Leipzig Book Fair – Happy is dangerous

Was that a joke or not? On Saturday morning I heard a stocky man who came towards his wife: “We are Germans, we go around right.” I could not take a closer look at him, too much crowds, even more than usual at the Leipzig Book Fair. You felt like in a long traffic jam on the highway, just on foot. In the corridors in the halls and especially in the tubes that connect the halls, the space was slowly climbed up, while one came forward very long, held on the lane of the book measurement staff, which regulated the flow of visitors and made sure that you did not get out on the pedestrian background to overtake. No more tickets were sold from Saturday afternoon so that people would not go crazy.

The longest snake that I saw stood behind the barrier tape in front of the Lyx publishing house. A stand that looked like a pink doll’s house in Groß, in which, like in a bookstore, the New Adult bestsellers’ new-adult bestsellers published in Rosa Cover, “Romance”, “Problems”, “Fantasy” and “Suspense” could be purchased. Not as special editions for collectors or something, but in normal editions, as they are available in an X-like business and shipping service. Why do the young people form an extra snake in the visitor snakes of the fair, without all the teenage hysteria, as you know them from live concerts? Is that perhaps a pubescent patience challenge? No, this almost sedated seeming and buying is a kind of “happening”, explained to me a publishing employee who had to regulate these buying movements like a traffic policy.

In any case, Lyx is a gold vein for the Bastei Lübbe Verlag, to which it belongs as an imprint, in the middle of the problem industry (everything is more expensive and less in demand). According to the association of German writers (VS), only two percent of the local authors can only live from writing, everyone else is considered “hybrid”, that is: they need an additional job. “We can only live from writing if we don’t have to live from writing,” said VS chairman Lena Falkenhagen when she presented the results of a “fee survey” of her association at the fair. Accordingly, only 17 percent indicate to achieve “good to very good income” with their writing activity. According to Falkenhagen, there are 40 income millionaires among the German authors. But the average advance of publishing, of which one should then write an entire book, which can take a year and longer and is classified by the Federal Employment Agency as a “highly complex activity”, is 3,500 euros.

And that was often the case with the fee. On the other hand, Barbara Kalende, who, with Richard Stoiber, was leading the March Verlag as a two-person company: “We exploit ourselves the most.” Even though work is often often carried out on Saturday or Sunday, there is still too much still there. March is still one of the best known and most renowned by the small publishers. And he is at the fair, the fees of which many publishers and newspapers, including the small “ND” and the big “FAZ”, can no longer afford. The mighty visitor flows of the fair suggest a different impression that they push themselves over the visibility of the economic crises such as the large oceans over the ecological disasters such as plastic waste.

The rich Norway, which this year was the host country of the fair this year, cannot distract with its demonstrative beautiful-all-in-order social democracy, which the success writer Erik Fosnes Hansen presented on Saturday at the long night of Norwegian literature with a state-of-sided meaning: “The sun is shining on you / the shadow, the grass for everyone is often.” Has hardly been spoken in the corridors about the host country, and his presentation and program in Hall 4 were also in Bieder and Knausgårdisch of self-referential-inherent.

What was more interesting and exciting was what happened in the neighborhood at the stand of Traduki, the network for authors and translations from Southeast Europe. For example, when the Bosnian-Croatian author Asja Bakić from “Deliciency”, her new second volume with stories from the Verlag, who was published, announced as “feminism in the age of the posthuman baroque”. She read a story about a young woman who became blind overnight – because, as it turns out, she had masturbated in a bed under a glass crucifix, which then fell and broken. A Kafkaeske punishment of God or whoever, very funny. “How are such stories in Croatia recorded?”, The Traduki presenter Maja Gebhardt wanted to know, Bakić only replied in one word: “Bad.” She was “communist and feminist”, but she did not want to write manifest, but short stories because they were much more difficult to write, because they would leave the readers alone without the explanatory connection of a romans. Especially in the politically extremely difficult times that come to us, “we would have to learn to be irritated,” said Gebhardt. You shouldn’t always feel great, “happy is dangerous”.

The beautiful book “East Flickers”, which the artist Philipp Baumgarten and social scientist Annekathrin Kohout have published by Mitteldeutsche Verlag, also deals with the feeling of being alone. There is a selection of photos of an empty eastern Germany; However, these are not an old faded SED ruins, but purposes from the 1990s that look as built and not picked up: supermarkets, suburbs and industrial areas. The west in the east that became the west. It is about the tilting points, as Baumgarten told at an event of the MDR, and about interrelationships, just like the Eastler only becomes “Ossi” when he appeared in the West and the Westler to the “Wessi” in the east. When Baumgarten, born in Zeitz in 1985, studied in the west, he found it too stupid and divided his friends in “Southis” and “Nordis”.

Together with 13 authors, including Marlen Hobrack, Lukas Rietzschel and Paula Irmschler, Baumgarten and Kohout present themselves as “We Wenden-Millenials”, which were born in the 80s and 90s, to “let a cool pinch flicker flicker through the grave fights”, as Baumgarten said. The basic feeling is a “torn down” between Eastern History and Western pop culture. The defense of the GDR today fell into the hands of the reactionaries, the AfD and its environment would praise the underlying state for its prices and emphasize that there were neither reeducation programs nor 68 rebellion.

But who abolished this state in 1989/90? It was not the imploded SED, but the CDU in East and West. An event of the Konrad Adenauer Foundation was reminiscent of this on Friday evening, when two thick volumes with the timely protocols of the CDU/DA faction were presented in the folk chamber, which was published in 1990, which were published by Herder. As a reminder: there was the abbreviation for the newly founded small party of democratic departure, which also belonged to Angela Merkel, which, contrary to all surveys, was hardly chosen because it came out shortly before the election that her party leader was a amazed state security. The CDU then became the strongest party and Sabine Bergmann-Pohl overnight to the Parliament President and thus also the last head of state of the GDR, which was then changed with 164 laws and 93 decisions of the People’s Chamber. The People’s Chamber was a “working parliament”, as Bergmann-Pohl explained, and unique in German political history because its main task was to abolish itself in order to open up in the FRG.

However, this would not be thanked for the politicians at the time, complained on the podium of the invited SPD politician and short-term GDR foreign minister Markus Meckel, who perceives the Sunday speeches on the fall of the memorial and reunification as predictable and boring and considers the last GDR government to be scientifically examined too little and generally taken too little. Instead, only Helmut Kohl is talking and that is wrong. There was only slight contradiction from the CDulers present. And there was Rainer Eppelmann, the former and so far the only German “disarmament minister”, who was in a long -winded, self -righteous explanations in a half cabaret tone. They originally wanted to make the GDR “more colorful, better, more honest, successful”, he said. But then suddenly everything was there. Cordula Schubert, who had been a minister for youth and sports for the CDU at the time, remembered plastic bags that they had received in Karl-Marx-Stadt from the west with Germany flag and CDU. They were sold for a mark and suddenly everyone ran around in the city. So you can also tell the downfall of the GDR.