Mr. Zille, on Wednesday you had to cancel the Leipzig Trade Fair for this year.

How are you?

Tilman Spreckelsen

Editor in the Feuilleton.

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Not so special, me and the team.

It's a very peculiar emotional state.

We've been working on the show until two days ago and were concerned that our projections would be shared by the majority of the industry.

And then you have to pull the ripcord and initiate emergency braking – for the third time.

You take the elevator down to the basement and have to dig out quickly to clear your head and see what you're going to do next.

In January it was said that 75 percent of the potential exhibitors wanted to be there in March.

Now the fair is not taking place after all because of numerous cancellations - what happened there?

Last summer we asked ourselves whether we would like to hold the 2022 trade fair in March or in May.

Everyone in the industry agreed that we should do it in March.

Finally, there was a rising vaccination curve, the indicators were positive.

So we fixed that.

Even in Frankfurt in autumn it was said that this fair was special, held under pandemic conditions - but everything would be better in Leipzig.

At that point, we already had about 70 percent of the exhibitors who were with us in 2019.

In January we did a survey among our customers, a large majority – including the group publishers – told us that we should continue.

Then the state government announced that the exhibition center could be used according to the Corona Emergency Ordinance.

Was the way clear?

Parallel to our work, the publishers also discussed what the situation would be like in March.

When we said on February 1st that the fair would take place, the basis for discussion in some publishers was different.

Then there was a whole series of cancellations.

By the way, across the board: It is by no means the case that the corporate publishers have pulled the plug here.

Of course, we also constantly advised each other.

And to this day I am convinced that a trade fair could have been held here as far as the hygiene concept is concerned.

But it was obviously no longer possible to do this without fear.

Publishers have argued they are suffering from large staff shortages because people are sick or in quarantine.

And that they would leave it up to the employees whether they would go to Leipzig.

And apparently not enough came together.

The ideas of what it would look like in mid-March were obviously very different.

Just like in society in general.

The day before the Leipzig Trade Fair was cancelled, the publishers of the Kurt Wolff Foundation said they wanted to come for the most part.

So big versus small?

There is no uniformity there.

Even small Leipzig publishers told us in advance that they did not want to take part in the fair to protect employees and authors.

We have repeatedly asked our customers to position themselves.

We really put the pressure on because we had to plan the halls.

Thanks to support from Berlin, we were also able to promise our customers that there would be no cancellation fees in the event of a cancellation.

Nevertheless, there are of course costs for stand builders or hotel rooms.

The small exhibitors who might have booked a system stand at the fair had a relatively low risk and were more likely to put it off until the last minute.

Medium to large ones couldn't do that because they somehow had to get along with their external stand builders.

And many of them have invested enormously in this.

And how is the mood in the city now?

Corona has already hit Leipzig - the companies, the culture, the inner city in general - badly.

A trader said the book fair is usually like a Christmas weekend, the peak business period.

That's gone now.

And there is sadness, disappointment and helplessness.

It's the same with us.

And you ask yourself: What should we have done differently to prevent this?

Namely?

As far as the transfer in the year is concerned, little occurs to me.

What about the host country Portugal?

We cannot postpone the performance, next year Austria is the guest country, followed by the Flanders region and the Netherlands.

We will now negotiate with the Portuguese how we can help them to bring their books to the public at the next fair.

There are many partners involved.

Can your organization survive three cancellations in a row economically?

Messe GmbH is owned by the Free State of Saxony and the City of Leipzig.

When it became clear that the cancellation was unavoidable, I received the signal that we would have all the means to hold the fair in the coming years.