Germany's literary love affair: Giving the gift of words

In the land of Goethe and Schiller, books - yes, even the paper kind - are still a favorite Christmas gift. But Germans' love of literature extends well beyond the holiday season. 

"Books are the best present you can give," says Lars, a literature professor with long blond hair. His left arm is loaded with a stack of volumes; another book is in his right hand. In all the commotion and bustle around him, there's hardly room to breathe. Just navigating requires foresight and constant apologizes; standing still even more so.
We're in a local branch of one of Germany's biggest book retailers, Thalia, and Lars is not the only one with his hands full. The lines at the registers stretch across the entire store. Only the very brave have dared to shop today.
Every year from mid-November through Christmas, the bookstores in Germany are flooded with people stocking up on the gift of the written word for their loved ones - and for themselves.
"I can't speak to you, it's Christmas business time" is a typical response from the salespeople if you dare ask a question not directly related to purchasing a present. Books were among the most popular Christmas gifts in Germany in 2012, with the pre-Christmas period accounting for nearly a quarter of bookstores' annual revenues.

Literature groupies 

In the land of Schiller and Goethe, it probably doesn't come as a surprise that Germans love to give books. But the passion for literature in this country is evident the rest of the year as well.
In any large German city, you're bound to find a literary event on any given week. In the largest cities, like Berlin and Cologne, they take place practically every day. Public readings and meetings with authors are as common as concerts, and just as popular.
One of the biggest literary events on Germany's cultural calendar, aside from the world-renowned Frankfurt and Leipzig book fairs, is the international lit.Cologne festival - 11 days with over 150 events for children and adults.
Highlights include readings by some of the most famous authors from Germany and around the world. Ticket sales begin as soon as the previous year's lit.Cologne has ended, and for a good reason - they tend to sell out quickly. The next lit.Cologne runs from March 12-22 and will see big names like Simon Beckett, Cornelia Funke, Hakan Nesser, and Arundhati Roy.
As an example of the importance of public readings in Germany, Ethiopian-born author Asfa-Wossen Asserate described his reception at a reading in a small village in southern Germany. The attendees treated Asserate like a rock star, announcing his arrival with posters, spreading a red carpet and showing up in droves.
Angelika Wolf from the Institute of Social and Cultural Anthropology at the Free University of Berlin has two theories to explain Germany's enthusiasm for books. "The first is the reading salons which existed in Berlin in the 18th-19th centuries, where people used to meet and talk about literature," she explained.
"The other reason is the fact that Germany had so many authors who influenced reading who stemmed from our culture, such as Schiller, Goethe and Hesse," continued Wolf.

Turning a page

Germans are indeed avid readers, now more than ever. According to the German Bookstores' Association, book shops experienced a small rise in revenue in 2012 - only 0.8 percent, but in the digital age just staying in the black is a feat.
Nevertheless, Goethe's birth country hasn't been left unscathed by digitalization. Between 1991 and 2011, the amount of money the average German household spends on newspapers, books and stationery dropped by 24.4 percent as a result of the global shift away from paper.

This year, for the first time in its nearly 200 years of business, book retailer Mayersche launched an Internet shop and reports that its online sales comprise 20 percent of total 2013 revenue.
A third of its web sales come from e-books. While that means paper books still make up the bulk of its literary wares, e-book sales across Germany tripled, from 4.3 million in 2011 to 13.2 million in 2012.
"The online sales of books and e-books naturally play an important role for the whole book industry," said Mayersche spokeswoman Simone Thelen. Yet in her view, "while the e-book curve is still rising, it is flattening out." Last year's leap in sales will certainly be hard to match.
"My Christmas gifts this year were digital books," revealed Wolf. However, there are some things technology simply cannot replace, she admits. "The social aspect is getting lost. You cannot exchange digital books with one another like you do with printed ones."
For Stephanie, a customer at Thalia, an e-book is not an option. She's searching for a book for her 70-year-old father. "My father doesn't know how to use the computer. He loves taking a book to the shore and reading in the sun."
And once her father is done with the book, Stephanie can borrow it and read it herself.


Deutsche Welle, 23.12.2013

Riff Cohen: ‘Many Israeli artists become reluctant ambassadors’

In mid-2011, YouTube exploded with the video of a petite, dark-haired girl dancing around the colourful streets and markets of Paris, along with a belly dancer and foreign looking youngsters, singing in French to an upbeat rhythm mixed with oriental tunes. It turned Riff Cohen into a sensation. Born in Tel Aviv to a French-Algerian mother and an Israeli father with a Tunisian background, the 27-year-old has been working towards her first official video since childhood.

The Cohen parental home is in Ramat Aviv Gimmel, a wealthy neighborhood in the north of Tel Aviv. The well-groomed tastefully furnished living room, opening into a back yard with an equally well-groomed cat strolling around, is a far cry from the rugged, alternative image of Riff Cohen herself, who answers the door in torn-up skinny jeans and an oversized sweater. ‘I really enjoy saying that I grew up here, because there’s such a specific stigma on this place, which I really don’t feel like I’m a product of,’ she relishes in breaking stereotypes. ‘It would have been proper for me to say that I’m from north Tel Aviv, but why should I? It’s good, it’s starting to change the stigma of things.’

I speak to Cohen a couple of days after she has signed an artist contact with AZ records, the French branch of universal records. Musically, she says she doesn’t approach French audiences differently from Israeli ones. ‘My approach was very universal from the start. But the understanding of certain concepts is totally different. If I say that I’m religious in Israel, they’ll think that I’m right-wing.’ One internet forum really did say that in those very words; ‘Really,’ she laughs. ‘That’s really funny. Just what I meant. On other hand, the fact that I didn’t serve in the army is considered to be very leftist or pacifist. It’s amazing how people look for something to hang onto, even the smallest thing, to jump to conclusions. Just let me be a musician, let go of the other concepts.’

Cohen is Riff’s mother’s maiden name, although the singer was married by the time the video for A-Paris was ready. ‘I sort of ‘got stuck’ with my name, because I started getting famous before I got married. I thought that changing my name would be weird,’ she says. ‘Perhaps I should have done it. Everybody is pissed at Israelis now. Politics seeps into every level, even down to boycotts at the bazar, which sadly is not just about politics. I regret the fact that a few years ago it would have not mattered that I’m Israeli and that my name is Cohen. I’m sure many Israeli artists become reluctant ambassadors. On the other hand, the fact that we’re Israeli creates a great deal of interest.’

Riff’s album deals extensively with questions of identity. It’s a theme which Cohen, who was born with two mother tongues and carries a soft French accent to her Hebrew from the very start, is preoccupied with. ‘If I have to introduce myself, I just say where my parents and grandparents are from, and that I’m just a first-generation in Israel,’ she says. ‘It’s hard for people to make this connection of an Israeli whose grandmother speaks Arabic and dresses in traditional Tunisian clothes; to them, you’re either an Israeli or an Arab.’

For many Israelis, it remains the most challenging concept of all. The melting pot policy, which was implemented on immigrants for decades, did its best to erase the attributes of their origin cultures right down to their names. Binary identity concepts left hardly any room for exploration. ‘Zionistic Israel erased all the roots and tried to create a new culture, but we’re still in a void of sorts, emulating western culture,’ says Cohen. ‘I also wear jeans and T-shirts; it annoys me, because they don’t necessarily reflect who I am. My grandmother wore cape-like dresses and heavy golden jewellery, as did her mother, grandmother and great-grandmother. It’s only because I’m in Israel that I'm wearing jeans and T-shirts that I'm wondering whether I should go to the Mikveh or not.’

Cohen channels this introspective idea into her work. The photo on the cover of the album released in Israel, a black and white of a young girl with braids, is her paternal grandmother Fortuna, who came to Israel from the Tunisian island of Djerba. It was the first photo ever taken of her, for her passport. Cohen tells, with great pride, of a woman of extraordinary talents and character, capable of holding several conversations at the same time, who cannot read nor write. ‘When they lived in Jaffa they used to buy a sheep, raise it for a while and then take it to the butcher when Passover, or some other big event or holiday, came along. I remember seeing the sheepskins hanging out to dry. She used to cover me with a sheepskin blanket, and it had a very strong, unpleasant smell,’ she reminisces. ‘There’s something much more respectful about that, rather than some businessman who has schnitzel for lunch every day without giving it a moment’s thought. My father was ashamed of it all, because it’s something supposedly primitive. But here I am, third generation - and I think that it’s something to showcase and be proud of. We shouldn’t hide it. It’s part of Israel’s cultural landscape. Everyone has their own culture, and we should showcase it and connect to it - without denial, without drawing a blank eye, without erasing our roots and trying to just be western. Part of our job as artists living in Israel’s sixties, is to search for Israeli culture and to create it.’

Café Babel, 21.12.2012

What’s in an Israeli name?

If you have any Israeli friends on your facebook lists, there’s a good chance you’re slightly confused in recent months as to who exactly they are, as their last names have morphed into new, confusing, and sometimes rather long ones. The inspiration was a Hebrew-speaking ‘event’, initially planned for a week, which has since been extended until May 2013.

The organizers of the Facebook event ‘Melting down the melting pot: Recovering the lost names!’ has a pretty mission: ‘Change your redone Hebrew family name on Facebook to the previous last names of your father’s and mother’s family: whether it was a clerk at the jewish agency or a school teacher who changed your name; whether it was changed out of shame or fear of racism; whether it was due to a family feud, voluntarily, following kabbalah studies; whether it’s your pen name – for a week [now extended] we retrieve the lost name and tell its story.’

Over 1,000 people have joined the initiative, which resonates with descendants of holocaust survivors, Arabic jews and second-generation immigrants alike. The requirement for ‘Hebrew’ names, which many encountered upon arrival, is a subject especially painful for immigrants from Arabic and eastern European countries, whose name were - and, in the case of Russian-speakers, still are - often forcibly changed upon arrival. One fellow, Amos Bar, became ‘Amos Shlomo Bilibil-Stock’ on Facebook. ‘Bilbil is the Turkish name of the Bulbul bird, which is also why my grandfather didn’t hebraicize his name,’ he says; bulbul is Hebrew slang for male genitalia. ‘The second part of the invented surname, Stock, means stick. Grandpa actually hebraicized that, to Sharvit, and then everyone thought he was of oriental descent. Bar is a name my parents made up after my mother refused to be Mrs. Bilbil. I hereby use this stage to kick its behind. Shlomo is my second name, after my grandfather’s father, who died six months before I was born. And he was actually named Zeide.’

Café Babel, 14.11.2012

Self-identification, multiculturalism and erasmus in the EU

My national identity has always been ‘the other one’. I moved to Israel aged six and my childhood was filled with perpetual torture inflicted on me by my peers, relentlessly pointing out the fact that I did not belong there: ‘Go back to Russia!’ ‘I’m Ukrainian!’ I would answer, knowing that it made no difference to people who couldn’t even find it on a map. Coming from a city in East Ukraine and speaking no Ukrainian, I embraced my ‘Russian’ identity, befriended young Russian-speaking people my age. It made no difference whether they had emigrated from Belarus, Moldova, Georgia, Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan. The structure of the Soviet Union was the country of our parents. To those of us born before 1991, it was our homeland. The results of this method of self-identification hit me in the face when I encountered youths from current, post-Orange Revolution Ukraine on a scholarship to an international summer university in Germany. Not even speaking the language which has now become an inseparable part of Ukrainian independence, I no longer belonged in a country I named as my homeland for 25 years.

Migration is a norm of the 21st century. With the forced socialisation upon which Israel was built, annulling all characteristics of previous identity in favour of creating a new loyal citizen is experiencing a revival. It mostly affects immigrants from non-European, muslim countries. In 2005 writer Matti Bunzl claimed that Europe’s rising islamophobia was a ‘part of a wide-open debate on the future of the muslim presence in Europe’. Austria’s right-wing freedom party attacked Turkey’s accession to the EU as a threat to the fabric of Europe’s existence, claiming Turkey lacked the bases of European culture and values. ‘When the freedom party abandoned its traditional nationalism in the mid-nineties, it embraced a new exclusionary project. Instead of the ethnic community it cast itself as the protector of Europe,’ writes Bunzl.

In 2010 former German bank executive Thilo Sarrazin’s scandalous bestseller Germany does away with itself (Deutschland schafft sich ab) attacked Turkish immigration in Germany, although it has been followed up by a contra-book from writers of multicultural backgrounds, Manifesto of the Many. Germany and Britain’s leaders expressed their disbelief in multiculturalism. French president Nicolas Sarkozy was expelling Europeans in the form of Roma immigrants in a country where his arrival instilled the 2007 inauguration of the French ministry of immigration and national identity. Across the EU, Hungary’s elections culminated in a sweeping majority for the radical right wing. In an article published in the New York Review of Books Turkish writer Orhan Pamuk condemns these tendencies. He accredits them partially to Europe’s lack of experience in comparison to Americans, ‘when it comes to living with those whose religion, skin color or cultural identity are different from their own’. 

This gap is being filled in Europe though, with the international erasmus student network (ESN), which has turned student exchange into a widespread norm all over Europe. ESN currently tends to 150,000 students across 34 European countries. Since its second year of existence it has enjoyed an average annual growth rate of 12.3%. Founded four years after the Schengen agreement in 1985, ESN has become the easiest way for young Europeans to spend time abroad. German-Dutch history PhD student Tobias Temming studied in Amsterdam and Granada. ‘I could have chosen to finish my studies at 25 and then work,’ explains Tobias. ‘I don’t know what better investment you could do with your life than learning another language and living for a year in a foreign country.’ With nationalists turning to the ‘protection of Europe’ rather than the ‘protection of the homeland’, it is fair to say that the erasmus generation is the face of future Europe. ‘Precisely because the world is their oyster, they feel a stronger sense of attachment to Europe than they might have had had they not left Europe,’ explains Till van Rahden, Canada research chair in German and European studies at the university of Montreal. ‘Bracketing all the internal European differences, one doesn’t quite realise what’s specific and unique about Europe across national boundaries and as a political project, until one has lived outside of Europe.’ As for Tobias, the investment grew – the second erasmus turned into an internship at the German embassy in Lima, where he met his Peruvian wife. As he puts it, the mentality differences between them are not strictly ‘German’ and ‘Peruvian’ - rather ‘European’ and ‘Latin’.

Café Babel, 05.04.2011

Yuriy Gurzhy: ‘Achtung! The party is Russian-rock-free’

The stage is small at the Kaffee Burger club in the centre of Berlin. A band dressed in punky, predominantly red outfits, is playing a Balkan-sounding variation on the Jewish hora, a traditional circle dance. The crowded dancefloor is a formation of German, Russian, Jewish, Spanish concert-going circles. They embrace in exhilaration, dancing faster and faster, creating an ecstatic mixture of unadulterated joy.

Rotfront, the resident Berliner band who make Emir Kusturica’s No Smoking Orchestra look like a tired stereotype, was founded in 2003 by the Ukrainian-Jewish Yuriy Gurzhy and Hungarian Simon Wahorn. Describing the German-Russian-English-Hungarian mix of Kleyzmer, Balkan, punk, reggae, hip hop and electro they play is a challenging task indeed. No wonder they felt their sound required a whole new term, hence: Emigrantski Raggamuffin. ‘I hate the word ‘crossover’, it’s so overused,’ says Yuriy, whom I meet for dinner in Cologne a few hours before he is due to DJ for an international party. ‘We basically juggle with elements of musics of different nations, with different musical styles, with certain cultural layers. The most important thing is that it works. It’s like a cocktail: you can mix something no-one has ever mixed before, but if it doesn’t taste good no-one will drink it. Perhaps the initial reaction would be ‘Wow, that’s interesting’, but it won’t last. Really, it’s all just pop music.’

On top of playing guitar for Rotfront, Yuriy is the second half of the famous Russendisko events (which he co-created with Russian author Wladimir Kaminer), and a successful DJ in his own right. ‘Achtung! The party tonight is Russian-rock-free,’ he warns me jokingly, making it clear that the Russendisko (‘Russian disco’) line of Russian/Ukrainian-speaking underground/ criminal/pop folk remains the same even when it leaves its usual residence at Torstraße 60, Berlin.

Russendisko compilation UKRAINE do AMERIKA

The small traditional restaurant in the centre of Cologne is a little piece of German countryside across from a shopping mall, whose neon lights can be seen through the large glass windows. Wood panelling, large wooden tables and long benches are decorated with red and white chequered pillows and faded pictures in dark wooden frames. In the background Germany’s pride and joy, Lena, is singing the 2010 eurovision song contest-winning hit Satellite. Yuriy orders the meal of the day, pasta with mushrooms and cream sauce, and a cup of green tea. It’s not quite the vodka-garlic combination he celebrates in one of Rotfront’s biggest live hits. ‘Not drinking?’ I ask, ignoring my own choice of a coke light. Yuriy retorts with a popular Russian joke. ‘Little Vovochka comes to his parents and says ‘Mom, Dad, can you imagine? Lenochka doesn’t drink and doesn’t smoke!’ ‘Really, Lenochka?’, the parents ask the ten-year-old girl. ‘You don’t drink and don’t smoke? Why?’ ‘I GOT SICK OF IT!’’ he finishes off, imitating a deep hoarse voice and laughing.

Yuriy followed his parents from Kharkiv, Ukraine’s second largest city, to Berlin fifteen years ago. ‘They came up with the decision. I just came with them, like on a big adventure. Missing a chance to go to Germany would have been stupid. In my heart I decided that if I didn’t like it I’d come back – those were not after all, the sixties, when leaving meant burning all bridges.’ Evidently, he liked it enough to stay. Visiting Kharkiv on a regular basis, Yuriy has made Berlin his home, making an unexpected career in music. Aside from Rotfront, Russendisko and general DJ gigs, Yuriy is part of a long line of various musical projects. The most recent of those is Mama Diaspora, along with Serbian Igor Sakach (Ingvo), Ukrainian Ivan Moskalenko (DerBastler) and Moldavian Eugeniu Didic (former member of Zdob şi Zdub). The more electronically-inclined Mama Diaspora, established at a festival in Belarus in 2009, is just recent adding to a myriad of bands showcasing endless variations on the Balkan sound. It suffices to mention the New-York based Balkan Beat Box – born, of all places, in Israel - to give a shining example of the musical invasion of the new millennia – the Balkan invasion.

Nor is Berlin falling behind. The city which prides itself on being the world’s electro capital is now bringing a different style to the front. With the Balkantronika wandering party line, DJ Robert Soko’s regular BalkanBeats night at club Lido in Kreuzberg, and live concerts by various bands, it is safe to say that the genre is in Berlin to stay. During Music Week in September 2010, Berlin announced its goal is mixing different forms of music, so it is indeed a small wonder that for Rotfront playing at Kaffee Burger feel like home. By nine o’clock Yuriy and I are the only two customers left sitting in the tiny restaurant. On the way to the S-Bahn station he scouts the people around us. ‘You know Valenki are in style now?’ he says, referring to this winter’s popular trend of UGGs and their likes, which resemble the traditional Russian felt boots. ‘Hipsters in Valenki,’ he laughs.

Café Babel, 18.02.2011

Global entrepreneurs at Brussels green summit

‘Fashion has always been a hobby in a green way, in terms of re-designing things I already owned,’ explains Nike Kondakis over a packet of purple chips. She is one of over a score of young green entrepreneurs from all over the world taking part in the co-creation workshop held by the Generation Europe Foundation (GEF) in Brussels at the beginning of December 2010. ‘Then I worked for a year with a development project for the Massai tribe girls in Kenya. A year later I handed the project over to local managers and then I set up my company.’ For three days they, alongside practitioners and representatives from the public, private and social sectors, have been brainstorming ways of bringing about sustainable green projects in their respective countries. ‘Sustainable’ means harmless for the environment, as well as in a financial sense.

All sorts of green conventions like this are taking place in Europe’s capital. Whether it is the proximity to the decision-making centre - the European council and its environmental bureau - or the cosmopolitan atmosphere of a city where hardly any language is foreign, or a combination of both, Brussels continues to be an important centrepoint for green brainstorming and collaboration with the Green Streets Conference, the upcoming ICLEI European Convention 2011 and Green Week, the biggest annual conference on European environment policy, which will take place for the eleventh time in May 2011.

Photo: Diana Duarte

The green trend has been sweeping the planet for so many years, that it should hardly come as a surprise that it is now taking over the capitalist way of thinking as well as the socialist one. Nike employs seven and creates custom-made gowns for over a thousand dollars a piece. However, she’s not an idealist who decided to fight the polluting fashion industry, but rather a sharp businesswoman who came up with an original idea and is following it through successfully. When asked how she would go about changing the lack of green awareness in Kenya, she gives a politician’s answer. ‘I’m not going to fix that. I never had any intentions to.’

Jean-Claude Bwenge’s up-and-coming company Entreprise la Perfection is working on several green projects, including renewable energy, biogas and information and communication technologies (ICT). ‘It is every one’s effort to support green businesses and stand against polluting businesses as a major way of eradicating polluting activities and hence save the world,’ says the engineer and entrepreneur from Rwanda in his workshop booklet. Face-to-face the 29-year-old conveys that his motives for his environment-friendly choice of project were far less romantic. ‘With the green field you are sure that it has no risk. With other technologies, the authorities can come after three years and stop the production. Focusing on green technologies means you can get support from them instead.’

Photo: Diana Duarte

We are slowly but surely achieving what Stien Michiels, the GEF workshop guide, calls a ‘marriage between the business world and the tree huggers’. ‘There are many socially active people who work to make this world a better place, but they think that business is an evil and red area,’ says Didem Uygun, 22, a Turkish green blogger and activist. ‘It’s more sustainable in business - you’re creating the money to re-invest into the environment and social projects, and it’s more measurable in the market.’ One such entrepreneur is 22-year-old Tariq al Olaimy from Bahrain, the co-founder and director of Al Tamasuk (Arabic for ‘cohesion’), an award-winning social enterprise which addresses diabetes awareness, prevention and education. ‘I’ve been thinking about how to address the issue in a social entrepreneurship way,’ says Tariq, ‘but the catalyst for the moment was Global Entrepreneurship Week in Bahrain in 2009. There was a business plan competition –pitch an idea and you get the seed money for it. I came across my three co-founders there, really connected with them, and won!’ The organisation’s diabetes educational workshops run by blind facilitators in complete darkness in order to communicate to the seeing population what it feels like to be blind as a result of diabetic retinopathy. The paycheck comes from the corporate workshops which Al Tamasuk charges for. Profits are then invested into running free workshops for the schools.

One might originally argue that mixing business with pleasure – that is, green ideals - is unholy marriage. After all, who is it that damages the environment the most if not major businesses and big corporations? However, a second look reveals the same marxist foundation. Caring for the environment is clearly becoming more profitable than polluting it; isn’t that what we’ve been striving for all along?

Café Bable, 21.01.2011