Croatia the Partner Country at the Leipzig Book Fair
Text: Vesna Kukavica
Every spring the International Book Fair in Leipzig gathers Europe's publishing elite, and the partner country in 2008 is Croatia. Along with pre-eminent writers from the homeland, Croatian authors from around the world will have an opportunity to make a joint appearance at this prestigious book fair held in the heart of Europe. The city of Leipzig, know as a centre of fairs and one of the key cultural hubs of both German and European history, lives every spring in the spirit of the slogan Leipzig Reads. In 2008 Leipzig reads Croatian! The success of the Croatian appearance in Leipzig, which runs from March 13 to 26 of this year, will be the desired ticket to the European culture scene. And it is the first time that Croatian literature is not just one of many at the stands of a large international event of this kind, but rather the one the focus is on. The number of books by Croatian authors translated into German has passed the 30 mark, which is a real miracle compared to before. Translations from previous years are also part of the Croatian fair presentation, especially from authors who have long published in German, for example Slavenka Drakuliæ, Miljenko Jergoviæ, Miro Gavran and Zoran Feriæ. The leaders and authors of the Croatian program are Gyorgy Dalos, a Hungarian pundit of Croatian literature and Alida Bremer, a Slavic languages expert living in Germany, but a native of Split. She is already known to the Croatian public as one of the most agile promoters of Croatian literature in the German speaking world and is also a translator and agent. Her ideas concerning the Croatian appearance in Leipzig are somewhat different, because Bremer feels that, although there were publications and translations into German earlier, the time has come for the kind of systematic presentation that for now, at least in the case of Croatia, has not yet been undertaken. The director of the Leipzig book fair, Oliver Zille, was also present at the Ministry of Culture for the final presentation of the Croatian appearance. He pointed above all to the numbers. Year after year, for example, the fair he leads has seen participation from about 2,350 exhibitors from 36 countries, and has been visited every year by an average of 127,500 people and 2,600 accredited journalists. Zille underlines that the Leipzig Book Fair is the oldest event of its kind in the world, as it has been held without break from the mid-fifteenth century. Our first mission is to bring young German authors to the market and to reposition authors coming from other countries. No less important is the promotion of the culture of reading. Namely, although it is a highly developed industrialised nation, Germany today faces the problem of illiteracy as 10% of our population is functionally illiterate, which means that they do not possess the culture of reading. That is why encouraging the culture of books, through the collaboration of schools and fairs like ours, is an exceptionally important activity. Leipzig, of course, has a much larger competitor, and that is the book fair in Frankfurt. Oliver Zille, however, does not consider this competition that important because, he says – there is room for all. The question is often posed as to whether Germany needs two fairs of this size. I think it does, because on the German book market, one of the largest in the world, some 80,000 new titles appear every year, which need to be offered to the public at a high standard, and that is a task that can be borne by another large fair, says Oliver Zille. The annual turnover of the book market in Germany is 9.2 billion euro, and 7% of the cited books are translations, which makes Germany the largest translation market in the world. And that is why in fact the appearance of Croatia in Leipzig as partner country could be a significant boost for a bigger breakthrough by Croatian literature on the global market. As German is numbered among the larger languages at the global level, being spoken by 128 million people in 38 countries around the world, where estimates say that more than half a million emigrant Croatians, for whom German is the first language, live, the Croatian interest for translations of Croatian literature into German it s quite logical. Cyberspace on the other hand shows the German is used very often on the Internet, just after English, and is followed by French, Japanese, Spanish and Chinese. More than eight percent of pages on the Internet are written in the German language among which is the frequently visited Croatian site http://www.crobuch.de/ conceived by the leaders and authors of the Croatian appearance at the Leipzig Book Fair, Gyorgy Dalos and Alida Bremer. The numerous Croatian community in the German speaking areas, which has now come in real and virtual space to Leipzig, is spread across the German federal states of Bavaria (Munich, Nürnberg, Regensburg), Baden-Württemberg (Stuttgart, Ulm, Karlsruhe, Mannheim), Rheinland-Pfalzu (Mainz), Nordhein-Westfalena (Cologne, Düsseldorf, Essen), and in metropolitan Berlin and Hamburg. And so the Croatian youth in the numerous German federal states and Croatians living in Switzerland and Austria read and learn in German, and in this school year they number a total of 4,700 readers of required reading in German and Croatian. Across Europe their parents, for the most part guest workers who arrived in the 1960s and 1970s, have awaited with special pride the moment when Leipzig reads Croatian / Leipzig liest kroatisch.
