It can not only be a mess, it must also have to do with courage and skill that the International Literature Festival Berlin (ILB) - in the pandemic year 2020 presumably the largest reading circus in a frozen Europe - shines again this year with many face-to-face events. Quite a few of the 269 authors from 47 countries are actually there, and even the sunny weather plays a role. Others, such as the almost hundred-year-old Georg Stefan Troller or the ninety-three-year-old Georges-Arthur Goldschmidt, will be presented in freshly produced video portraits at the 21st ILB. Above all, "live" means jostling, chattering, herd warmth and a glass of white wine afterwards. At the opening in the concrete hall of the Silent-Green-Kulturquartier in Wedding, the audience sat close together,because, according to festival director Ulrich Schreiber, the formula "3G plus FFP2" has also proven itself in Berlin concerts, and here and there even insufficiently disinfected hands were shaken.
Paul Ingendaay
Europe correspondent for the feature pages in Berlin.
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From complaining about the lack of subsidies, the director has developed a highly comical art of improvisation that shines in different shades of color every year. Schreiber used to be grumpy about the meager 350,000 euros the festival received from the Hauptstadtkulturfonds, but a few years ago he was happy about the higher sum of 600,000 euros, but noted that more could always be used. This time he commented on the 660,000 euros that the Hauptstadtkulturfonds will provide for at least three years from 2022, with a formulation that hovers between profundity and flaccid as “not very, very great, but very, very good”. Overall, the festival can count on funding of around 900,000 euros annually and should be able to compensate for the shrinking revenue from ticket sales.
Reading makes women dangerous
The opening speaker Leila Slimani from Morocco, who has lived in France for a good twenty years and won the Prix Goncourt in 2016 with her novel “Then you sleep too”, gave a lively account of the oppression of women in traditional Muslim societies, their social shackles, on the first evening and omnipotent commands of silence.
With motifs such as sexual independence and disinhibition (in her first novel) and child murder by a nanny (in her second), Slimani has written herself as far as possible from her cultural roots.
In this way her art became a gesture of rupture - and a manifesto for those who followed.
It speaks for the homogeneity of the Berlin audience and their expectations that Slimani's remarks were received with sacred devotion even where they dealt with Simone de Beauvoir's “The Other Sex” and the first drink order in the Parisian Café de Flore. The age-old feminism with its obligatory bows to Virginia Woolf, the somehow well-known sentences that are likely to have come from countless speeches (“The need to please is a prison that alienates and restricts us”), the pathos of an incarnation through writing , which probably said nothing to very few in the audience, because in Germany things are not so repressive after all ("I was a woman and a reader. I was dangerous"), none of this was perceived as militant, eccentric or outdated,but honored as a fresh wound. Above all, it has to be authentic for Berlin.
Indeed, following the abandonment of Afghanistan by the West, the speech has taken on a sad topicality that it did not have two months ago. The very freedoms that Slimani fought for by moving to France and choosing to write (and which numerous Afghan women and girls have been able to get to know at least to a certain extent in the last twenty years) create a bitter contrast to what women do Afghan population expected after the Taliban's triumphant advance. “Replacing caution with boldness, politeness with insolence”, as Slimani recommends to her readers, will hardly be possible in everyday life in this Muslim world. So in the end it comes down to conjuring up the utopian ("Writing means taking a risk,and it is always a revolt ”) - in the hope that someone remains to receive the message.