You Are Not Literature
Novelist Lana Bastašić’s blazing response to yet another act of censorship from German literary organisations and festival organisers has been viewed by many as both brutally articulate and also courageous and inspiring.
Last month, the award-winning Bosnian-Serbian novelist announced she was cutting ties with her German publisher in protest against its silence on the humanitarian crisis in Gaza. The dispute mirrors the ethical conflict arising from sponsorship of literary and cultural events here in Scotland where backers are heavily invested in fossil fuels.
In this case the high profile Austrian literary organizations Literaturfest Salzburg and Literaturhaus NÖ withdrew Bastašić’s invitation and effectively cancelled her upcoming residency and readings. They wrote:
Dear Lana
Thank you once again for your interest in the residency and reading in May 2024. Like many others, we have been closely following the discussion surrounding your decision to leave the S. Fischer publishing house, and we have engaged in intensive discussions on the matter over the past few days. As much as we appreciate your books, under the given circumstances, we unfortunately must withdraw our invitation. Your stay at Literaturhaus NÖ and participation in the Literature Festival Salzburg would inevitably imply a positioning on our part that we do not wish for and contradicts our role.
Best regards,
Josef Kirchner and Anna Weidenholzer
Bastašić responded saying:
Dear Anna,
For the sake of truth and transparency, I would like to remind you that the interest was yours, given that you invited me. Your decision to uninvite me is a clear positioning on your part. Let it also be clear that this is a cancellation of a residency and an event we previously agreed on, based solely on my decision to leave a publisher. It is my political and human opinion that children should not be slaughtered and that German cultural institutions should know better when it comes to genocide. You should also know that you have now added yourselves to the long and infamous list of cultural institutions which cancel artists who refuse to stay silent when the world is screaming.
I do not know what literature means to you outside of networking and grants. To me it means, first and foremost, an unwavering love for human beings and the sanctity of human life. Given that you invited me to your residency and festival, you must have been acquainted with my work, which deals closely with the consequences war has on children. Perhaps to you literary works are divorced from real life, but then again you probably have never known war first hand.
Thank you for uninviting me. I would not want to be part of another institution which not only cancels artists because of their activism, but seems to think silence and censorship is the right answer to genocide. While I am aware of the fact that the funding you receive within the system you inhabit must have made you forgetful of what art really is about, I still want to remind you that (fortunately for precarious writers like myself), you are not Literature. Your money is not Literature. S. Fischer is not Literature. Germany is not Literature. And we, the writers, will remember.
Lana Bastašić
Taking a hit for your principles is not just a rare thing today but is a difficult thing for hard-up writers trying to develop their artform and survive. Leaving her publisher cost the writer a ‘years worth of money’ we’re told.
But is is Bastašić’s line ‘You are not Literature, your money is not Literature‘ that really lands. It is the demarcation of roles that lights up this response, and the refusal to be neither prostitute nor monkey. The perceived role of the literary festival is to give profile to the writers and to sell books and tickets. But they want the writers to be interesting enough – but not too interesting. Any prospect of actually having a political message, or to be politically organised is verboten. The response cuts a line between the sort of liberal introspective and burgeoning bougie book culture and real literature.
The cultural sector is becoming the epicentre of the wider political clash in Germany. Writing in Jacobin in November Dave Braneck writes: “Germany’s leaders have given unconditional support for Israel’s war in Gaza — but also demanded that immigrants do the same. The rhetoric of German atonement for the past is being used to silence left-wing Jews and blame antisemitism on immigrants.” He continues:
“We’re also now seeing the mere assertion that Palestinians are people itself being deemed somehow antisemitic or supportive of Hamas. German press did not hesitate to attack Naomi Klein (who is Jewish) for calling Israeli violence “genocidal” and failing to condemn Hamas in the same tweet. Nor have they thought twice about branding Judith Butler (who is also Jewish) as an antisemitic “Israel-hater” for “relativizing” Hamas’s violence and for her role in postcolonial studies more broadly. That using the state of Israel as a monolithic stand-in for all Jews is itself pretty antisemitic hasn’t seemed to dawn on most Germans.”
Atonement as Denial
Now more than 500 writers, artists, filmmakers, and culture workers have announced a push back against Germany’s stance on Israel’s war on Gaza, calling on creatives to step back from collaborating with German state-funded organisations. Called Strike Germany, the protest is in response to the continuing Israeli assault on Gaza that since October 7 has killed more than 23,000 Palestinians, nearly 10,000 of them children.
The artist-led coalition demands that German authorities should protect artistic freedom. It also calls on German institutions to combat structural racism, and calls for support of the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS) campaign. The movement has such support that key events such as the upcoming Berlin Film Festival, as well as associations like the Goethe-Institut, and museums like Gropius Bau could be affected.
Strike Germany was launched earlier this month, and is backed by French author and Nobel Prize for literature winner Annie Ernaux, and Palestinian poet and activist Mohammed El-Kurd, who alleges Germany has adopted “McCarthyist policies that suppress freedom of expression, specifically expressions of solidarity with Palestine”. Other supporters include the actress, Indya Moore, British Turner Prize winner Tai Shani, and Lebanese alternative rock singer Hamed Sinno.
It is a dark irony that freedom of speech is being curtailed in defence of genocide while large parts of Gaza resemble the Warsaw Ghetto. A world as brutalised as this needs writers of conscience like Lana Bastašić to articulate an adequate response.
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A great post. Thanks.
We live in an age of virtue signalling, performative activism and luxury beliefs.
Discuss.
I don’t know how you can call giving up a years income as ‘virtual signalling’? People are responding to the appalling massacre we are witnessing as best they can.
Unless she has signed a very strange book contract, her royalties don’t stop because she’s left a publisher, and if she doesn’t get a lump-sum advance on her next book from her last publisher, she’ll get one from her next publisher. It’s a very odd story – it doesn’t stack-up at all the way it has been portrayed here.
Lana hasn’t taken a hit by cancelling her contract with Fischer Verlag. The contract she terminated was for her next novel, which she’s currently writing. As she said in an email to The Guardian, “I walked away from enough money to last me a year.” The hit she’s taken is the cancellation of her residency at the Literaturhaus NÖ and her reading at the Literaturfest Salzburg, which came with a generous stipend from both these organisations.
Lana terminated her contract with Fischer Verlag following its publication of a statement on its website, in which it reaffirmed its intention to ‘stand up to new forms of antisemitic and racist thinking and action… especially after Hamas’ massacre on 7 October 2023’. Fischer Verlag was founded in 1886 by the Jewish publicist Samuel von Fischer and was driven into exile by the Nazi regime in 1936.
Both Literaturhaus NÖ and the Literaturfest Salzburg took the decision to distance themselves from the discussion around Lana’s protest against the publisher’s pro-Jewish position, which (they felt) threatened to overshadow the festival to the detriment of its other participants.
You appear to have missed the point of the article, Numberman, which doesn’t surprise me.
I haven’t commented on the article, Graeme. I was setting Satan’s false assumptions right.
Your second and third paragraphs don’t address any point or assumption made by Satan. The terms in which you felt moved to respond to Satan validate my comment.
The second and third paragraphs contextualise the point I make in the first, which is that the financial ‘hit’ that Lana has taken relates to the loss of income from the cancelled residency rather than her termination of her contract with her former publisher.
I fail to see what any of that has to do with Mike’s article.
With regard to the article itself, I agree with Mike that literary festivals are marketing rather than artistic events and that they’re exclusive inasmuch as they tend to exclude those voices that are dissonant with their sponsors’ preferred messaging. But this is true whatever the size or political complexion of the festival, whether its curators are progressive or conservative, radical or traditional; he who pays the piper…
Back in 2013, I broke the habit of a lifetime and accepted an invitation to read at the Mamilla International Poetry Festival in Ramallah. Its two main sponsors were ARCH – The Alliance to Restore Cultural Heritage in Jerusalem and the Mahmoud Darwish Foundation. I’ve no doubt that had I expressed, in word or deed, a message that dissented from the preferred messaging by the sponsors, my invitation to read would have been withdrawn. That’s just the way it works.
I also agree that ‘your money is not Literature’. But it’s naive to suppose that literary festivals are about literature; they’re about money. I’d have more respect for Lana’s righteous stance if she actively refused to participate in the commercialisation of literature in general and the commodification of her own work in particular – full stop. I’d also have more respect for her moral righteousness had she not cast herself as a passive victim of ‘censorship’, which doesn’t sit easily with the matter of her writing, which deplores such passivity.
I’m not a fan of literary festivals myself, though they do provide the publishing industry with an opportunity to market their writers and ultimately flog content and other merchandise, which is important to that industry and, by extension, to the larger economy.
They also provide an occasion for the leisurely bookish to hobnob in their various tribes or ‘genres’; that is, in the form or type of written, spoken, digital, or stylistic communication, which is governed by socially-agreed-upon conventions that have developed over time, and which defines their community, to the exclusion of ‘Others’.
This means that literary festivals tend not only to be little more than trade fairs; they tend to be cliquish as well
Pull the other one, Numbersman! 🙂 The paragraphs provide no context relevant to the point made by Satan or any possible assumptions underlying it, erroneous or otherwise. They set out the background and perspective of the publishing house Fischer Verlag, which Satan doesn’t even mention, but Mike’s article clearly does.
Satan’s comment does mention Fischer Verlag (to which s/he refers as the publisher whom Lana left).
The second paragraph of my reply this comment says why Lana cancelled her contract with Fischer Verlag (she objected to its pro-Jewish statement of intent to ‘stand up to new forms of antisemitic and racist thinking and action… especially after Hamas’ massacre on 7 October 2023’).
The third paragraph of my reply to this comment says why Literaturhaus NÖ and the Literaturfest Salzburg decided to cancel Lana’s residency (Literaturhaus NÖ and the Literaturfest Salzburg wanted to distance themselves from the discussion that’s arisen around Lana’s protest).
Both provide context to what I say in the first paragraph of my reply to Satan’s comment (that the financial hit Lana’s taking comes from the decision by Literaturhaus NÖ and the Literaturfest Salzburg to cancel her residency rather than from the loss of any royalties or advances due to her consequent on her cancelling her publishing contract with Fischer Verlag).
Isn’t this what Mike’s article (and subsequent comment) says? That Lana has taken a financial hit as a result of the decision by Literaturhaus NÖ and the Literaturfest Salzburg to cancel her residency?
Satan doesn’t mention Fischer Verlag by name. He/she makes a generic point about the relationship between author and publisher to which the background and perspective of Fischer Verlag are completely irrelevant.
No; Satan doesn’t mention Fischer Verlag by name. But nor does s/he make a merely generic point about the relationship between author and publisher; s/he is clearly making a more specific point about the relationship Lana and her [former] publisher (namely, Fischer Verlag), which is the point I corrected and the relationship I elucidated in making that correction.
@SteveH, whatever a ‘luxury belief’ is, surely there are fewer beliefs more ‘luxurious’ than self-pleasing myths about one’s self, group, country or faith? Especially when the reality is much shittier. Your own statements ring curiously hollow on these. What do you find most pleasing about ‘your’ country’s history, then? What parts do you appoint yourself the luxury of ignoring?
These behaviours have always been around. They’re not peculiar or characteristic of our postmodern times.
@SteveH, when a certain ‘SteveH’ posted this comment:
“This is the kind of freedom I was (and still am) happy to put my life on the line for.”
https://bellacaledonia.org.uk/2024/01/28/israel-on-trial/
it kind of maxed out the virtue signalling, performative activism and luxury beliefs triple-high-score on my meter.
I suppose the triplex virtue signalled is patriotic-courage-with-a-smile (scoring much more highly than, say, Stoicism). The performance basks in the cheapness of a social media comment while implying a deep, possibly eternal, on-call heroism; nice. And what a luxury to be able to say such things without the actual requirement to do anything. What makes it even more this-minute is the further implication that you are not only prepared to offer up your life, but what-a-life, since you’re clearly living-your-best-life.
What can I say? A masterful demonstration.
The simple truth is that everyone virtue signals sometimes. It is called being human but seeing as how the right came up with the term they would never accept it applies to them. Same with cancel culture – never them either.
@Niemand, I have just read an account of how politicians/public officials were trained for the council of Tlaxcala (a ‘mature urban parliament’ according to Spanish colonial sources at the time of Conquistador contact). According to this account, candidates were put through a gruelling and humiliating training in ethics and other requirements before being considered fit to take place in government.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tlaxcala#Pre-Columbian
See Chapter 9 of The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity, by David Graeber and David Wengrow.
So there are probably many useful republican traditions and practices from around the world which have been designed to a) select suitable candidates and weed out unsuitable ones, b) rigorously train candidates, c) inculcate public service ideals, and d) attempt to eradicate the egoist need for hypocrisy and cant (what right-wingers project on Others as ‘virtue signalling’) from those preparing for public service; and most of these ideas will be foreign to extremely hierarchical societies like the British Imperial Metropole, where *unfitness* for office seems systematically selected for, and the offices themselves designed to limit public service as much as is considered feasible.
And yet the res publica (public affairs) within the British empire was administered in just the same way, in this respect, as they were in the ‘idyll’ that the two Davids curate in their description of the indigenous origins of democracy in the Americas (‘Hiding in Plain Sight’, in Lapham’s Quarterly, Fall 2020). Within this regime, the British public school system likewise evolved to a) select suitable administrators and weed out unsuitable ones, b) rigorously train those administrators, c) inculcate in those administrators public service ideals and the ideal of personal ‘sacrifice’ for the ‘higher good’ that the empire embodied. The two regimes were not so ‘foreign’ to one another in respect of their recruitment and selection to the administration of their res publicae.
Publishing houses are supposed to comment on World events? I didn’t know that publishing houses publicly commented on anything much, or that anyone would care if they did. What a bizarre strory. Maybe the author is doing self-publicity? She is certainly good at publishing her correspondence.
It’s also strange that she hasn’t split from her UK publisher, seeing as they are owned by the largest publisher in Germany, where being sympathetic to Gazans is viewed as antisemetic, or somesuch.
Also strange that she hasn’t split from her UK publisher seeing as they are owned by the largest publisher in Germany, which is anti-Gaza, or something.
Indeed, Fischer Verlag (with whom Lana has fallen out) and Macmillan (with whom she hasn’t) are both subsidiaries of the Holtzbrinck Publishing Group.
A wee addendum to this story:
The Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (PACBI) holds the Holtzbrinck publishing house complicit in covering up Israel‘s old crimes or facilitating new ones.
In 1932, the Palestinian architect, Andoni Baramki, built a house in Jerusalem for his wife, Eveline. In 1948, during the Nakba, the Baramki family was uprooted, and the house was transformed into a military outpost. The building stood across from Mandelbaum Gate, on the ‘seam line’ between East and West Jerusalem.
In 1999, the Baramki House was transformed into The Museum on the Seam by the Israeli Jerusalem Foundation. The Museum on the Seam is a socio-political contemporary art museum, located on the meeting point of the three religions Abrahamic religions. It presents art as a language with no boundaries in order to raise diverse social issues for public discussion and bridge the gaps. The changing exhibitions in the Museum deal with social issues such as environment and sustainability, the consequences of capitalism, questions of public conscience, the individual’s solitude in the technological age, gender violence, and the relations between men and animals. This project was made possible through the financial support of the von Holtzbrinck family.
PACBI see this Museum as an embodiment of Israeli criminality, hypocrisy, property theft, colonisation, oppression and persistent denial of the Palestinians’ very presence and the rights that go along with it. We demand that the Baramki House be returned to its legitimate Palestinian owners, the Baramki family. If we in the UK want to show solidarity with the Palestinian people, we should stop buying books published by Macmillan and its imprints (e.g. Palgrave, Pan Books, Picador, Macmillan Children’s Books, Macmillan Education) and demand that our libraries and educational establishments divest of Macmillan books and periodicals.
I have been reading some of Svetlana Alexievich’s Last Witnesses: Unchildlike Stories, which document testimonies from adults who were children at the outbreak of war. Some talk of attacks by the technologically terrifying enemy, others of refugees facing starvation and cold and disease; some about the loss of relatives, or the loss of colour amidst ashes and occupation.
The Rabbit is a fun book to read, and this article got me to drag it out – mine’s is published by Picador. Just because you write a good book, or a good blog in no way indicates that you are a good person. In my experience, quite the opposite.
Lana Bastasic for the Edinburgh Book Festival?
Mike, please excuse me but I can’t find any other way to communicate with you–are you aware that Bellacaledonia has disappeared (been disappeared?) from Twitter/X?
True yesterday–back today! Just more of Elon’s “quirks” I guess. Sorry for the distraction…
Yes it wasn’t banned, I just took some time off social media for the sake of my mental health as not doing great right now.
Sorry to hear that Mike. Me too.
It’s a tough time for anyone who has a heart. Try getting a bus somewhere and talk shite to everyone you meet. It’s easy to forget (esp. with social media) that most people are actually decent, friendly and caring. You are among friends. Dinnae forget that.
I agree with this article. Artistic freedom matters and artists should not be running scared of having and expressing the ‘wrong’ views by those who have power over their livelihoods. It isn’t new but it has increased to the point we should be worried. Hats off to Lana Bastašić for her stance and her letter is excellent – her views (which I happen to agree with) should be well within the legitimate area of debate about this awful war.
I hope, though, that the same condemnation be made of the various publishers, awarding bodies, venues and residencies that have withdrawn awards, gigs, grants, residences etc from others like gender critical feminists for saying the ‘wrong’ thing even though, equally, their expressed views are well within the legitimate area of debate on that topic. So this should not be about only lauding those we agree with. If it is, it is meaningless to talk about ‘artistic freedom’.
An excellent piece Mike.
What an inspirational writer and article! Thank you so much, Mike, for sharing this with us all.
Thanks Vishwam!