Facts and figures

The 2004 Frankfurt Book Fair opened yesterday. Rania Gaafar, in Frankfurt, marvels at the magnitude of the event

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The opening ceremony of the International Frankfurt Book Fair (5-10 October) took place on Tuesday in the presence of Chancellor Gerhard Schröder, Arab League Secretary-General Amr Moussa and, representing Nobel laureate Naguib Mahfouz, Mohamed Salmawy, editor-in-chief of the Egyptian French-language newspaper Al-Ahram Hebdo, who delivered Mahfouz's speech. Later in the week, Boutros Boutros Ghali, former UN secretary-general, will be giving a lecture on reform and human rights in the Arab World, while yesterday the International Trade Centre was inaugurated by Foreign Secretary Joschka Fischer and First Lady Mrs Suzanne Mubarak, head of the Egyptian delegation to Frankfurt -- marking the official opening of the trade side of the event, its historical raison d'être.

Talk of Frankfurt's status as a literary city goes hand in hand with discussion of the fair and the guest-of-honour presentation. Frankfurt, it is said, inherited its culturally significant location, for Johannes Gutenberg invented printing only a few kilometres away in the city of Mainz, in the 15th century. The city's first post-war book fair opened in 1949, and since then the event has turned Frankfurt into a leading world community for the book trade and, increasingly, after the rise of information technology, for the media.

As the largest international event in the book industry, the Frankfurt Book Fair yearly overtakes the city -- a fact demonstrated by the annual rise in the number of exhibitors and media personnel, estimated at 290,000 this year, as opposed to last year's 288,887. Some 172,717 square kilometres have been set aside for the event this year, with the Arab world guest-of-honour presentation taking up 4,000 square kilometres -- the largest space given to a guest of honour in the history of the fair. Approximately 7,000 exhibitors from no less than 110 countries are participating, with the purpose of establishing new contacts in the publishing world, or else renewing old ones. The UK comprises the largest foreign contingent, with 900 British exhibitors. It was in reference to such figures that Volker Neumann, this year's Frankfurt Book Fair president, described it as "the unchallenged leading fair".

Under the motto "A Look into the Future", the guest of honour is presenting more than 200 writers, artists and intellectuals, with stellar poets like Mahmoud Darwish and Adonis (Ali Ahmed Said) standing side by side with writers who have proved successful in languages other than Arabic -- Taher Ben Jaloun, Assia Djebar and Amin Maalouf, to mention three Francophones. For Neumann, indeed, the Arab World is "by far the most interesting guest of honour" Frankfurt has had, not least because, unlike Russia, last year's guest of honour, for example, it encompasses so many countries and cultures. Through the duration of the fair more than 3,000 cultural events -- readings, performances, conferences, workshops, seminars, lectures -- will be taking place in and around Frankfurt. On the last day non-trade visitors will have the opportunity to buy books offered by publishing houses (a total of 350,000 titles) at shop price.

One of the highlights of the Frankfurt Book Fair is the presentation of the prestigious annual Peace Prize Award of the German Book Trade, traditionally awarded at the closing of the Book Fair in the Frankfurt Paulskirche. Recent winners include Jorge Semprœn (1994), Annemarie Schimmel (1995), Martin Walser (1998), Assia Djebar (2000), Jèrgen Habermas (2001), Chinua Achebe (2002) and Susan Sontag (2003). This year's winner is the Hungarian writer Péter Esterhàzy, whose work will be eulogised by Michael Naumann, former minister for the arts and currently the co-editor of Germany's weekly newspaper Die Zeit, on 10 October. The prize regularly generates debate -- Annemarie Schimmel's critique of Salman Rushdie, for example, otherwise known as "the Walser debate" -- and, Esterhàzy's status notwithstanding, this year is expected to be no exception.

In contrast to last year's widely criticised focus on popular cultural events -- celebrities presenting their autobiographies, for example -- this year Neumann aims for "a concentrated working fair" focussing on politics and cultural policy. Yet such celebrity-centred events, which have helped turn the fair into a media spectacle in recent years, may balance the emphasis on weighty topics like "the dialogue of civilisations", "Islam and modernity" etc.

Museums and cultural institutions in Frankfurt traditionally cooperate with the book fair and its annual guest of honour, and this year an exhibition entitled Al-Cinema Al-Arabiya (Arab Cinema) will be held at the German Film Museum (Deutsches Filmmuseum) until November, shedding light on 77 years of Arab film history with film posters, costume designs, photo stills and architectural sketches. Alongside the exhibit, the museum has dedicated the greatest ever retrospective in its history to Arab film. Running until April 2005, the programme is akin to a journey of discovery excavating films and directors in every part of the Arab world during the last 50 years. With 30 percent of Frankfurt's population Muslim -- immigrants make up a considerable population -- the German Film Museum feels the need to offer a different perspective on Muslim life: film watching as a form of education, so to speak, with a week of special screenings for school children. Like Arabic literature, Arab film remains largely unknown in Germany even as it has gained attention and awards in countries like France and Italy. Among the cinematic figures who will be present to discuss their work with German film goers are Egypt's auteur Youssef Chahine and Tunisian filmmaker Moufida Tlatli, while Lebanese filmmaker Daniel Arbid's Ma'arik Hubb (In the Battlefields), a stimulating and important debut, will be screened. The German Museum of Architecture will likewise present the work of the pioneering Egyptian architect Hassan Fathi in February 2005.

The culture pages of the German press this week nonetheless shed critical light on the Arab presentation -- the last links in a chain of debate to which both Arabs and Germans have contributed. Thomas Steinfeld, an acclaimed cultural critic writing in the daily Sueddeutsche Zeitung, feared that the book fair would focus solely on Arab-Western relations. "Negotiating Arabic literature will receive the least attention of all at this book fair," he wrote. "Arabic literature appears on the premises of its mediating function, and it is these premises that change the subject [of the presentation]." Steinfelt contended that the "pedagogical impetus" with which Arab literature is presented will have a significant impact on its perception in Germany: "Surely there is a reason... the novels reaching us this autumn from across the Arab world appear to be solidly founded on 19th-century European narrative..." He questioned Arab modernity, whether in literature or life, claiming that it stands "on uncertain grounds". Around 50 Arabic books have been translated into German for presentation at the fair, and Steinfelt wondered if the event offers enough of a chance to read and assess them with a view to answering the questions he raised.

Following a similar line of thought, Stefan Weidner, translator, writer and editor of Fikrun wa Fan (Art and Thought), quoted Lebanese poet Abbas Baydoun in another daily, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung. In the wake of 11 September the latter had charged the West with reading Arabic literature only to be informed about Arabs, not with literary motives -- a tendency he described as "literary espionage". But Weidner viewed this as a relative advantage: at least it leads to readers becoming acquainted with Arabic literature, he argued. He also praised what he, in common with many German critics, describes as the "intelligence and open-mindedness" of the fair's organisers: "Fortunately we will not be confronted with clumsy Palestinian propagandist poets... Nor will we hear from political essayists who justify the resistance in Iraq, the killing of innocents, using modern theoretical means..." Such statements typify a position frequently held in Germany. Weidner spotted serious problems in the Arab publishing business, with 3,000 copies making a best-seller; nobody can make a living from that, he said. In this and other ways -- the fact that Arab publishing houses do not sustain editorial departments, for example -- the Arab book business cannot compare with the West. "Compared to such crucial problems," he concluded, "much talked about questions like censorship appear to be of minor importance."

Elsewhere Khaled Al-Maaly, the Iraqi founder of Germany's leading Arab publishing house, Al-Jamal (The Camel) -- the house specialises in translating German literature into Arabic, publishing modern Arabic fiction and poetry -- pointed to high rates of illiteracy in the Arab world. "The 2002 UNDP report," he wrote, "shows... of the 280 million people living in Arab countries today, about a fifth of the world population, 65 per cent... are illiterate." The German-based Syrian author Rafik Shami, whose work, written originally in German, has been translated into 23 languages not including Arabic, agreed. The Arab world is in the throes of a cultural crisis, he contended, with the cheap, aesthetically displeasing way in which books are produced amounting to "a castration of spirit and thought".

Positively for many Arab immigrants to Germany, the fair could bring about a welcome change of perspective -- especially in the nature of the attention paid to the Middle East by the German media -- bringing about not only increased knowledge of Arab political and cultural history among Germans at large but a reduction in the sense of alienation felt by Arab immigrants. Perhaps as a way to facilitate Western awareness of, and insight into, Arabic literature, there should be a return to the post-structuralist idea of the death of the author during this year's fair. Best to have the texts speak for themselves, allowing them to spread organically irrespective of the country of their author, his political orientation or his gender.