Kulturkirche is the name of the beautiful place in Cologne-Nippes where the reading festival lit.Cologne bowed to the most demanding German printer since Johannes Gutenberg.
The poet Michael Lentz had raised himself to dizzy heights in laudation - Gerhard Steidl's existence as a publisher was "an improbability" - until the "book fanatic" from Göttingen modestly replied that he considered his life to be "a mess".
But he never looks back anyway: "because that's boring".
Looking to the future, Steidl exudes an optimism that has become rare: he is not deterred by the paper crisis – “prices are exactly at the 1990 level” – “visual education” has improved thanks to smartphones and the interest in high-quality printed books keep increasing.
His publishing house is currently experiencing its best years.
The twelve-day festival ended with this outlook, which after an unusual and a purely digital edition (both are still counted) took place again on a large scale.
With 71,000 visitors and an occupancy rate of 89 percent, the organizers were very satisfied with the response to the FAZ, even if - the pandemic is still here - two dozen events were cancelled.
In other respects, too, the mood, to quote Karl Lauterbach, was better than the situation.
And that felt good, counteracting the growing depression with some hope.
PEN President Deniz Yücel, who had indirectly called for NATO to intervene in Putin's war of aggression at the opening event and has since been considered intolerable by some in the German PEN center, received the most energetic rebuttal from Alexander Kluge, whose entire work grew out of the experience of the World War.
"War has no superiors," said Kluge, who fights ironically for rationality in front of a full audience: He is a demon, a chameleon, talkative and comes from the abstract, almost never from below.
He warned not to fall into the "Trap of Thucydides" (so named by Graham Allison), that is, if only for fear of a power gaining strength, at that time it was Athens who considered war to be inevitable.
One would have Ukraine
Georgia and Moldova can also protect without the - unfulfilled - promise of NATO membership, namely through the OECD.
But this has produced uncertainty, also on the Russian side, about what needs to be understood, although that in no way justifies the "highly erroneous" war of aggression.
"I always think it's good when he has ideas"
In an interesting twist, the war became the subject when Can Dündar and Mohamed Anwar, who presented their Erdogan comic, worked out the parallels between the autocrats of Moscow and the Bosphorus together with Günter Wallraff ("We live here in a free democracy").
It is completely wrong, says Dündar, to see Erdogan as a "lesser evil".
In general, there were accusations against German politics and the "dirty refugee deal": "Unfortunately, Angela Merkel became Erdogan's biggest supporter in Europe." So this parallel was there too suddenly, the German dictator caressing.
But hope here too: Turkey will change, everyone agreed, the sultan is doomed.
Two Nobel Prize winners ensured that the strongest impressions of this year's lit.Cologne were of a literary nature.
Abdulrazak Gurnah presented his twenty-year-old novel “Ferne Gestade”, which has just been published in German, but also spoke about “Das Lost Paradise” (2021), complex world literature that looks at the encounter of cultures from the perspective of the colonized.
With great seriousness and even greater knowledge, Gurnah explained to the audience, based on the Berlin West Africa Conference of 1884/85, Germany's involvement in colonialism, which was wrongly considered to be negligible.
Orhan Pamuk appears in a completely different way, namely as an ironist who incorporates his audience.
With a lot of humor he presented his island novel “The Nights of the Plague”, which is easily recognizable as a parable of modern Turkey and the (often bluntly denying) handling of the corona pandemic.
Of course, Pamuk denied that it was an allegory.
Last but not least, such applied irony serves to undermine the repression of the Turkish power apparatus, although not always with success.
The novel, as the author remarked with amusement, earned him an absurd charge of insulting Kemal Atatürk.
But he feels more guilty with regard to Corona.
It seems to him that the subject of his novel brought about the pandemic in the first place.
to undermine the repression of the Turkish power apparatus, although not always with success.
The novel, as the author remarked with amusement, earned him an absurd charge of insulting Kemal Atatürk.
But he feels more guilty with regard to Corona.
It seems to him that the subject of his novel brought about the pandemic in the first place.
to undermine the repression of the Turkish power apparatus, although not always with success.
The novel, as the author remarked with amusement, earned him an absurd charge of insulting Kemal Atatürk.
But he feels more guilty with regard to Corona.
It seems to him that the subject of his novel brought about the pandemic in the first place.