World Book Day: Reading is more

A day to celebrate and stroll. A huge folk festival is celebrated on the streets and squares of Barcelona. Stands with books and roses that lovers are supposed to give to each other this April 23rd. This is the tradition of Diada de Sant Jordi, a festival that has become the epitome of Catalan identity.

According to legend, Saint George came to the aid of the Christians in the fight against the Moors. He is revered in many countries – from England to Georgia, from Bulgaria to the Middle East. Sculptures and paintings show him drawing his lance over a fearsome dragon. He is the patron saint of knights and men of war – the “Saint George Ribbon” already existed under the Russian Tsar, which was exploited as a symbol under Putin and banned in Ukraine and the Baltic states. But here, far from anything martial, a proverbial lance is to be broken for love and reading. Legend has it that in the Catalan village of Montblanc, Sant Jordi rescued a beautiful princess from the clutches of a monster. And when the Dragonborn touched the earth, a rose bush grew.

Catalonia has had this rose festival on April 23rd since the 15th century, to which flower sellers are said to currently owe 40 percent of their annual turnover. Booksellers want to keep up. How fortunate for them and all literature enthusiasts that at the same time as Sant Jordi, UNESCO’s World Book Day is celebrated, the date of which refers to the anniversary of the deaths of Cervantes and Shakespeare.

The day before the festival you can see the preparations in Barcelona’s picturesque old town. Traders set up their stalls on Las Ramblas. Buildings like the “Casa Batlló” (The House of the Genius), designed by the Catalan modernist Antoni Gaudí, on the magnificent Passeig de Gràcia boulevard are decorated with flowers. Many Catalans take time off work for Sant Jordi and World Book Day. How nice it would be if people in this country would do the same for Book Day. But would they really use the time to buy books and read? Would they perhaps rather sleep in or sit in front of the television, exhausted as many are? At least go outside and get some fresh air. Books and roses? Some people would definitely prefer a beer mile.

According to “Börsenblatt”, 36 percent of adult Germans said in 2023 that they read a book at least once a week. That is one percentage point more than in 2013. The most significant increases (from 28 to 78 percent) occurred in “playing on the cell phone, surfing, chatting” and “using the internet” (from 55 to 97 percent). Television, the strongest category in 2013 with 96 percent, “lost by 12 percentage points.” While in 2013 74 percent said they read a newspaper at least once a week, now only 42 percent of Germans do so.

I would be surprised if this trend didn’t also exist in Catalonia. Everyone involved in the book market wants the largest possible readership – including “Ona Llibres”, one of the largest bookstores in Barcelona. Modern and at the same time with a sense of the traditional, a pleasant literary ambience has been created here. But how can we achieve this by reaching as many people as possible?

In 2019, when I was in a school in Tatarstan (819 kilometers east of Moscow), I was fascinated by a banner: “Reading brings respect.” In Germany that would have been speaking in vain. You can gain “reputation” even without being literate. In any case, “education” is becoming more subordinate to the needs of the labor market. From the cultural technique of reading, only what seems appropriate for the relevant tasks is used.

But reading is more: thinking beyond what is practical, questioning the given (including yourself), letting your imagination wander into infinity, learning to know and appreciate something other than just your own reality. “A wise trader” is one who brings goods to his homeland from foreign countries, wrote the Catalan philosopher Ramon Llul (1235–1316), after whom a cultural center in Barcelona is named. “An even wiser trader would be you, my son, if you moved to foreign lands and brought with you the best habits you could find.”

Yes, if only World Book Day could be celebrated in Berlin like it is in Barcelona! Of course, bookstores, publishers, libraries and schools are coming up with a lot of ideas for this occasion. For example, the book “I’ll give you a story” is distributed to around a million school children. That is to be appreciated, but I would like more: a large folk festival that praises the value of the book as an issue for society as a whole.

Even if reading appears to be a private leisure activity, it is much more than that: education in a comprehensive sense as a prerequisite for functioning democracy. Especially since many people feel like they are “left behind,” the socio-economic crisis we find ourselves in is also a socio-cultural one, to use the words of the sociologist Andreas Reckwitz, whose book “The End of Illusions. “Politics, Economics and Culture in Late Modernity” is something I would like to recommend to everyone.

The big celebration of World Book Day – “Leipzig Reads” on the occasion of the book fair could be a model for this – would of course also have to provide space for political discussions, as well as for poetry, prose and music. The message: Life is good in a reading country. Books and flowers, even a beer mile – enlivened and strengthened by many impressions, some may finally be tempted to read. And those who need reading to live anyway will be even more inspired.