The literary store is celebrating its 40th anniversary at the Munich Kammerspiele

Created: 12/15/2022, 10:45 am

By: Michael Schleicher

Invited to the Kammerspiele: Rachel Salamander (right) and Ariella Chmiel (left).

Charlotte Knobloch gave the speech on the anniversary of the literature trade.

Patrick Guttmann © Patrick Guttmann

Rachel Salamander founded her literary store in Munich 40 years ago.

It was the first Jewish specialist bookstore in the Federal Republic.

Now the anniversary has been celebrated in the Kammerspiele.

"At some point," says Rachel Salamander in her moving speech late on Tuesday afternoon (December 13, 2022), "at some point I will believe everything that was said here".

The publicist and literary scholar invited to the theater of the Munich Kammerspiele to celebrate the 40th birthday of her literary shop.

As reported, Salamander, born in 1949 in a camp for displaced persons near Deggendorf, founded the first Jewish specialist bookstore in the Federal Republic in Munich in 1982 after studying German and earning his doctorate.

This has long since had branches all over Germany and has developed into a far-reaching “guiding star of Jewish culture”, as Charlotte Knobloch, President of the Jewish Community in Munich and Upper Bavaria, emphasized in her speech.

In 1982 Rachel Salamander founded the literary store in Munich

At the beginning of the 1980s, just 37 years after the liberation of Germany by the Allies, this development was anything but foreseeable and mapped out.

Salamander remembers: She and her team initially celebrated the founding of the literary store every five years, certainly as a kind of "conjuration".

But something fragile has long since become a matter of course - that alone is enormous luck and a win for Munich, the Free State, the state.

And because that's the case - they all came to celebrate Salamander and the literary store: a top-class, diverse group of guests from culture and politics experienced this entertaining ceremony.

Among them, for example, the writer and former Hanser publisher Michael Krüger, who once, on November 17, 1982,

moderated the first reading in the literature store;

the Israeli poet David Rokeah was a guest at the time.

Poet Albert Ostermaier is there and recites his "Ode to Rachel Salamander".

Historian Norbert Frei celebrates, as does Monacensia boss Anke Buettner, who has just received Salamander's archive, and Barbara Mundel, artistic director of the Kammerspiele: After the reception, the party attends the presentation of the adaptation of Gabriele Tergit's fantastic novel "Effingers".

Moving-moving review of the first four decades of her literary business: Rachel Salamander.

© Patrick Guttmann

Politics is represented, among others, by Munich's former mayor Christian Ude, cultural advisor Anton Biebl, ex-minister Ludwig Spaenle, today the Free State's anti-Semitism commissioner, and by former city councilor Marian Offman, who published his debut novel "Mandelbaum" this year.

Among the guests are, of course, representatives of the guild without whom no bookshop could exist: Dirk and Marlene Ippen, publishers of our newspaper, among other things, and Thomas Zuhr, head of the Hirmer art book publisher.

They all applaud when Munich's deputy mayor, Katrin habenschaden, remarks that Rachel Salamander has not only created a bookstore, but a "meeting place".

Today Ariella Chmiel runs the literary store

This institution of intellectual and cultural life, which can be found today on St-Jakobs-Platz, should (and will) remain so in the future.

Ariella Chmiel, who charmingly leads through the celebration, is now in charge of the fortunes of the literary store: "Knowledge never goes out of style," she states - quite rightly.

The literary store has turned 40 and we wish: ad me'ah v'esrim – to 120!

At least.