Austrian and Swiss libraries were completely unpatriotic. Of the thirteen nominations from England, one is a translated title. Irish libraries suggest two translations, Scottish none (although there were only two libraries participating). South African zero. USA four of around seventy suggestions. Australia none, New Zealand one. Barbados & Jamaica none, Canada one. (And sorry to have overlooked, like, half the English-speaking countries on the list. It's because I don't get out enough.)

In most cases, translated books were nominated solely by libraries in their countries of origin (which explains the lack of Austrian and Swiss titles on the list). But at least this is a good way to get greater attention for those books in the English-speaking world, however much it smacks of Eurovisionism. The actual judging is more traditional, so that also gives less popular titles a fair shot at the prize.

Trojanow Again

Speak of the devil... that Ilija Trojanow gets everywhere these days. The really rather excellent Booktrust translated fiction website now has an interview with him online, conducted by the site's editor James Smith. Asked why he thinks British readers are, ahem, slow to catch onto foreign-language writing, he gives the perfect answer:

The polite answer would be: as with the cuisine it takes time to discover and cherish the marvels of the diverse. And the impolite: a postcolonial mindset that still harbours illusions of grandeur and superiority. But then again, without the imported literatures within the English language, there wouldn’t be that much of a British literature to talk about. Forgive me, AL Kennedy!

You tell 'em, Ilija! (or Iliya, as he now seems to be transliterated)

Ilija Trojanow and Wolfram von Eschenbach

Tuesday's taz features a gorgeous little piece by Ilija Trojanow, on a scene in Parzifal where two cultures meet. A knight comes across a noble heathen in a forest clearing, they fight, the knight's sword breaks and the heathen lays down his arms. The two sit down together and talk, whereupon it comes to light that they are brothers. The heathen, being the offspring of a white man and a black woman, is spotted black and white.

Now back in the not quite so distant past, I myself read this scene. Being an arrogant product of the twentieth century (and only about 20 at the time), I assumed that this was just medieval ignorance - ha ha, they didn't know back then what mixed-race kids look like. But no, Trojanow points out, Wolfram von Eschenbach was actually paying his respect to the Arab culture, alluding to its wisdom and conveying a picture of an individual who has taken on the best aspects of both worlds. What he realised, Trojanow says, is that what separates us is only a momentary difference - "the other" only becomes obvious when two cultures fight. "The only way I can tell the heathen from the Christian," Trojanow interprets Wolfram, "is that they approach each other as enemies."

Trojanow goes from the specific to the general, and then back to fine details. The music of the African slaves in North America, he writes, has subversively conquered white high culture out of the plantations and ghettos. Which took me to Trojanow's book Kampfabsage. Originally written (but apparently not published) in English together with one of his translators, the Indian poet and cultural theorist Ranjit Hoskoté, the book calls for a new understanding of European history. I've only just started reading it, but it seems very good so far - a rallying battle cry against the myth of the "clash of the civilizations" and a long overdue reminder of just how many different influences have flown into modern Europe as we understand it.

I'm just hoping that his truly excellent Burton-inspired novel on a smiliar theme, The Collector of Worlds, released last month in the UK by Faber & Faber and translated by William Hobson, will be a hit and pave the way for Kampabsage. After all, as it was originally written in English that means no extra costs for translation.