It's been a good thirty years since Spain was the guest country of the Frankfurt Book Fair.

And if you add the very special year 2007, when Catalonia presented itself as a cultural region in Frankfurt and already brought with it some of the problems that would lead to the great independence rift of 2017, you can set yourself the task for the coming autumn, when it once again it is not so easy to imagine.

Only up close, in Barcelona, ​​does it become apparent that nobody wants to talk about the drama anymore.

Somehow both sides feel battered.

Writer Marta Oriols tells us that one senses an enormous weariness to speak at all, a weariness that will not go away for a long time.

Barcelona 2022 is a city that prefers to look ahead rather than back.

Paul Ingenday

Europe correspondent for the feuilleton in Berlin.

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When the Spanish Culture Minister Miquel Iceta was asked by a cheeky journalist after his meeting with the Book Fair boss Juergen Boos about the eavesdropping that Madrid government agencies allegedly carried out with spy software on politicians of the independence movement, the topic came up again.

But the minister refers to other responsibilities: something unappetizing disturbs this holiday.

Appropriately, the motto of Spain's guest country appearance in October - "Exuberant Creativity" - is as apolitical as one could wish.

Long lines of readers

World Book Day, celebrated here as Sant Jordi with hundreds of bookstalls and allegedly six million red roses, is all about a – this time mask-free – reading culture that is unique in Catalan self-perception.

As early as 1615, the second part of "Don Quijote" told of the large number of book printers in the city.

Today, the publishing giants Planeta and Penguin Random House are based in Barcelona and pull the strings of the Spanish book industry, as well as independent publishers and countless creative people.

Any author who is self-reliant (or has the nerve) gets himself harnessed to the Sant Jordi day for the outdoor book signing marathon, sometimes for four or five hours, and when at midday the hail suddenly lashes the squares and the waters out fall from the sky

According to studies, people in Spain read less than in Germany, but from a corporate perspective it looks a bit different.

At the Spanish headquarters, Markus Dohle, CEO of Penguin Random House, says enthusiastically that every single year – “Write that!” – the number of books sold is growing compared to the previous year, namely overall.

Because, on the one hand, humanity is constantly growing and with it the number of potential readers, for whom more and more media are allowing ever easier use;

on the other hand, the great upheaval that everyone is talking about is not taking place with books, but with sales.

The book itself is in good health.

He thinks we should write about that too, because not everyone knows about it yet.