Your Tucholsky Library Needs You - Today!

The Kurt-Tucholsky-Bibliothek in Esmarchstraße, Berlin-Prenzlauer Berg, is already an unusual project. The local authority closed this small local library down at the end of 2007 - to save money - and a group of volunteers opened it up again in July 2008. It's now run by about forty people in their spare time, still affiliated to the city's public library network but receiving far less public funding than other libraries.

Because of this affiliation, says this article in the Prenzlauer Berg Nachrichten, the library is obliged to keep its stock up to date. That involves culling a certain number of books every year (3600 – 15% of their 24,000 titles), which are supposed to be replaced by new books. Unfortunately, the budget for new books, which comes at least partly from donations, is lower than other libraries'. Five thousand euro, to be precise, which buys about 500 media, as the librarians state. You can imagine what will happen in the medium term: culling damaged books and media absolutely nobody uses is all fine and good, they say, but at this rate it'll only be a few years before they have none left.

So they have an idea. On Wednesday, 19 June, four borough librarians will be coming to "help" them carry out the cull. All you need to do is go to the library during their opening hours today - 3 to 7 p.m., Esmarchstraße 18, and take out some books. Like a literature protection flashmob. Because if the books aren't on the shelves they can't be taken away. Each borrower can take up to sixty media out at a time, and in case you can't actually carry sixty books at once, they've also kindly offered to store them for you.

It seems there is some confusion on the official front over how strictly this rule has to be applied. What the Tucholsky volunteers want is to be allowed to cull the same number of media as they replace. Perhaps a show of public solidarity will encourage the local authority to go a little easier on them. And if all else fails - or you're simply too far away and can't use the inter-library distance loaning service - you can always donate to their new purchases fund.

Michael Krüger Complains (Part XIV)

Ah, Michael Krüger. Such a grumpy old curmudgeon - you've gotta love him. My friend Amanda DeMarco interviewed him for Publishing Perspectives, where he exudes pessimism on all sorts of subjects: who should have won a Nobel prize, bad books, American publishing, and this little gem on his successor as head of the Hanser publishing house:

Jo Lendle was chosen by the board of Carl Hanser Verlag. He is a young, good-looking, educated and friendly person, so I hope that Hanser made the right choice.

Writers and Translators on Turkish Protests

I hesitated to write about this, not sure of whether posting about Turkish protests on love german books would be exploitative and tasteless. But then I decided it wouldn't.

Germany has strong links to Turkey on ground level, despite cool diplomatic relations. I probably don't need to explain why, right? So news of the Gezi Park protests spread very quickly here. I was confused by the flood of Facebook posts from friends and colleagues in the UK, saying "We need to know this is happening" when in fact, we did know over here. But then I worked out they were talking about effective media blackouts inside Turkey. There have been solidarity demonstrations in Berlin, where apparently Germans suddenly learned various catchy Turkish slogans. I don't know whether they also indulged in public drinking after 10 p.m.

And writers are involved too. First there was Moritz Rinke, who seems to have been in Istanbul to get married (I think his fiancée is from Turkey), and wrote a diary of events and gave a number of interviews. Interesting, if a little confused. Then there's Mely Kiyak, who's in Istanbul to research a new book and "will be reporting weekly on the situation and the protests". She's written about sleeping next door to Erdogan and about Turkish TV reporting.

I've also been following translator-in-residence at London's Free Word Centre Canan Marasligil, who's reporting from afar on how the events make her feel, fascinating linguistic phenomena, and more. What I like is that she feels the need to explain more, because British readers know less than Germans about Istanbul. Or I assume they do.

As Erdogan threatens to "clean" Gezi Park so the authorities can deal with the "fringe terrorist" groups he accuses of being there, we can watch tendentious language used in a very aggressive manner. I'm glad there are other people sharing their information and knowledge in a more considered way.

Music and Translation

I'm leaving for Wolfenbüttel for my annual DJ duty for the German literary translators (this time with Hank the DJ, who is charge of country and indie, while I shall stick to sort of soulful stuff). As you know, translators need a strong sense of rhythm to do their work well. They like a nice dance. In the never-ending list of translation analogies, the "musician interpreting a piece" is pretty common. I do wonder whether musicians ever compare themselves to translators - or are perhaps allowed to be simply musicians. "What's it like being a musician, Mister McCartney?" "It's a bit like being a translator actually."

Anyway, this is going somewhere else: take a look at this fascinating project all about translating music. They're looking at opera in particular, as there's a lot of translation in that field, but also other kinds of music. They ask:

Why is Schiller’s Ode to Joy in Beethoven’s ninth symphony translated into so many languages in international performances while a piece such as Haydn’s Creation is usually performed in German or English?

Why are so many songs and musical pieces not translated and how can we improve communication in this area, thus opening up culturally? What can music mediate in films and other artistic forms? How can we carry improving the access of music to those who have impairments and miss it, because they have lost their hearing for example?

They're planning events and workshops, sharing best practice, and so on. It's a fascinating area. All sorts of things spring to my mind. Stage (and film) musicals are frequently translated into German on a really high level, by professionals who don't necessarily consider themselves translators. My favourite is the German version of My Fair Lady, which totally hits the spot by transferring the Cockney fun into Berlin dialect. And I note that ABBA musical is now entirely in German too, including the songs. Or think of those dodgy Beatles recordings in German! I've translated pop songs for a German singer, which never got used, sadly, but were great fun to do. Recently at our translation lab in Berlin, we looked at a few astounding translations of songs from Der Blaue Engel: "Falling in Love Again"! The lyrics are miles away from "Ich bin von Kopf bis Fuß auf Liebe eingestellt" - but they absolutely capture the spirit of the song. And look what they did for Marlene Dietrich in the USA. Listen to a 1939 broadcast via that link and especially the way she's announced as "one of us". Wonderful. We've also had fun translating lyrics in the past at Translation Idol - a song by the writer Jan Böttcher spawned all sorts of weird and wonderful versions.

Translating lyrics is a special challenge, but produces special solutions. Have a good weekend.

Georg Büchner Prize to Sibylle Lewitscharoff

Various publications have reported that this year's Georg Büchner Prize, the most prestigious award for German writers' body of work, will be awarded to Sibylle Lewitscharoff.

She was born in Stuttgart in 1954, to a German mother and a Bulgarian father, and worked as an accountant for an advertising firm before dedicating herself to writing full time. According to Der Spiegel, she also invented a grammar boardgame. She has published seven novels, most recently Blumenberg about the philosopher Hans Blumenberg and the lion in his study. Apostoloff won the Prize of the Leipzig Book Fair and will be out in my translation from Seagull Books this summer. I am rather excited by proxy.

The jury stated:

In her novels, Sibylle Lewitscharoff has applied inexhaustible observational energy, narrative imagination and linguistic invention to explore anew and question the boundaries of what we consider our everyday reality.

Congratulations!

Schneckenmühle vs. Nilowsky

Is it particularly crass to write a joint review of two quite different novels, merely because their protagonists fall into the same sociocultural dynamic? Possibly, but I shall do so anyway.

Jochen Schmidt’s Schneckenmühle (emphasis on the third syllable) is narrated by fourteen-year-old Jens and set at a summer camp in the dying days of the GDR. The narrator of Torsten Schulz’s Nilowsky is another fourteen-year-old boy (to begin with) in East Berlin in 1976 ff. The characters themselves have little in common, as do the respective plots; and yet both novels slyly dose us with information on life in East Germany.

In Schneckenmühle, that underhand drip-feed is part of the novel’s concept, it seemed to me. Up until about halfway through, I’d been wondering when the plot was going to kick in before I noticed what Schmidt was up to. Off Jens goes to his last ever summer camp, his naïve voice sharing the joys and horrors of school holidays spent in a hut with his peers. Girls, bad jokes, nudity, illicit alcohol, bullying, not washing for weeks on end. On the surface, it’s all fairly standard stuff, even if you come from a country that doesn’t do summer camps. And enjoyable, of course, because Schmidt knows how to entertain his readers from his long experience as a Lesebühnen author (which I usually describe as slam prose, for want of a better analogy).

But two other things are happening in parallel. Firstly, Jens has a rather strange fixation with consumer goods. His mother writes him a letter and the most thrilling news is that she’s bought a pedal-bin for the kitchen. He can hardly wait to try it out. Or he buys a replacement glass liner for a vacuum flask as an exciting gift for his father. In fact, the highlight of every trip the kids go on is the shopping part. A jaunt across the border to Czechoslovakia starts with the lines:

Unfortunately, the shops aren’t right by the station; you have to walk a little way into the town and find them in the side streets. We storm the very first food shop, full of greed for the unknown sweeties in excitingly unfamiliar wrappers.

The main difference between the two countries in the kids’ eyes seems to be in their respective consumer goods: sherbet sweets, ketchup in tubes, rubber snakes, bendy erasers and rulers, table football sets – all the Czech excitement makes Jens ill.

And then there are the more subtle details: the people disappearing, Jens’ discomfort about openly displaying his Christianity, the kids singing Western songs at the disco, the Russian soldiers. And a rather strange night-time adventure kicks in to provide surface plot action. I don’t want to write a great deal about this aspect, because it’s one of the most interesting things about reading the book. Perhaps it’s enough to warn you to look a little deeper than Jens’s reading of events. In retrospect, I’m reminded of Irmgard Keun’s Child of All Nations, in which another young narrator narrowly misses the historical point. Very clever indeed.

And so to Nilowsky. As I mentioned, the two books have little in common in terms of structure. Schulz’s narrator Markus ages in the course of the story, going from fourteen to about twenty, with a brief epilogue some years later, and his voice is more mature than Jens’s. He’s a conscious storyteller, perhaps, rather than an accidental one. His parents have moved from Prenzlauer Berg to a dire corner of East Berlin for work. It could be the area between Adlershof and Spindlersfeld, still not exactly Berlin’s sunny side today, but in Nilowsky a reeking triangle between a chemical plant, a forest and railway line.

And here Markus meets Reiner Nilowsky, an inveterate trainspotter a couple of years older than him. Especially in contrast to Markus’s dreary life, Nilowsky reminded me rather of Astrid Lindgren’s Karlsson-on-the-roof – a mischief-maker extraordinaire with his own rules and theories of how the world works. In this book, though, the oddball character has a very dark side. We see him being beaten by his father very early on, followed by his despised father’s and beloved grandmother’s deaths. And we meet his love interest Carola, who has decided to remain thirteen even though she’s seventeen: anorexia.

Markus falls under the older boy’s spell but is equally drawn to Carola – again, nothing we haven’t read before. But Nilowsky is his gateway to an otherworld, a GDR populated by drunks, old ladies and guest workers from Mozambique. As in Schneckenmühle, Schulz gives us a rare insight into a particular aspect of life in East Germany, in this case racism. Fawned over by the old ladies, the Mozambicans live in barracks in the forest and are generally condemned by everyone else, including Markus’s father, who is in charge of them at the chemical works. They are expected to work hard, learn their trade and then return to the “brother country” to aid the revolution. As far as I’m aware this was standard practice in the GDR. I’ve met people who came over as students and were treated similarly, but managed to settle here after the Wall fell. In fact the SPD is now fielding its first black parliamentary candidate, Karamba Diaby, who originally came from Senegal to study in Leipzig. For our adventurous Markus, the Mozambicans are enticing as rebellious heroes, and one of the most bizarre things Nilowsky does involves some kind of voodoo ritual. I wondered at times whether the author hadn’t created rather two-dimensional stereotypes, but I decided the very fact that he portrays Africans in the GDR is pretty groundbreaking, and what he shows us is how people saw them. And that no doubt included a good pinch of racist clichés.

Torsten Schulz has a background in screenwriting, and as such his plotting is more robust than Schmidt’s. After crises in the family and his friendship, Markus moves away again and loses touch with Nilowsky for a while, marking the apex of the novel. But the rest of the book deals with his attempts to grow up and away from his strange friend. As he gets older, Carola becomes a more realistic prospect – except of course that would mean betraying Nilowsky. And Nilowsky’s life becomes darker and darker while Markus’s grows more and more conventional. The ending is melancholy with a tinge of iconoclasm. Throughout, Nilowsky's unconventional voice stands out, making for some excellent writing.

Two fascinating novels, both featuring stories well told. Go ahead and read them both.

Bucheli, Weidermann and the FAZ Comments Section: a Utopianist Rant

I've been thinking about literary criticism and blogging, sharing some of my ideas here as I go along. And I'm not the only one, as it turns out. On the day I was on that panel in Solothurn, Roman Bucheli had an article in the NZZ on the pressure of digital options on literary criticism (and then sat in the front row of the event, intimidating me slightly). To sum up my reading of the piece, he says that criticism is under pressure because of financial issues (with newspapers having to please advertisers). He also talks about the idea that digital publications can do a lot more because they have more space, and he says the idea of just putting the same reviews online as in print is a bit of a wasted opportunity. He closes:

Even (and perhaps especially) in the digital age, there will be space and need for such sophisticated texts. Digital is not necessarily the grave-digger of analogue critique; rather, it could become a platform for a critical and analytical competence that has  existed in various forms since Lessing. To enable this, open and free spaces for thinking must be created, where the art of reading is linked with enjoyment of argument and the will to interpret is linked with the Eros of writing.

I love this idea, although of course it's very abstract, as utopias often are. To my mind, those spaces would be open to both professional critics and mere amateur book-lovers. They would enable genuine conversations, perhaps in a similar way to the World Literature Forum or the Guardian's Tips, Links and Suggestions thread – only they'd incorporate professional criticism.

So then Volker Weidermann wrote a piece in response to Bucheli in the FAZ. Basically, he said that Bucheli was too pessimistic and critics should stick to writing excellent reviews. Bucheli's comment that readers of print editions are less impatient than digital readers, he points out, is nothing but an assumption - we can't know how many articles are read all the way through in a print newspaper. And he rejects Bucheli's call for new spaces:

The only response is that these "platforms for critical and analytical competence" and these "free spaces for thinking" already exist. They are the arts pages of the daily and weekly newspapers, and – particularly free, particularly open – the internet. All that's needed is to fill these spaces, in such a way that people want to read it.

Look to the past, says Weidermann, and lists a number of excellent literary critics of yesteryear. But for me, he's missed the point. I shall address his vague, blanket use of the concept of "the internet" in a moment. However, his insistence that the newspaper arts pages (in print or digital form) are a free space appears a little ridiculous, frankly. Professional critics can write there, but only if the editors accept their pieces. Readers now have an opportunity to react in a slightly more immediate way via the comments section, but in practice this opportunity is very limited indeed, particularly in the FAZ.

The FAZ comment field has 1000 characters. Try making a coherent point on a complex issue in 1000 characters. Yesterday I tried and failed. What I wanted to say took up three separate comments. It was probably also riddled with spelling mistakes and grammatical errors, and very possibly my argumentation was flawed. I can't tell, however, because the FAZ moderates comments before they go online and hasn't yet activated my serious points. Ah well, it's the weekend, I thought initially. It's rather nice that the moderators get the weekend off. Only to find my rather puerile comment about the gendered avatars had been waved through, much to my embarrassment. And then another comment posted by someone else today (Sunday). I'm a little bit upset now, because I'd been talking about the article with a couple of lit-bloggers on Facebook and we/I thought it'd be fun to have that conversation in public, via the comments section.

Obviously, part of my annoyance is sour grapes about what may well be a technical glitch. But on a less personal level, the structure of a comments section that limits the length of entries is a hierarchical one. The professional journalists have space to expand their ideas, while the rest of us are allowed to respond in brief. I think I wrote something to the effect that it's probably not the FAZ's function or indeed intention to democratise literary criticism. However, they did in fact have a more open approach at one point, with the FAZ Lesesaal (which died in 2008). A shame.

Because, given time, that digital space could have become something akin to what Bucheli wrote about and I imagined. A public platform rather than closed conversations like we have on Facebook; a central port of call rather than a thousand individuals' blogs.

Ah yes, the vague and blanket use of the term "the internet". Open, free, full of people expressing their individual opinions. True, this is something we can do on the internet. As Weidermann's probably aware, though, the multitude of voices expressing opinions makes it hard to develop a conversation. Wouldn't it be wonderful to have a single critical, analytical space where anyone could join in? I suspect Weidermann's hair would probably stand on end in horror at the idea. Who's supposed to pay professional critics to argue with mere readers? Ach, that's the trouble with utopias, and with incomplete ideas. They fall at the hurdle of financial reality. Still, I suppose there's always Goodreads, for those who aren't boycotting it since Amazon bought it.

To round off this rant on a more optimistic note, I have a few more amateur critics to introduce you to – excellent blogs about literature by people with day jobs:

In German: We read Indie - a conglomerate of booksellers, editors and librarians (all women) blogging about independent books. In English: Helen Finch - a Germanist writing about her work issues, German-language literature and translation - and Vertigo - a museum director writing about art and literature, with a particular emphasis on W.G. Sebald.