Leipzig Book Fair: Do you know Kant?

The Gaza war was the topic at the Leipzig Book Fair. During the opening in the Gewandhaus, Chancellor Olaf Scholz was annoyed by hecklers during his speech. “Stop yelling, it’s over!” Scholz shouted like an impatient teacher. But when the first caller was overwhelmed by security guards, someone else on the other side of the hall continued, and when she had to fall silent, a man behind her started.

Three effectively distributed shouters were enough for the “FAZ” to report back a day later: “The opening ceremony of the book fair was in jeopardy for five minutes.” But then everything continued as normal, with a total of eight speeches to be given from that evening onwards , including a laudation by the sociologist Eva Illouz for the philosopher Omri Boehm, who received the Leipzig Book Prize for European Understanding for his neo-Kantian-inspired book “Radikaler Universalismus. Beyond Identity,” which he published in 2022 against the particularism of identity politics.

What the three people in the Gewandhaus were shouting was not easy to understand. But you could read it, at the tram stops at the fair they had written it, using a stencil, spray-painted on the floor: “Stop the genocide” and “Long live Gaza”. A day later, a speech in the Old Trading Exchange by Federal President Frank-Walter Steinmeier was disrupted, again by various people shouting against Israel, who were not so easy to stop. In contrast to “the Chancellor under verbal attack” (“FAZ”), Steinmeier reacted in a presidential manner and said: “This is a serious topic that we in this country do not just discuss during the book fair.” One could also say: Bad teacher, good teacher.

But Steinmeier wasn’t concerned with the “serious topic”; that was just a phrase. Instead, he was concerned with the Basic Law (turns 75), the abolished GDR (also called the East) and Leipzig (the West German establishment’s favorite revolutionary city). Steinmeier said that the East-West confrontation was fading and that today we are “a lot further along.” As proof, he explicitly mentioned East German authors such as Manja Präkels, Anne Rabe and Lukas Rietzschel, whom he considered to be part of a “new generation” who were “excavating” the “turmoil and pain of the upheaval” of the 1990s.

Later in the evening, Anne Rabe (younger East German), Marcel Beyer (settled West German) and Ingo Schulze (older East German) attempted a German-German discussion (as one would have said in the past). For the “FAZ” that was “really a bit much on what was already a strenuous evening.”

The East-West relationship remains unsettled. On Friday, the TV presenter and journalist Jessy Wellmer pointed out in a “Taz” talk about her book “The New Alienation” that people in the East continue to be annoyed by the “moral arrogance” of the West, as a narrative of their own Devaluation, which is why many would develop understanding for the morally ostracized Putin because they would also like to see him as an Easterner who is somehow disappointed with the West. Wellmer criticizes this attitude as being just as naive and unworldly as that of her Western colleagues, for example from the “Süddeutsche Zeitung”, who still perceive the East as an incomprehensible puzzle country to which they do not want to go themselves, but would rather send them there as East Germans.

In any case, such identity politics journalism has nothing to do with the universalism demanded by Boehm. The last question from “Taz” editor Peter Unfried, born in 1963 in Schwäbisch Gmünd, to Wellmer, born in 1979 in Güstrow, was funny: whether her name was actually “just Jessy”? Answer: “Yes, and not Jessica either.” And certainly not with a middle name of Sandy, Mandy or Nancy.

But how should we talk about all these problems and prejudices? On Thursday, Barbi Marković was awarded the Leipzig Book Prize for fiction for her short story book “Minihorror”, in which she shows in a comical and depressing way how everyday situations tip into the surreal and unpleasant, for example in “zombie talk” between people at parties, Because nobody “knows the same TV series, nobody listens to the same music, nobody has played the same computer game. They don’t share suffering, at least none that they want to talk about now.” On the political meta-level, this applies consistently to East and West as well as to Israel and Palestine.

Omri Boehm, born in Haifa in 1979, who has been teaching philosophy in New York since 2010, has noticed that every year there are fewer students who, at the beginning of their studies, agree with the principle that every human being has inalienable rights, he said at an event organized by the PEN Berlin on the topic “How utopian is peace?” with a clear reference to the Middle East. For Boehm, the Netanyahu government, Hamas and the radical left make differences between people, and that has a fatal effect on the “center” of society. As a result, more and more people thought human dignity was a rumor.

He himself considers the “two-state solution” for Israelis and Palestinians, which has been repeatedly preached in various Sunday speeches but has never been implemented so far, to have failed. Instead, he advocated a “one-state solution” in the form of a confederation, based on universalism as an ideal like Immanuel Kant. The Israelis must “protect the stateless Palestinians” in order to create a common state with them in the future, believes Boehm and demands first a ceasefire in Gaza – not unlike the people who disrupted the event where he was awarded his Prize for Understanding. But unlike them, he emphasized that the Israeli army’s attacks on “military targets” and the Hamas army were necessary. Hamas started the Gaza war, not Israel – anyone who keeps this quiet or trivializes it, or leaves it out of the discourse, is ultimately arguing anti-Semitic, one must add.

Discourses are often more complicated than you think. Have you ever thought about what makes artificial intelligence tick? At an event organized by the criminal publishing house in the self-governing youth cultural center in Conne Island about the new anthology “Code & Prejudice,” the computer scientist and philosopher Jürgen Geuter emphasized that the AI ​​had been fed “bagfuls of prejudice,” including advertising since 1920 and This also includes all the stereotypes and racism that the ever-popular chat GPT naturally reproduces and perpetuates. For Geuter this is the “flattening of the world and of thinking”.

But sometimes it also seems to atheists as if the “hand of God” is intervening. This is what Diego Maradona said about his famous goal, which he scored with his hand against England in the 1986 World Cup quarter-final and which the referee thought was a regular header. The musician and author Florian Weber, who plays drums for the Sportfreunde Stiller, describes the discourse about this in his book “Maradona Mío”, from which he read in a very entertaining way in the Felsenkeller. It was a discourse in his childhood, among twelve-year-olds, that polarized this goal, “even if we didn’t yet know what polarizing was.”

To this day, he doesn’t believe in God, because his God is called Maradona, says Weber, whose book was published in the new football series “Idols” by Voland & Quist, which Frank Willmann publishes. That same evening he read the foreword to his new book “Forays through the Wild Football East,” published by Ventil-Verlag. “East” here means Eastern Europe, which is also the topic of his column on the nd sports page. For Willmann, “football being left behind in the East is the last sacred spectacle of our time”: full of tradition, longing and pain. He is also driven by the dream of universalism and justice – despite everything. “The Easterner looks to the West with a longing that the West by no means deserves,” writes Willmann. And then at two in the morning the dance floor at Conne Island rang out: “Don’t hurt me.” The refrain of Haddaway’s old Eurodance hit as a call against war and madness.