Czech culture minister booed at Frankfurt Book Fair opening

At the gala opening of the 78th Frankfurt Book Fair in Frankfurt am Main on Tuesday, novelist Radka Denemarková said that two former officers of the communist-era StB secret police are now sitting in the Czech government. Among the guests at the ceremony was Czech Culture Minister Otto Klempíř, who has himself previously admitted to contacts with the StB — when he took the stage, the audience greeted his own speech with shouts of “shame” and whistling.

The minister booed, and a speech about literature

Denemarková opened her speech in German with a sharp line: “Culture ministers who destroy culture come and go, but literature remains.” The organisers had asked her specifically to open the ceremony — the best-known living Czech writer in the German-speaking world, author of the novels Money from Hitler and Hours of Lead. Her speech lasted about twenty minutes.

Klempíř represents the Motoristé sobě party and has previously admitted to cooperating with the StB. When he walked onto the stage, the audience repeatedly interrupted his speech with jeers of “boo” and “shame” and whistling.

“It’s all politics”

“I’m tired of hearing that politics should be kept separate from literature. All of this is politics. Today’s question is simple: open democracy or a closed society,” Denemarková said. She noted that Ukraine is defending itself against Russian aggression and that Taiwan is threatened by China, criticised the erosion of democracy for the sake of economic gain, and warned of the dangers of populism, disinformation and the manipulation of language, also mentioning the removal of books from some libraries in the United States.

“A moral person cannot today remain a mere bystander,” stressed the writer, known for her uncompromising views. Her speech ended in a standing ovation. The fair’s programme includes several panel discussions, author readings and the premiere of a documentary made about her.

Before Denemarková, musician Iva Bittová and poet Maria Iliashenko, a native of Kyiv, took the stage. She read a poem about the sea and called for support for Ukraine: according to her, Russian strikes destroyed 13 million books in Ukraine over the summer alone, and the damage to the book industry amounted to 25 million euros.

Klempíř himself also spoke — he recalled the influential critic Marcel Reich-Ranicki, noted how German writers Heinrich Böll and Günter Grass had supported their Czech colleagues under communism, and mentioned the émigré careers of Milan Kundera and Josef Škvorecký. “Czech-German cultural cooperation contributes to European cohesion and to defending freedom of thought,” the minister said.

Why Czechia is the guest of honour

The Frankfurt fair is comparable in importance to the Cannes Film Festival — last year it drew 238,000 visitors. On Wednesday it opened to trade visitors, where literary agents sell book rights, and from Friday it opens to the general public, closing on Sunday evening.

The previous government of Prime Minister Petr Fiala allocated 197 million crowns to prepare the 2023–2027 project, and organisers raised a further 40 million crowns or so from private sponsors, including the PPF Foundation. The Czech presence is organised by the Moravian Library in Brno under the slogan “Czechia — a country on the coast”, an image that goes back to William Shakespeare’s famous error of placing landlocked Czechia on a seashore in The Winter’s Tale.

The Czech pavilion, spanning more than 2,400 square metres, plays on this motif: inside is a fairy-tale landscape with inflatable objects, orange buoys and a lighthouse projecting excerpts from literary works, while a giant sphere resembling a sunset “floats” beneath the ceiling. The stand was created by studio Jinjan to a design by architect Jiří Mašek: the white inflatable shapes with a dotted pattern are not meant to resemble anything specific — “some people see stones on a beach in them, others see the sandstone rocks typical of the Czech landscape,” the architect explained. Inside is an exhibition of Czech books, two discussion spaces, a business-meeting area, a café, and a screen where, alongside a robot, comic artists Štěpánka Jislová and Lucie Lomová will draw for six days.

75 writers — and those who weren’t invited

The Czech programme comprises more than a hundred events across the whole of Hesse — in libraries, theatres, museums and concert halls. Martin Krafl, director of the Czech Literary Centre, explains that since 2017 the centre has been pursuing a ten-year strategy for German-speaking countries, and that the guest-of-honour status in Frankfurt is its culmination in the ninth year. The path to it was opened by Czechia’s success as the main guest of the Leipzig Book Fair in 2019.

Between 2024 and 2026, more than 190 Czech books were translated into German, although Czech literature in Germany is still firmly associated with twentieth-century names — Bohumil Hrabal, Milan Kundera, Václav Havel and Franz Kafka. This year Czechia is represented by 75 writers, spanning prose and poetry to comics and children’s literature; among them are Alena Mornštajnová, Jaroslav Rudiš, Kateřina Tučková, Jáchym Topol, Bianca Bellová and Petra Hůlová, poets Petr Borkovec and Zofia Bałdyga, philosopher Tereza Matějčková, and illustrators Jindřich Janíček and Jaromír 99.

Those left out of the delegation include, for example, Jan Němec, editor-in-chief of the magazine Host, Alena Machoninová, a recent winner of the Magnesia Litera prize, and Marek Šindelka, whose new novel critics are calling the event of the year. According to Krafl, the selection was made by a twenty-three-member council, with an existing German translation as the main criterion; he offered Němec at least a place in the trade programme, but the writer declined.

Among the fair’s biggest stars are two-time Pulitzer winner Colson Whitehead and Gisèle Pelicot, who wrote a book about how her husband drugged her without her knowledge for almost a decade and offered her to dozens of men to be raped. The German book trade’s Peace Prize will go, at the close of the fair, to lawyer and writer Philippe Sands. Krafl hopes Frankfurt will become a “gateway to the world” for Czechia: from 2027 the new priority will be the English-speaking world, particularly London. Denemarková herself, a star of translated literature on the German market, has not yet been published in French — but at a presentation linked to Frankfurt she has already caught the interest of a French publisher.

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Source: seznamzpravy.cz