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Author Kast 2020 at Lit Ruhr: "There was no zoom in the savannah"
Photo: APress / imago images
Aside from the absolute horror fearful dream of a nuclear war (that was in the 1980s, I was a teenager, things have now subsided), I only have one recurring nightmare, and it goes like this: I'll be late for my own event.
Something is stopping me, I just can't move or have forgotten something and come to my lecture or reading completely unprepared.
To the author
Even a freshwater snail was named after
Bas Kast
: the Tylomelania baskasti.
In addition, the German-Dutch science author, who was born in Landau in the Palatinate in 1973, wrote one of the most popular non-fiction books of recent years: the "Nutrition Compass".
And right now, "The Book of a Summer. Become Who You Are" has been published by Diogenes Verlag.
Only once in my life would this nightmare almost become a reality.
Well, maybe several times, but in any case never in such an uncomfortable way as at the book fair:
Frankfurt two years ago, a beautiful Sunday, shortly before 11 a.m.
I don't have to bridge more than a few hundred meters as the crow flies to make it to the SPIEGEL booth D56 in Hall 3.0 in the trade fair maze (yes, I swear, it was really the SPIEGEL booth with the orange SPIEGEL logo and the SPIEGEL bestseller lists as larger-than-life posters - I had an appointment there for a panel discussion: For the first time in my life, a conversation with SPIEGEL, and I suck it up ...).
I couldn't help it.
No, the hall was just as packed as the Oktoberfest, only with less Munich and less beer;
People as far as the eye can see and much further, the air: stuffy, the bustle: big - nothing worked.
I want to say: I was in the middle of an unimaginable crowd, more like a human jelly, and, by the way, every single one of us without a mask!
Because that was still back then, in that other world.
You remember?
In this world of yesteryear, where you shook hands with strangers.
That was considered polite at the time.
That's how I came into personal contact with SPIEGEL for the first time, for which I am now even allowed to write a text about a book fair that no longer exists.
I ask myself: If THAT experience was a nightmare, shouldn't a book fair without a fair and without people have to be wonderfully beautiful?
The ideal fair.
A trade fair where nothing can go wrong.
Because not only are there no crowds, there is also no SPIEGEL stand that I could be late to, and in order to still be on the safe side, a higher force has also ensured that the SPIEGEL conversation has already taken place has (here to listen)!
So I imagine how I will arrive at the ghost mass.
And then I stop.
In all these years, from the very first visit, when I came to Mass as a twenty-year-old with my printed manuscript and a lot of hope in my backpack, the hope was that I would come across a publisher who would do my scribbling for me, of course no one was ready, because no manuscripts are read at the fair - I asked myself at the time: why this fair?
It's so loud there, in the main halls it's like standing right next to Niagara Falls.
Buying books is much more relaxed in the bookstore, and the acoustics at the events, which can admittedly be interesting, are often terrible.
And yet I pause now, now that more and more people are starting to say: "That was the last mass in its old form, like back then, with all the traffic jams, it will never be again", I ask myself no, I feel: I'll miss you, dear book fair in its old form.
I miss you already!
more on the subject
Icon: Spiegel PlusKlett-Cotta boss on the Frankfurt Book Fair: Why didn't we try harder? A guest contribution by Tom Kraushaar
My dream of a book fair: writers really have no business there! A guest article by Daniel Kehlmann
You get there, are suddenly surrounded by books and publishers, agents, fans, critics, journalists, and notice that the lines that you formulate in the quiet little room that this modest activity is the raw material for the world of an incredible number of people.
Of course, your own book isn't really the world of all these people, but for a moment it feels exactly like that.
And that's great.
And I miss that, that energizing feeling.
Book fair, I miss you.
And of course, personal encounters are not only possible at the fair, and yet the fair is one of the best opportunities, as an otherwise lonely writer, to get to know the people of the book world as people.
If our brains had developed in times of lockdown, things might be different.
But, as is well known, the Incarnation took place in the African savannah, face to face, not screen to screen.
There was no zoom in the savannah.
Do you want to abolish the book fair in its old form?
According to me.
Reinvent it!
But, dear, can you - can we all - come up with something, I mean something that preserves the core of what the old, analog mass was able to conjure up in a magical way?
If there won't be a book fair anymore, if THAT becomes the new reality, yes, well - I guess, then I'd really rather have my old nightmares back.
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