A discussion on what it means to be a modern German writer was the highlight of this year's Dublin Writers Festival, writes Eileen Battersby
What exactly is a literary festival? A celebration, an entertainment, an opportunity to look at current trends in writing, and most importantly a forum of ideas that inspires readers while also providing an insight into how and why writers write. Last week's Dublin Writers Festival hit all four targets, by offering the familiar and the unknown.
The Dublin Writers Festival was born in 1998, and having missed one year due to uncertain funding, has been held seven times. It has always run, hand in hand, and certainly most harmoniously, with mid-June's two other major literary happenings; Bloomsday and the announcement of the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award.
According to the festival director and founder Jack Gilligan, who is also Dublin City Council arts officer, "the primary idea for founding the festival was to address the deficit in literary activity provision in the city. Dublin has an international reputation as a literary city and yet we didn't have a writers' festival. We had Bloomsday - which for all its general appeal remains a specialist interest - and we had IMPAC. Yet, I still saw the need for a platform to bring Irish and international writers together."
The festival is international, but this year the Irish emphasis was stronger than usual. It can be easy to overlook the familiar and we shouldn't.
Festivals are dominated by readings. Poets, short story writers and novelists take to the podium and read from the works. Some writers are natural readers, others are not. An inspired, atmospheric reading can have the effect of a revivalist meeting, it becomes a shared moment. Afterwards, members of the audience hurry out, to see if a copy of the book is available outside. Somehow, there always manages to be a copy waiting to be purchased by a new convert, eager to re-experience a poem just heard, or simply find out what happens next in the novel from which an extract has been read.
What happened next was most pertinent to the appearance of Antoni Libera, author of Madame, a stylish erotic tale of a young boy's obsession in 1960s Warsaw with a dazzling older woman who just happens to share her birthday with no less than Mozart. Shortlisted for the 2002 IMPAC Award, Madame, which was first published in Poland in 1998, was brought to the public's notice through that prize which has, since its inception, generously championed international literature in translation. If his young thwarted hero is unusually intelligent, he is also endearingly vulnerable in his fixation. Libera should be applauded for gracefully steering the European intellectual tradition spanning German high Romanticism and French cinema onward to an intoxicatingly witty celebration of erotic tension.
Yet the business of successfully transposing the tone, which in the case of Madame is vital to the novel, through to another language, depends on the skill of the unsung hero of international literature - the translator. This task is very important to Libera, who has "translated, annotated and staged in the theatre" the work of Samuel Beckett.
He had arranged to meet Beckett in early May 1986, in Paris. "Beckett arrived with his typical punctuality, at twelve on the dot . . . To a meeting that wasn't connected with any creative plans or projects he usually came 'empty-handed', as he liked to put it. This time he was holding a small book, which turned out to be an old, very well-thumbed copy of Effi Briest by Teodor Fontane."
It was as Libera noted, one of Beckett's favourite novels, and one to which he referred in his work. Beckett remarked he had been "born too late" to write such a book, adding, "no one writes like that nowadays. Nowadays one writes much worse." For Libera, Beckett's comment was to shape the opening line of his own novel, the English translation of which reads, "For many years I used to think I was born too late."
Being born in a divided country and then having to suffer the confused legacy of a united one gave rise to, for me, the most intriguing of festival sessions, "Berlin Republic" on Saturday. Less than two weeks after the 50th anniversary of the death of 1929 Nobel Literature Laureate, Thomas Mann, who was born in Lübeck in 1875, a trio of German writers, IMPAC contender, Christoph Hein; Thomas Brussig and Juli Zeh, all of whom have been translated into English, participated in a panel discussion.
Chaired quite brilliantly, even provocatively, by Hugo Hamilton, the Irish-born son of an Irish father and German mother, this was a chance to experience some sense of what it means to be a German writer in a country in which liberation, freedom and Western commercialism has made everyone desperate for the old ways. Suddenly the audience had entered the world of Wolfgang Becker's heartbreakingly funny film, Good Bye Lenin! as well as that of Hein's Willenbrock.
German fiction has long proved the unsung resource of contemporary European fiction, from Grass to Gert Hofmann to WG Sebald, Ingo Schulze and the cryptic explorations of the act of living by the emerging Judith Hermann (none of whom were mentioned); this inspired panel discussion left no doubts as to the range, intelligence and energy of German writing.
It was an interesting balance, with the intense Juli Zeh, who was born in Bonn in 1974, and is author of Eagles and Angels, explaining the sensation of being a former West German now living in the former East. She has the confidence of the younger generation and described how "feeling at home" for her is simply what she experiences among her friends in Bosnia. The West was imposed on the East, which was "taken over" as much as "liberated". For her Germany seems to be more a state of mind; the East is a place she can live in without experiencing the weight of history, and Europe is a word than comes more easily to her.
Only nine years, but really a generation older, Thomas Brussig (born in 1965), author of the wonderful satire Heroes Like Us, and recent screenplay co-writer of Reitz's cinematic trilogy Heimat, is a gifted satirist. His contribution to this debate was extraordinary, particularly the sincerity of his insights. A packed Project audience listened as a man no longer young, but far from old, recalled the effort of learning to say the word "Germany". He admitted "I used to see re-unification as one word and two lies."
Brussig satirised the past but he never lost the feelings and emotions imposed by history. "You can only write such a book when everything is over," he said, describing the fall of the wall as "a fantastic miracle". Life in the GDR was, it seems, "always in the 70s" as Brussig said, his face conveying the surrealism of it all. "Nothing moved".
As the discussion developed, an absurdist element emerged that helped make the new German dilemma, that of the search for the lost values of the forgotten East, all the more intelligible for the outsider. Hugo Hamilton recalled being in Eurfurt. When he happened to mention cakes, women present immediately offered him recipes. Zeh glanced at him and articulated what we were all thinking: "In the East, they still made cakes. In the West we bought them in plastic in the supermarket."
So we looked to the concept of Heimat, "home" or "homeland", that sense of belonging - another word stained by Nazi rhetoric. All the while present at the table was Christoph Hein, born in 1944, in Silesia. Author of The Tango Player and The Distant Lover, he has also restored words discredited by the Nazis and is now representative of the generation between Grass and Hofmann and Brussig. Speaking in German, he was witty and shrewd, just like his fiction. His novel Willenbrock (2000), one of the strongest challenges to IMPAC winner The Known World, is a portrait not only of one man, a former engineer turned second-hand car dealer, but of a society, a culture distorted by change. It is Ballard country, only funnier, catching that peculiarly wry despairing German humour. Hamilton remarked that the Germans were good at being unhappy. The panel's consensus was that Germans were actually even better at being unhappy on recalling the euphoria surrounding the fall of the wall.
According to Brussig, Germans disliked remembering how happy they had been in 1990. Later Christoph Hein, who sees comedy as the only way of understanding the pain and betrayal, when asked in the foyer about Grass's legacy said, "he is very important, and will always be; he saw the lies, the betrayals".
Panel discussions often fall flat. This one was exciting and thoughtful, as three writers spoke as individuals about their country, creator of one of the world's richest cultures, which has yet to locate a coherent identity.
Most Joyceans will agree this year's post 2004 centenary Bloomsday was a muted affair - not that Bloom and Molly, or even Joyce and Nora are complaining - even the most committed of lovers are entitled to some belated privacy. The Dublin Writers Festival was far from muted. It even managed to withstand the good weather, and lured the public in from the busy streets, to rather humid interiors, where readers shared in the magic of words and the perennial power of story, that irresistible allure of what happens next.
