Good evening,
Marie Lisa Kehler
Deputy head of the regional section of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung.
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some people have suffered from acute “book fair withdrawal symptoms” in recent years.
The exchange and browsing at the stands, the opportunity to meet authors, to network - all of this could hardly be represented digitally.
Another week of literature lies behind the city.
And somehow everyone seems a bit exhausted - but happy - after so many impressions.
The number of visitors is pleasing:
a total of 180,000 visitors were counted.
That is significantly more than in October last year, when only 73,500 came.
You can find out briefly and concisely here what else was important this weekend.
Excellent:
The television viewers saw in close-up what the people in the Paulskirche may have only guessed.
There was a lot of crying at the awarding of the Peace Prize to Serhiy Zhadan, who comes from Ukraine.
Out of desperation, anger, compassion, sadness.
The winner also had to fight back tears several times.
The Kharkiv-based author, poet and writer is one of the most important voices in contemporary Ukrainian literature.
He has not only been honored for his creative work, but also for his humanitarian work.
In the Paulskirche, the author himself found moving words: “The war changes our memory and fills it with extremely painful experiences, extremely deep trauma and extremely bitter conversations.
You can't erase that memory, you can't ignore the past.
From now on she is part of you.” Our author Florian Balke summarized the awarding of the Peace Prize for her.
Questioned:
In two weeks, the people of Frankfurt will be called upon to speak out for or against the deselection of Mayor Peter Feldmann (SPD), who is accused of taking advantage in office.
If you're on the social networks, you could easily get the impression that half of Frankfurt has already decided anyway.
Because more photos are uploaded every day that show the voters posting their postal voting documents.
If you haven't ticked the box yet and still need a little time and information to weigh up the arguments, an analysis by our editor Günther Murr could help.
Like other colleagues, Murr picked out one of Feldmann's concrete election promises and checked how much of what the mayor once pompously announced during the election campaign was actually implemented.
Let's put it this way: Little is left of the election promise "build, build, build".
Nevertheless, Feldmann has achieved something in the area of "living".
It is also thanks to him that some housing companies are only allowed to increase rents by a maximum of five percent within five years.
But the truth is that he originally announced that ABG would use city subsidies to reduce rents.
He was just as unable to keep that as his election promise to campaign for the designation of new building land.
Feldmann should have involved the surrounding towns better for this.
For example, when planning a new construction area in the northwest on the A 5. According to Murr, clumsy communication and little cooperative behavior have shaped his work in this field.
Our author sums it up: "There was little to be seen of the 'working mayor' that he always wanted to be when it came to developing solutions for complicated issues."