Dhe beginning of the Frankfurt Book Fair will be royal this year. Felipe VI opened on Tuesday together with the German Federal President Frank-Walter Steinmeier. Spain is guest of honor there. The Spanish royal couple landed in Berlin on Sunday as a kind of vanguard. Spain is sending a delegation of around 200 authors, translators and booksellers to the book fair itself.
It is the first state visit in a quarter of a century, and the German capital is the first stop. The last time King Juan Carlos I and his wife Sofía were in Germany was in 1997. Felipe and Letizia traveled to Berlin shortly after the coronation in 2014 to introduce themselves. But state visits are something special. The pair have only completed a dozen so far; from Germany was Federal President Johannes Rau on a state visit to Spain in 2002.
The Queen is a reader
For the royal couple, the Book Fair is more than a protocol appointment. Letizia is known to like to read a lot. The Queen traditionally comes at the end of May for the opening of the Madrid Feria del Libro. The stands of this fair are in the open air in the Retiro Park. Letizia is said to have taken “The Song of the Crayfish” by Delia Owens there. Among Spanish authors, she is said to value Javier Marías, who died a few weeks ago. She is said to have been seen driving home from the Madrid trade fair heavily laden with more than two dozen books – novels, photo and cinema volumes. She shares her love of film with Felipe. They like to go to the cinema at the weekend, dressed casually and only accompanied by a few security officers.
The two know the most important Spanish-speaking authors personally. The royal couple awards the Cervantes Prize every year. It is considered the Nobel Prize for Spanish-language literature. On April 23, the anniversary of the death of the author of “Don Quixote”, they usually hand it over in the historic auditorium of the University of Alcalá de Henares, Cervantes’ birthplace. When that was not possible during the two years of the pandemic, Felipe and Letizia visited the award winners at home.
A language-loving family
On their travels, both also act as ambassadors for the Spanish language. In Frankfurt, the Queen will meet German Hispanists at the Cervantes Institute. Felipe and Letizia are on the Board of Trustees of the Spanish Institute of Cultural Abroad. At the recent meeting in Madrid, Felipe called for “building up the Spanish house” and attracting new Spanish speakers, despite the fact that the language is actually “in good health”: Almost 600 million people in the world speak Spanish, if you count the 493 Millions of native speakers add those who have limited knowledge or are just learning the language – in Germany there are 6.2 million.
Many other languages are spoken and learned in the Spanish royal family – even if Felipe’s mother Sofía, who comes from the Schleswig-Holstein-Sonderburg-Glücksburg family, is the only one who speaks fluent German. English is a matter of course. Felipe studied in the United States, while Crown Princess Leonor is currently attending college in Wales. She began one of her first public speeches in Spanish, continued in English and Arabic, and finished in Catalan. Her father also learned Catalan, other official languages in Spain alongside Basque and Galician. A quarter of the books presented at the book fair will be in these languages.
Apart from the book fair, Felipe does not attend any cultural events during the state visit. On Tuesday he accompanies Steinmeier to the German-Spanish Forum, which is about the economy. Steinmeier’s wife Elke Büdenbender and the Queen go to the Palais Populaire in Berlin and visit the exhibition “Escribir todos sus nombres” from the museum’s collection of Helga de Alvear, which comes from Germany. Your Madrid gallery is one of the most important art addresses in Spain. In Cáceres, in Extremadura, she has fulfilled a dream and opened a contemporary art museum, to which she is donating 3,000 works from her collection. Steinmeier and his wife know the western region. They were there in October 2018 during their last visit to Spain. German-Spanish contacts have recently been as close as they are rare. On Friday, Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez was in Berlin with Chancellor Olaf Scholz, who himself had traveled to the port city of A Coruña with seven ministers for the German-Spanish government consultations almost two weeks ago.
