/ARTS WEEKLY/BOOKS: Political Colours at Literary Festival

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Clive Freeman

BERLIN, Sep 20 2005 (IPS) - Carlos Fuentes, 77, the famous Mexican writer, drew eager audiences at Berlin’s 5th International Literary Festival. He proved quite a magnet, along with Hans Magnus Enzensberger, the veteran German poet, and London-based Nagasaki-born Kazuo Ishiguro whose latest novel ‘Never Let Me Go’ could lift him this year’s prestigious Booker Prize in Britain.

The Festival Sep. 6-17, which drew some 150 writers to Berlin from 30 different countries, got off to a breezy start when Fuentes, in an opening speech entitled ‘In Praise Of The Novel’ raised questions like, “Why does a best-seller sell?”, and “Why does a long-seller last?”

“Some writers achieve great popularity and then disappear forever,” he said, pointing out that “the best-seller lists of the past 50 years are, with a few lively exceptions, a sombre graveyard of dead books. No one can write a book aspiring to immortality, for it would then court both ridicule and certain mortality.”

Enzensberger, long one of Germany’s most noted poets, found himself surrounded by a coterie of literary disciples at the inauguration of the festival, during which he read extracts from the work of early 20th century American poet Wallace Stevens, who died 50 years ago this month.

The Berlin Literature Festival established five years ago by its current director Ulrich Schreiber is now a firm fixture in Berlin’s bulging calendar of cultural events. But this year it has moved across town from the Hebbel Theatre in the Kreuzberg district to the Haus der Berliner Festspiele near the bustling Kurfuerstendamm boulevard.

“We are delighted with the new location. The premises are excellent and will serve as our headquarters for years to come,” said the enthusiastic Schreiber.

Located in the downtown Charlottenburg district of Berlin, the Festspiele premises give visiting writers easy access to off-beat haunts along the Kurfuerstendamm and the nearby Savigny Platz where splendid venues for late-night readings, recitals and poetry slams are to be found in clubs and restaurants.

Two prominent writers who are regulars at the Berlin Festival are Eliot Weinberger, 56, from New York and Tariq Ali, who was born in Lahore in 1943 when it was still a part of India, but has long since made his home in London.

Both men are firm opponents of U.S. President George W. Bush’s war in Iraq. Weinberger recently published a controversial text titled ‘What I Heard About The War in Iraq’. Compiled from remarks made by the military and political perpetrators of the conflict, the text was first published in the ‘London Review of Books’.

It later appeared on a great number of websites. “I never make things up. All my sources are verifiable,” he assured his Berlin audience after four actors took turns at reciting phrases used by President Bush and other key members of his administration, among them Donald Rumsfeld, Colin Powell, Paul Wolfowitz, Condoleezza Rice, and also British Prime Minister Tony Blair, in the run-up to the war.

Weinberger, who teamed up with Ali to discuss events since the Sep. 11, 2001 attacks, claimed that more terrorists had been created since then by the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Asked if there could have been a different way of dealing with the terrorist threat, the writer told the Berlin audience: “I think we have to look at Spain after the bombings there, and note the reaction of the government in Madrid.”

“They did not carpet-bomb Morocco,” said Weinberger. “They went and arrested the people responsible, and since then things have been very quiet in Spain. People carry on with their lives and don’t live in a climate of Code Orangeé and Code Redé and constant terror the way we do in the United States.”

After many decades of anti-Americanism around the world, “some of it perhaps justified,” Weinberger said a chance had arisen for the United States to change its arrangements with the rest of the world, especially after the end of the Cold War.

“Instead, that chance was completely destroyed by the invasion of Afghanistan and even more so by the invasion and occupation of Iraq. To me, that is the great tragedy of 9/11,” said the American author.

Kazuo Ishiguro was among the stars of the festival. His latest novel is a mild horror story told in the deceptively calm voice of Kathy H. H., a 31-year-old woman looking back on her schooldays. Humans are cloned as organ donors, yet spend their childhood at a special boarding school shielded from this knowledge.

Asian writers from Japan, China, Taiwan, Singapore, India and the Philippines were also well represented at the festival.