An this book was not a thought two and a half months ago, and it would have been better if it had stayed that way. But the Hamas massacres of October 7th changed the world, unfortunately only for the worse. Anti-Semitism has increased worldwide, debates about the situation in the Middle East are becoming increasingly intransigent, and the perplexity is even greater than the anger. A month after the mass murders and in view of the Israeli invasion of the Gaza Strip that was beginning at that time, the publisher S. Fischer decided to ask a hundred authors to submit texts – not their own, but ones that give them support in desperate situations and should now be collected in a book . 96 of those contacted responded and sent what the publishing director Oliver Vogel, co-initiator of the campaign, calls “life texts”. The resulting book is already being published today.
Strangely enough, there are only 91 contributors, some with multiple submissions. The range extends from a single sentence (Robert Musil's “You can't not want to know” from “Man without Qualities”), which the writer Ernst-Wilhelm Handel submitted, to the seven-page speech by the Soviet dissident Ivan Dzjuba, who was to become Minister of Culture there after Ukraine's independence and died two days before the Russian attack on his country, held a speech in 1966 on the 25th anniversary of the Babyn Yar massacre carried out by German units. This moving text, which called on Ukrainians and Jews as victims of violence to show mutual sympathy and is therefore extremely relevant today, was chosen by the scholarly couple Claudia and Uwe Dathe, who have close ties to Ukraine through their activities.
Among the submitters are writers such as Julia Franck, Durs Grünbein, Charlotte Gneuss, Ingo Schulze, Olga Martynova, Kathrin Röggla, Katarina Poladjan and Tomer Gardi; Among the authors of the consolation texts are Hannah Arendt, Mascha Kaléko, Franz Kafka, Ingeborg Bachmann, Paul Celan, James Baldwin, Thomas Brasch, Ilse Aichinger and Musil (each several times). However, the most chosen author with four texts is the Palestinian poet Mahmud Darwish, but the Israeli-German poet Jehuda Amichai, who writes in Hebrew, is also represented three times (in fact, just over half of the 99 selected texts are poems).
What is strange is the publisher's decision to print a total of eleven texts in the original English, although in most cases there are German translations; Virginia Woolf's excerpt from “To the Lighthouse,” on the other hand, selected by Cécile Wajsbrot, can be read in German. Otherwise there are only two other foreign language entries, each with the German equivalent. There is a Jewish Orthodox prayer for the Israeli army in Hebrew, chosen by the playwright Lothar Kittstein – which stands in strange contrast to the rejection of any act of war that the Israeli peace activist Udi Aloni wrote after the massacre with which the Film director and novelist Jan Schomburg consoles. And on the other hand, Thomas Brasch's poem “What I have, I don't want to lose” in Arabic – the result of an anthology of German-language love poems co-edited by the submitter Thomas Sparr, each of which was also translated into Arabic.
Some submissions do come from personal work: the best-selling authors Daniel Speck (historical novels) and Klaus-Peter Wolf (crime novels) most reliably console themselves with their own texts, the writer Reinhard Kaiser-Mühlecker with his translation of a poem by Raymond Carver and the Orientalist Stefan Weidner with a Darwish poem he transcribed. What is most poetic (but also literally otherworldly) is Helga Schubert's consolation: the photos of distant galaxies make her “forget all her worries.” However, probably not those who look towards the sky – but for fear of impacts.
Oliver Vogel, Sophie von Heppe, Maren Baier, Michael Reinfarth (eds.): “Words in dark times”.
Verlag S. Fischer, Frankfurt am Main 2023. 256 pages, 3 illustrations, hardcover, €20.
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