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The journalist and former publishing editor Uwe Wittstock wrote a great book a few years ago.
He called it “February 33: The Winter of Literature.”
And he describes how within four weeks all democratic rules were undermined by the Nazis and writers had to fear for their lives.
Now he has written a book that takes place seven years later.
The Nazis are in full control.
The war has been going on for a year.
“Marseille 1940. The Great Escape of Literature,” he calls it in the subtitle.
Because we know that a lot of writers, Jews, left-wing intellectuals fled to France and then realized that they weren't safe there either.
The Germans invade France.
Vichy regime, Marshal Pétain, staunch Nazi.
But there is a free zone in the south of France, and everyone gathers there in the hope of catching another ship, getting from Marseille or to Lisbon and from there possibly getting to America or South America, at least flee.
And the French also have internment camps.
And there is actually a young man in America who is 28 years old, his name is Varian Fry.
And he sees this misery in Europe.
And he says: Doesn't anyone actually help?
And he gives up his great job and leaves his wife and goes to France and starts an office, an aid organization for refugees.
Officially he helps them with money and accommodation to survive.
But it is becoming more and more of an escape agency.
And he has a lot of helpers.
People who smuggle the endangered people over the Pyrenees, to Spain, and from there to Lisbon.
He has people who organize ships and take them out of the ports.
So he has a lot of people who support him with money and energy.
There are also police officers who turn a blind eye.
There are French people who help, who support.
He's not alone, but he's the one who orchestrated it all and is the one who goes through with it, risking his career and his marriage to do it.
Varian Fry, a very young man.
And that’s what Uwe Wittstock describes.
He found him, did thorough research and described everything that happens to these people so vividly and so excitingly, so interestingly and so movingly in this book.
We know many of them.
We know that Heinrich Mann traveled across the Pyrenees with Golo and his wife Nelly with great difficulty.
We know about Alma Mahler, who hiked over the mountains with her seriously ill Werfel and a bag full of scores.
She wanted to sell the scores of Mahler and Bruckner in America in order to live better there.
We know of Walter Benjamin, who made it across the Pyrenees and then took his own life in Portbou.
Out of desperation, exhaustion, fear.
And he also talks about many unknown people who used these escape routes.
In times when things were becoming more and more bureaucratic.
You need an exit visa from France, an entry visa into fascist Spain, where it was better not to go in the first place because they also had the lists of everyone Hitler was looking for and wanted to put in the camps.
Anyone who was caught was sent to a concentration camp.
But there were always officers and police officers in the guard posts who turned a blind eye and simply let them pass.
He describes it brilliantly.
How important it is that such people exist, that one remains human in inhumane times.
In times like today, when prisoners who have different opinions are killed in prison again or when people like Assange who expose crimes have their entire lives taken away.
In times like these, reading a book like this is of course highly sensitive.
What happens when conditions are undemocratic with upstanding democrats?
A very important, a really great book and I highly recommend it to you.
And by chance I came across another one that goes with it by Werner Herzog.
“The Future of Truth.” The Future of Truth is already such a title.
Will there still be truth in the future in times of fake news and AI, where we can hardly control what is true and what is not true?
The news spreads faster and faster, in a matter of seconds.
But the narrative is important: who sent the message?
Is it true?
Is it edited?
He writes that fake news has always existed.
There is a lot of fake news about Nero and the Pharaoh Ramses that was cleared up centuries later.
So we have to check who is telling us what?
And we can check that.
And in times of creatures like Trump or Putin, it is also important that we check what news is being fed to us.
Not everyone has the opportunity to do that.
The people of Russia, who suffer from a propaganda machine, do not know what is really happening in their country.
But he says: It makes us human that we stick with it, really explore the truth, spread the truth.
He also says there is no truth in art.
Because imagination and reality, art can only emerge if poetry also changes reality.
But reality and truth are two different things.
So a very interesting essay on the topic of truth and this is an interesting book on the topic of humanity.
I highly recommend both to you and next time there will be novels again.
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