Book Fairs, Publishers and Institutions in Germany

They provide more than just a stage for readings by authors from all round the world; Literature Houses offer training seminars for writers, translators, publishers and booksellers, too, and they also publish poems on billboards and on the Internet.

One capital, five houses of literature

Playhouses, opera houses and concert halls have been around for centuries, whereas the oldest literature house is just about to come of age. On 29 June 1986, the day of the Football World Cup Final, this literature house opened in a noble side street of Berlin’s Kurfürstendamm with a reading by sports-loving writers. Housed in a magnificent Wilhelminian style villa, the Berlin House of Literature is a prestigious showcase for living literature. It provides a venue for readings and literary exhibitions, and the café – complete with large garden – and bookshop in the basement fill the house with life during the day, too.

There is another venue in Berlin which does not call itself a literature house but which has long played a central role on the literary scene. A mansion on Lake Wannsee is the setting of the Literary Colloquium Berlin, which has been supporting writers for more than 40 years with readings, literature prizes and its own publications. The focus of its work is supporting literature out of the public eye by awarding scholarships to authors and organising prose workshops or meetings for translators. The Swiss literary scholar Peter von Matt called it a "nerve centre of all German-language literature".

The Literary Colloquium and the House of Literature emerged as instruments for promoting literature when West Berlin was an island in the former East Germany during the Cold War. The spirit of optimism that took hold of the city after the fall of the Wall led to the founding of three more literature houses in the former East Berlin, each with its own individual character. The Brecht Centre of the GDR became the Literature Forum at the Brecht House. LesArt, Berlin’s Centre for Children and Youth Literature, and the literaturWERKstatt berlin emerged as innovative alternatives to the more prestigious House of Literature in the West. All five literature houses receive precious little financial support from the economically ailing capital. They depend on project funds from cultural foundations or cooperation with publishers and sponsors to supplement their lean programme budgets.

Service centre for the book sector

The situation is very different in Munich, Europe’s highest-revenue publishing city, where a strong alliance of publishers and booksellers pressed ahead with the foundation of a literature house in the nineties. The city provided a striking building, a former girls’ school with market halls on the first floor which today house a spacious coffee house. The Munich Literature House, which opened in 1997, is the largest in Germany and serves as an information centre for the entire book industry. The Institute for Copyright and Media Law works in the building, the Academy of German Book Trade organises management courses and the Deutsche Bucharchiv (German book archive) gathers all sort of information on publishing and book making. It’s also useful to know that you can use its services free of charge on the Internet. Upon request the librarians compile literature lists. Popular events, like Frischluft, a writing project for young people, are also held here.

A network with gaps

In 2001 a coordination office with an Internet platform for the literature houses was also set up in Munich. It collates their work and organises joint projects like the summer event ‘Poetry in the City’, which transformed billboards all over Germany into showcases for poetry. By joining forces, it is easier for the literature houses to find sponsors for such projects. Authors on reading tours go from house to house, and in 2002 the houses started awarding an annual literature prize together. In 2005, together with the Goethe Institutes in the Middle East and North Africa, the houses were inviting Arabic authors to come to Germany as "Stadtschreiber" (city chroniclers), and likewise German writers visited the home towns of the Arabic authors. In 2006, Indian and German authors will report on their experiences in the two countries in a project named AKSHAR (letter).

The following literature houses are currently part of the network: Berlin, Hamburg, Frankfurt, Salzburg, Munich, Cologne,  Stuttgart and Leipzig. Unfortunately, the joint Internet portal does not contain links to the literature houses in Nurnberg and Magdeburg. Neither are the German-language literature houses in Basle, Zurich, Vienna, Graz and Innsbruck represented.

New distribution channels for new forms

Nevertheless, there have been discussions at the coordination office on strengthening the network with the partner institutes abroad, in particular to be eligible in future for project funds from the European Union. Berlin’s literaturWERKstatt, the most unconventional and energetic literature house of the last decade, is much more advanced in this respect. It has had a network of global partners for a long time and they keep each other up-to-date on the latest trends on the literary scene. The Berlin house runs lyrikline on the Internet, a platform on which authors from all round the world read their poems in their native tongue. While the activities of the other literature houses are more or less aimed at the book market, the work of the literaturWERKstatt is based on a completely different principle. It sets up new distribution channels for texts, which, like lyrical verse, either have a very hard time getting printed at all, or require completely new forms of distribution.