Opening of the Frankfurt Book Fair: The madness of the nation

It's actually a good approach: every year the Frankfurt Book Fair focuses on a guest country and thus forces the German public to think outside the box. Otherwise, who would know about the peculiarities of Indonesian or Slovenian literature?

If the invited nation is ruled by right-wing, sometimes right-wing extremists, strange contortions by local dignitaries have been observed in the past at the opening ceremonies. The appearance of post-fascist Italy in 2024, for example, will remain unforgettable, while in the Philippines last year the political situation was discussed - the country is led by the dictator's son Ferdinand Marcos Jr. ruled – generously away.

This year too, there would be a lot to criticize about the attitudes of the guests, the Czech Republic, which is governed by right-wing populist to right-wing extremists. However, the criticism was left to the Czechs themselves. There were whistles and boos in Czech when Czech Culture Minister Oto Klempíř gave his speech in the Frankfurt Congress Center on Tuesday evening, in which he referred to the close cultural relations between Germany and the Czech Republic.

Klempíř belongs to the “Motorists” party, which specifically supports motorists and the abolition of bicycle lanes. It was only on Monday that the government under Andrej Babiš passed a resolution on a new cultural policy for the years 2026 to 2029, which 600 representatives from the cultural sector opposed in advance in an open letter.

Wolfram Weimer was not booed this year, although he was rather cautiously applauded. The Minister of State for Culture spoke of a “discursive greenhouse effect” that the “marriage” of AI and social media creates “in Western societies” (only there?). He wanted, he said, to “ask the question of ownership” in relation to Tiktok. What the Americans did was right, says Weimer, by which he means the forced handover of the US business (which generates billions annually) from the Chinese ByteDance to a US joint venture.

With a little detour about the Grimmelshausen Society, which will probably award the “Literary Word of the Year” in the future, Weimer finally ended up with the outgoing Jürgen Boos, who had been director of the Frankfurt Book Fair for over 20 years and whom he wanted to recognize as a “world market leader”, especially at the national level, for his services to the fair.

Positive references to one's own state or association of states were also made at a higher level. Maltese EU Culture Commissioner Glenn Micallef said he was pleased that a European country was once again a guest country in Frankfurt, before he called out the Maltese writer Manwel Dimech for the importance of literature and then called for more rights for authors vis-à-vis AI companies, as if he wasn't actually a politician but someone else.

The “power question” was then asked by Sebastian Guggolz. The new head of the German Book Trade Association referred to the latest PISA study, which gave the state education system an unsatisfactory report. According to Guggolz, we live in one of the “most prosperous states in the world,” but we no longer meet the basic requirements for school education: There are “huge structural special funds for infrastructure and the military, but where are the special programs for intangible infrastructure?”

Culture and politics, yes, literature and politics cannot be separated, as Radka Denemarková also pointed out, in times when Europe is becoming “brown again”. The fight for word power, said the Czech writer, is also a fight for world power. She also recalled the entire madness of nationalism, as a nation is nothing more than a construct consisting of language, borders, propaganda, and national identity is one that is based on negation. Therefore, she began her speech, which was greeted with stormy applause, one thing should not be forgotten: Ministers of State come and go, but literature remains.