The Latest at Goethe

It’s book fair time again and everyone’s talking about the new publications. What German books do readers already love most? The Goethe-Institut and the Deutscher Sprachrat wondered and sought out the best “friendship story.” By Sophie Rohrmeier

It’s not easy to make lifelong friends. A mutual history needs time to unfold. The longest friendships are often those that began in early childhood or youth. For many entrants, this made the My Favourite Book contest a journey into the past. More than 4,000 people from 57 countries entered the contest. A jury of VIPs, including former state educational minister Christina Weiss, journalist Henryk M. Broder and president of the Goethe-Institut, Klaus-Dieter Lehmann, will select the winners. The jury will not judge the readers by their respective favourite books, but on the basis of the reasons they give about why a certain book won their hearts.

At first glance, the ten books most often cited are surprising. Goethe’s Faust only at seventh place? Three children’s books (Krabat by Otfried Preussler and The Neverending Story and Momo by Michael Ende)? The list does not comprise a literary canon, but reveals personal reading experiences from around the world. Many of the entrants learned German as a foreign language. Many simply learned to love that book the most that helped them discover their love for reading.

For instance, for actor Karoline Herfurth her first was also her favourite reading: The Never-Ending Story. “This book tells so much truth in such a poetic way.” Herfurth is apparently not alone. Yet, older contemporaries also recall their childhood books. Hans Magnus Enzensberger, for example, writes about Hatschi Bratschis Luftballon (1904) by Franz K. Ginzkey, “When I was five, I was resentful of gravity and wanted to fly, so verses like these came at just the right time: ‘Swift as an arrow one day at noon / flew Hatschi Bratschi’s big balloon.’”

Something about the world

As varied as these books are, the stories of their readers were just as diverse. In very differing ways, the “love letters” received by the Goethe-Institut tell the stories of special ties between a book and the person who read it. Yet, they have one thing in common: there is always a sense of gratefulness, a deep bond based on the experience that the readers found truth in the reading – their own truth. The tenor of all of the cases is: my favourite book told me something about the world and had something true to say about the lives we lead.

Writer Ingo Schulze also loves the truthfulness in his chosen book, Detlev Opitz’s historical novel Der Büchermörder. “The best thing about it is that almost everything about it is still true.” The criterion appears to be that the book must speak to the reader, announce something, teach and guide, help the reader understand the world.

The documentary filmmaker and playwright Andres Veiel and his friends wished for a book that would express their antipathy against the establishment. “We sought out allies.” It was Peter Handke’s Das Gewicht der Welt that struck a chord. Also among the top ten were Buddenbrooks by Thomas Mann, The Reader by Bernhard Schlink, Patrick Süskind’s Perfume and Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front.

To choose the most charming of all of the entries is no easy task. The jury will announce the winners of the contest at the Frankfurt Book Fair on 6 October.