Book fair in Mexico: Poems against narco-terror

An the morning after arriving in Mexico, jet lag is in your bones, but there is also a certain excitement: Las Americas! Immediately after the accreditation, the visitor is passed on to a young man who introduces himself as Hiram, a former student at the Colegio Alemán in Guadalajara, now a student of literature with a particular fondness for Heinrich von Kleist. You can tell he is happy to be speaking German again to be able to. But let’s take Hiram, twenty-one years old, above all as a symbol of Mexican eagerness to learn and impressive friendliness. Because in the coming days we’ll keep running into each other, even though the exhibition hall is gigantic, and as if by agreement we always follow up on our very first conversation: Kleist. More precisely, Kleist’s poems. “Not many people know the poet Kleist,” the visitor says to Hiram. “But his poems are great,” is the answer. On the third day, the student talks about his plan to write a master’s thesis on Kleist’s poetry.

It’s no coincidence that people like Hiram walk around here. When the Guadalajara International Book Fair was born 35 years ago, it was the work of one enthusiastic man. Of course, Raúl Padilla Sánchez, who died this spring at the age of 68, had important collaborators, but the idea and the mix of willpower and vision were his alone. He wanted education for everyone. He wanted to create a meeting place for Spanish language authors, but also a center of attraction for writers from all over the world. In addition, intellectual debates without political interference and encouragement for the book trade, which is repeatedly hit by economic crises, social inequality and political instability in Hispanic America. Today everyone is proud of this book fair, and not just because Guadalajara has something that the capital would never have put together. But because the most important writers in Latin America meet here, in the Mexican state of Jalisco, every November.