WWhilst elsewhere people are still going shopping, trains are late, one gets on his bike, another unlocks her front door, a child has his cap pulled over his ears, while also in front of the villa of the former Suhrkamp publisher Siegfried Unseld in Frankfurt’s north end After work in a German city unfolds in all its October normality – it’s dark early, but still mild – the Ukrainian writer and musician Serhij Zhadan sits in the living room of this Unseld villa and reads from texts he wrote during the war.
Poems that he still found time for when he wasn’t involved in his country’s civil defense or taking care of soldiers who were defending it against the Russian aggressor. Zhadan first reads in Ukrainian, but later also in German: “No one can take away our right to speak our language,” a sentence from Zhadan’s recently published war diary. He’s a little smaller than you thought, you think to yourself at first, and then: He’s a lot bigger than you thought. On Sunday, Serhij Zhadan will receive the Peace Prize of the German Book Trade. Slava Ukraine.
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It’s book fair again, live in Frankfurt. Almost like it used to be, at least a little more than last autumn, when the halls seemed deserted at first and that never quite died down in the days that followed. Now the 4,000 exhibitors have moved together in three halls around the Agora, the stands of the publishers are more compact: The whole thing seems streamlined to the bare minimum and therefore somehow reasonable. But only very few people wear masks voluntarily inside, and people stand around and jostle like they used to. Every conversation begins with feeling each other’s pulse, how good it is now that the trade fair is back and whether it feels the same as it used to, and everyone is talking about the paper crisis, the book prices that can hardly be maintained. According to one publisher, people want either distraction, that is, entertainment, or books about Ukraine. After all, the Americans are back at the fair.
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On Monday evening, Kim de l’Horizon goes on stage at the Römer to accept the German Book Prize for “Blood Book”. Thanks mother and grandmother, sings, cries, explains to the jury in the first row that they also wanted to set an example with this award, for love and against hate, shaves off their hair and calls on the hall to show solidarity to show the freedom struggle of women in Iran. And if someone should have stayed seated there at that moment, you couldn’t see it for the people standing there. Book awards are also acts of self-promotion, and this act of self-promotion by a self-identified nonbinary who has written a novel about the self-empowerment of a nonbinary storyteller coming into the world and showing himself was even more so.
