Kolkata

Germany is the land of poets and philosophers. As a matter of fact, though, no one notices it at the world’s largest public book fair.

Statistics can be tricky. Frankfurt boasts of being the “world’s largest book and media fair.” This may be true for the number of exhibitors. But when it comes to visitors, in Kolkata one can merely snigger. While a little fewer than 300,000 guests visited the fair on the Main River in 2009, last year a little over two million bookworms surged to the Hugli. In other words, the total number of visitors to the Frankfurt Book Fair come to the Kolkata Book Fair (or Kolkata Boimela, as the Bengals call it) on a single Sunday.

To underscore the fair’s international character, the five big halls are named after foreign writers. Three Europeans and one North and Central American each were selected and a sentence allocated to them that the Indian fair organizers associate with them.

It begins with Mark Twain (1835 - 1910): “Great books are weighed and measured by their style and matter, and not the trimmings and shadings of their grammar.” The next up is Charles Dickens (1812 - 1870): “Charity begins at home, and justice begins next door.” Pablo Neruda (1904 - 1973) is the third: “Laughter is the language of the soul.” Europe’s middle ages are also represented by Dante Alighieri (1265 - 1321) and his Inferno: “Midway on our life’s journey, I found myself in dark woods, the right road lost.” The writers’ quintet is completed by the Russian Leo Tolstoy: “All, everything that I understand, I understand only because I love.”

I have already crossed through the entire width of the fairgrounds in Science City; the length would take three times as long. But, I am drawn to the German pavilion. At three information booths the friendly young people always tell me, of course Germany is here, and they all send me in the same direction, but to no avail!

Instead, I encounter Italy. And how! For Bella Italia is the partner country in 2012. Positioned very prominently and certainly Italy’s trump card at this fair is Tiziano Terzani, long the Spiegel correspondent in Asia. He does indeed have much to do with India, not least perceptible in the testament book by his son Folco, which was recently filmed with Erika Pluhar playing Terzani’s wife: The End Is My Beginning. Apart from that one sees many children’s and schoolbooks, Umberto Eco’s latest work The Prague Cemetery, Enzo Bianchi’s thoughts on the Gospel of St. Mark entitled Why Are You Afraid?, and a promotional film in which Italy is still the football world champion and Fabio Cannavaro, who now plans to relocate to Kolkata, stretches the trophy to the Berlin sky.

Actually, Italy is also taking advantage of the stage in Kolkata to promote tourism. The Bengals photograph one another not only in front of the bookshelves, but also the posters from Pisa, the Dolomites, and da Vinci’s “Last Supper” just as often.

The USA and Great Britain also fly their flags with large booths, Spain, France, Japan, Vietnam, Turkey, and even Peru with smaller ones. But Germany has passed up this opportunity to promote good will even though this year the literature Nobel prizewinner Rabindranath Tagores (who was downright venerated in Germany during his lifetime) is being celebrated and there are other points of literary contact with India, such as Hermann Hesse’s Siddhartha.

Frustrated about my homeland, I head towards the exit. At a booth with books in Sanskrit I see many copies of the familiar photo of a man with a toothbrush moustache: An Indian named Prasanta Samanta wrote a book about Adolf Hitler. While talking with the man in the wooden booth I am unable to discover how the great dictator comes across in the book. I only know one thing: I could have done without him as Germany’s representative.