Frankfurt Book Fair | The Czech Republic is now by the sea

In Prague, the Vltava sometimes seems like an ocean: "If Bohemia is still by the sea, I will believe the seas again," wrote Ingeborg Bachmann in 1964 - and in 2026 we will believe the Czech Republic, the guest country at the Frankfurt Book Fair. Photo: dpa/ZUMA Wire/Slavek Ruta Irritation as an advertising effect: the Czech Republic is a landlocked country. As a guest country at the Frankfurt Book Fair, which begins today, how can it be advertised as “A Country on the Coast”? One should remember Ingeborg Bachmann's famous poem "Bohemia lies by the sea", which was inspired by William Shakespeare. Whether out of geographical ignorance or wantonness, he located Bohemia not far from Sicily in his drama "The Winter's Tale." However, as a fantasy land where bad things can turn into good things. In her 1964 poem, Ingeborg Bachmann calls: “Come here, all you Bohemians, sailors, harbor whores and ships unanchored.” After all, Czechs greet good friends with “Ahoj”.

And the largest book fair in the world, which runs until Sunday, also welcomes its guest of honor with “Ahoj”. A 2,400 square meter room, designed like a coastal landscape with huge, inflatable "pebbles", two literary stages and a red lighthouse, is intended to attract and inspire visitors as a "Czech pavilion". 75 authors from the neighboring country will shape the trade fair program at 100 events. There are 150 new Czech releases at the fair.

Translations from Czech have always been part of the German book market, but there has never been such a large selection. Many publishers are fighting for the audience's attention. They have to fight. Around 52,600 new German-language publications per year - that means 144 new books are published every day.

In total, the retailer has around 2.5 million titles available. How many of these will end up in waste paper at some point due to a lack of storage capacity? What no one wants to talk about, a classic of Czech literature makes it clear to you. Bohumil Hrabal (1914–1997) can no longer live to see the re-publication of his book “All Too Loud Solitude,” published in 1987, by Suhrkamp. But it is highly recommended, as he has tackled the root of a problem that not only the book market, but actually society as a whole is struggling with: reading ability is declining. There are more and more people who have no idea “what a book like this actually means.”

From 2025 to 2024, the industry's sales fell by 2.7 percent. In 2026 it fell even further and is now three percent below the same period last year. Particularly worrying: the number of young people is shrinking. Even though sales in the “New Adult” segment have increased, the number of young readers is decreasing. Things aren't getting any better either: the most recent PISA study showed that one in three 15-year-olds in this country lacks "basic reading skills."

In contrast, Hrabal presents a man who is at a paper press and numbing his pain with beer when he discovers gold-edged folios that someone has thrown away among the bloody waste from a butcher's shop. Who then drags the rescued thing into his small apartment in the evening, where everything is already full of books. In a great monologue he draws us to his side, in fact he already reflects the entire world of today.

In the mid-1970s, when Hrabal wrote “All Too Loud Loneliness,” there were no computers in private use. Nevertheless, he felt how “a completely different kind of thinking” was pushing back the spirituality that had always been associated with reading.

After all, who dares to come up with a big design these days? Radka Denemarková worked on her new, almost 600-page novel “Chocolate Blood” for ten years. It's about gender equality in the 19th century. It began with her admiration for the Czech national poet Božena Němcová. She not only read Nemcová's popular novel "The Grandmother" but also her previously unpublished letters in manuscript. It affected her deeply how this woman - sick, spied on - literally starved to death in 1862 at the age of just 41. In contrast, Denemarková describes the life of the women's rights activist George Sand, who became famous as an author under a male pseudonym, and in contrast, the life of George Rockefeller, founder of an oil empire.

The Frankfurt Book Fair opens on Tuesday evening and runs until Sunday. Wednesday and Thursday are reserved for trade visitors, after which it opens to the public. The number of exhibitors is “at the same level as previous years,” says book fair spokesman Torsten Casimir. Most recently, 4,350 exhibitors from more than 100 countries and 238,000 visitors came to Frankfurt. More than 1,000 authors can be seen on ten stages. Industry sales continue to decline. Interest is falling in most subject areas: travel books minus 11.6 percent (from 2024 to 2025), guides minus 8.1 percent, non-fiction books minus 4.6 percent, children's and young adult books minus 2.4 percent. Sales increased for fiction (plus 1.2 percent), young adult plus 4.8 percent and new adult plus 9.6 percent. But the young generation is disappearing: the number of readers between the ages of 10 and 15 fell by over 30 percent, and among 20 to 29 year olds by almost 18 percent.

Why 19th century? Because a lot of things that shape us today began back then, Denemarková explained the author in an interview. You have to put your dramatic short chapters together yourself when reading them. Which would be to the taste of Bohumil Hrabal's first-person narrator. But would he have shared this radical feminist view?

The list of those invited to Frankfurt almost shows female dominance. Women are a growing target group for publishers; they read many more books than men. Tereza Boučková's novel "The House on Matoušova Street" tells the almost century-old history of a building in the Smíchov district of Prague. It begins with concern for an old woman and leads the author to the Jewish lawyer who bought the neoclassical bourgeois villa in Prague and died before the outbreak of the Second World War. Others of his relatives and acquaintances tried to escape from the Nazis, but not all of them succeeded.

We see the actress Zita Kabátova and Vaclav Havel, who visited his girlfriend in this house. And it is told in a very personal way, right up to the arrests after the end of the Prague Spring and the shooting at Charles University in Prague in 2023. The author, born in 1957, is the daughter of Pavel Kohout, the writer and civil rights activist and co-author of "Charter 77". He was expatriated in 1979 and, now 97, temporarily lives back in Prague.

The novel “Where the Dead Speak” by Jaroslav Rudiš has a completely different narrative tone. The title sounds dark, as it also describes a trip to European cemeteries. But the three friends who are traveling in an old Saab take it as an adventure, and each has their own reasons for this cemetery tour. They meet Adalbert Stifter at the cemetery in Linz. In Vienna they stand at the grave of Thomas Bernhard. Later on that of Karl Kraus. Ludvik Kundera in Kunštat, Jaroslav Hašek in Lipnice, at the New Jewish Cemetery in Prague they drink beer “with Kafka”. In the Giant Mountains they remember Carl Hauptmann, who founded an artists' colony here with his brother Gerhart. So many names in European literature! But then it becomes dangerous. From Lower Lusatia they are pursued by “two garden spiders”.

“A book must be the ax for the frozen sea within us” – this sentence from Franz Kafka always comes to mind when the trade fair topic is the Czech Republic. In her novel “The Shift,” Anna Beata Háblová tells the story of a young woman who sits at the checkout in the supermarket every day, filling shelves and sorting vegetables. Doesn't there have to be something else in life? At first her thoughts about art, about painting, were just dreams. Then it becomes concrete. She creates an image that she doesn't want to give away again because it has become part of herself.

This is how Bhumil Hrabal's worker feels when, stinking of beer and dirt, he carries home what he has saved from the paper press - "because in the folder I have books from which I hope to learn something about myself in the evening, something that I don't yet know."

It feels to him "as if there was a little flame flickering inside me too, a little control flame like in a boiler, a little flame like in a gas refrigerator, a tiny, eternal light to which I pour every day the oil of those thoughts that I have read out while working and against my will from books like the ones I now carry home in my folder." What language, opposed to hopelessness.

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