PEN Berlin and the Berliner Ensemble, which provided the reading room, had been summoned and invited to the solidarity reading for Salman Rushdie at short notice, just over a week after the assassination attempt on the British writer in Chautauqua. Not least based on the model of the solidarity event that took place last Friday in New York in front of and in the Public Library with Paul Auster, Siri Hustvedt, Hari Kunzru and Colum McCann, among others. Although the time for preparation and thus for media coverage was short, the Neues Haus des BE is sold out with a good two hundred people, and there are still a few people at the box office asking if they don’t have a second ticket left.
Twelve authors came to read Rushdie’s texts to say Words Against Violence, as the event is titled, including Sven Regener, Zoë Beck, Judith Schalansky and Priya Basil. Unlike in New York, where the authors read from practically all of Rushdie’s works, from “Midnight Children” to his as yet unpublished new novel “Victory City” announced for 2023 – and only once from the “Satanic Verses” -, things are more concentrated here in Berlin; everything here is related to Rushdie’s fateful novel and what followed.
There are readings from his autobiography “Joseph Anton”, several times from the “Satanic Verses”, one from the follow-up book “Harun and the Sea of Stories” and two essayistic passages. That seems conclusive, because it gives you impressions of the incriminated work, of Rushdie’s thoughts after the insane death sentence against him and the time he went into hiding, as well as his fight for artistic freedom and against censorship. Eva Menasse first reads excerpts from a speech that Rushdie gave as President of PEN America, followed by Günter Wallraff, who joined in from Cologne and read a passage from “Joseph Anton”. Wallraff hid Rushdie in his house in 1993, under constant surveillance and with armored vehicles in front of the door.
The writer and moderator Thea Dorn is then the first to read from the “Satanic Verses”, namely the furious opening. This presents the two main characters of the novel as they both fall from a height of 10,000 meters from a ruptured airplane. On the one hand there is the Indian actor Gibril Farishta, who is later morphed into the archangel Gabriel, on the other hand his compatriot and opponent Saladin Chamcha, who is particularly successful as a voice actor, and London then in the form of a devil with horns on his head and hooves instead of his own legs reached.
“Up there in the sky,” Rushdie says, “that soft, imperceptible realm that the century had made possible, and which then made the century possible, that had become one of its defining spheres, the site of striving and war, toward a place that shriveled the planet, a power vacuum, the most uncertain and unstable of all spheres, treacherous, ever-dissolving and transforming…”
The journalists Yassin Musharbash, Erin Güverin and Deniz Yücel, also a co-founder of PEN Berlin, read further passages from “The Satanic Verses”, the supposedly more sensitive ones, those which had aroused the wrath of Islamic fundamentalists: with the “man who became a businessman Prophets” Mahound in the centre, his appearance at a poets’ gathering. “I am the herald and I bring verses from a Greater than all who are present here.”
It is the satanic verses that he will later recant. And then it is said of him: ‘In those years Mahound – or should one say the Archangel Gibreel? – or should one say Al-Lah? – obsessed with the thought of the law. Under the palm trees of the oasis, Gibreel appeared to the Prophet and spat out precepts, precepts, precepts until, said Salman, the believers could hardly bear the prospect of further revelations.”
Yücel points out, as he puts the paperback edition of the novel in front of him on the desk, that the book is currently out of print and is being reprinted by the publisher. The Penguin Random House publishing group has commissioned a new print run of 25,000 copies.
The book will be available again this Thursday. What you might notice then is that there is no indication of who translated the novel. After the Japanese Rushdie translator Hitoshi Igarashi was stabbed to death in 1991, and the Italian translator Ettore Capriolo and the Norwegian publisher William Nygaard also survived assassination attempts in 1993, the name of the translator has been kept secret in the German edition to this day.
Against this background, the Turkish author and journalist Can Dündar, who lives in exile in Berlin, points out that after the ban on the “Satanic Verses” in Turkey, it was the writer and then editor of the newspaper “Aydinlik”, Aziz Nesin, who who said he would have the book translated. And Dündar recalls that on July 2, 1993, an angry mob stormed a hotel in Sivas, Turkey, where a cultural congress was taking place, in which Nesin also attended. 37 people died, including many artists and writers.
Rushdie described it in “Joseph Anton”, you can hear that clearly from the passages he read, how he experienced a lot of solidarity among authors on the one hand, and how the mood gradually changed on the other. When, for example, “George Steiner – the true opposite of a bigoted ignoramus – launched a powerful literary attack on his work, to which other well-known figures in the British media world were soon to add their hostile comments, according to Auberon Waugh, Richard Ingrams and Bernard Levin”.
BE director Oliver Reese said in his welcoming address that one would have been “naïve”. What is certain is that the security that Rushdie probably felt more and more over the years was a deceptive one. Yücel admits that there isn’t much you can do, you can only help Rushdie with solidarity campaigns like this one, by celebrating freedom of art and freedom of expression. Daniel Kehlmann, who is a friend of his, informed Rushdie about the Berlin reading, according to Yücel. He should have been very happy. It was an evening which, even in its brevity, not only demonstrated the richness of Salman Rushdie’s work. But also that such an attack affects everyone, especially us writers.
