Bookshops

  The saturation of Paris has an end date: 1939. During the Second World War, cultural life in the city was partially frozen, while the territory and intellectual activity of the United States remained intact. Once the 1940s and their political and military myths passed, cracks opened up in the 1950s that allowed an incipient bohemian life in at bebop pace. A first, quantitative broadening-out takes place from the beat to the beatnik world. Ferlinghetti recounts how busloads of beatniks began to draw up outside the doors of City Lights in the 1960s, as part of their pilgrimage in the tracks of Kerouac, Snyder, Burroughs and the rest. But it is the hippy movement that really turns the new version of bohemia into a mass movement, now entirely stripped of the recherché, distinguished impulses of the first dandies. New levels of literacy and sophistication in The West after the Second World War mean not only that a genuinely mass culture emerges, but that several cultural masses can coexist, each with perfectly defined features.

  A consensus must be reached and consequently there have to be followers and readers before a literary generation can be canonized. The last two generations in North American literature—the lost and the beat—entered the canon thanks, among many other factors, to the activity of the first Shakespeare and Company and its interplay with La Maison des Amis des Livres on the rue de l’Odéon; and to City Lights and the other cultural nuclei of the San Francisco Renaissance, the period of cultural splendour the West Coast city enjoyed in the 1950s. It is no coincidence that “renaissance” is a French word.

  V

  Bookshops Fated to be Political

  A poster of Cicciolina, the then porn actress and future ­Italian politician, with her bright red lips and swooping neckline, and next to it a poster of the neighbouring Baroque district. A healthy supply of new books and magazines from various countries, on stained walls, under useless, fused bulbs. I discovered such contrasts at the start of the century in La Reduta, a bookshop on Bratislava’s Palacky Street, close to what was a quiet park, despite the sparks thrown up by passing trams. That feeling of being between two waters, between two historical moments, is shared by those in every place that has been touched by communism. The buyers devoted as much space to Slovakian literature as to Czech, though new books in Slovakian were thicker, as if proudly underlining the state of play within the context of an extremely slow transition.

  The whole of Berlin communicates a similar sense of waters parting. Walking from Alexanderplatz down that wide boulevard, built according to a socialist aesthetic, that was once called Stalin Avenue, and later Karl-Marx-Allee, so broad a whole army could parade down it flanked by several tanks, you are surprised that in that site of megalomania, that perfect scenario for political intimidation, so much emphasis is given to culture. First, you find the Teacher’s House’s huge mural, with its colourful, didactic exalting of the world of work. A little further on, on the left, you see the façade of Kino International that, from 1963, was the venue for the premieres of the DEFA (Deutsche Film A.G.). After that come Café Moskau, Bar Babette, the D.S.A. Bar, before you reach the Karl Marx Buchhandlung, the old communist bookshop that, since its closure in 2008, has housed a film production company, and on its left the old Rose-Theater. Two years before it shut, the bookshop acted as the set for the end of The Lives of Others, a film essentially about reading.

  Stasi captain Gerd Wiesler, who signs off his reports as “H.G.W. X.X./7,” spends his whole time reading (listening in on) the daily lives of writer Georg Dreyman and his partner, actor Christa-Maria Sieland. At a key moment in the action, the spy removes a book by Bertolt Brecht from Dreyman’s library, a narrow strait through which he timidly verges on the dissident. If in this way the book becomes a symbol of dissenting reading, a typewriter smuggled over from the West—since the secret services controlled every typewriter in the German Democratic Republic—stands out as the symbol of oppositional writing. Dreyman, a supporter of the regime, now disillusioned by the persecution of his friends and the infidelity of his girlfriend (who decides to sleep with a military man in order to avoid being ostracised), types out an article on the extremely high level of suicide that the government is keeping quiet to be published in Der Spiegel. Wiesler has begun to feel favourably towards the couple and protects them by writing reports that omit any mention of the suspicious activities being carried out in their house. Thanks to him, the typewriter is not found during a raid and Dreyman is spared the consequences of his treachery, although Christa-Maria accidentally dies during an inspection. As his superior intuits—rightly but without proof—that the spy has switched sides, he reduces him in rank to a purely reading role in the postal service: opening suspects’ letters, reading the private correspondence of individuals who might be sending information to the enemy or conspiring to overthrow the regime. After the fall of the Wall, the writer gets access to the Stasi archives where he discovers both the informer and his role in events he had not been able to understand previously. He seeks him out, discovering he is now a postman. He goes from one house to the next delivering envelopes sealed in accordance with the right to privacy. He decides not to say anything. Two years later, Wiesler walks past the Karl Marx Buchhandlug and stops when he recognizes Georg Dreyman on a poster advertising the publication of his latest book. He goes in. The book is dedicated to “H.G.W. X.X./7.” “Is it a present?” asks the cashier. “No, it’s for me,” he replies. The film ends with that response, in this bookshop that is now a large office though I recognize its shelves both from the film and my visits in 2005. I take a photograph of the mural of Karl Marx with his purplish, bearded face, tucked away at one end of the premises. Those traces.

  In his novel Europe Central, William T. Vollmann enters the mind of one of the spies who acted as perpetual readers of the lives of human beings who, in their eyes, were genuinely literary characters. A critical, censorious mind. His responsibilities include control of Akhmatova’s movements. Using a metaphor that was turned into reality by the Stalinist apparatus, he writes: “From my point of view, the correct thing to do would have been to erase her from the picture and then blame the Fascists.” Alluding to the sending of subversive material that is much more important than the article written by Dreyman in the film, the spy declares, “For instance, had he been left to me, Solzhenitsyn never could have smuggled his poisonous Gulag Archipelago to the other side.” Vollmann describes the frantic activity of the bookstalls on the Nevsky Prospect, the cultural artery of St Petersburg, in whose Sytin bookshop Lenin bought his books. Together with bookseller Alexandra Komikova, who sent books ordered by revolutionary militants confined to Siberia, he created the Marxist newspaper that the cause needed in order to spread the word. For The Development of Capitalism in Russia, Lenin secured a contract for 2,400 copies, and with the accompanying advance he was able to buy the books he needed for his research in Komikova’s shop.

  With an honesty rare in literary endeavours, Vollmann recognizes A Tomb for Boris Davidovitch, by Danilo Kiš, as the model for his work, where political conflict is taken to extremes in dictatorships of the proletariat, being social constructions based on the existence of legions of ordinary readers and on eminently textual negotiations. Banned books, censorship, translations that are authorized or rejected, accusations, confessions, forms, reports: writing. Based on suspicion, born from horror: writing. In the final struggle between Novski the prisoner and Fedukin his torturer, who tries to drag a full confession from Novski’s innards, Kiš captures the essence of the relationship between intellectuals and repressors repeated, like racist jokes, in every community suffering from systematic suspicion. As in The Encyclopedia of the Dead, the Serbian writer takes Borges as his starting point, but in this instance he does so in order to politicise him, enriching his legacy with a commitment that is absent from the original:

  Novski lengthened the hearing in an attempt to introduce into the document of his confession, the only record that would remain after his death, a few clarifications that might soften
his definitive fall from grace and, at the same time, provide a lead for any future researcher, through cleverly fashioned contradictions and exaggerations, to the fact that the entire fabrication of that confession was based on a lie, wormed out of him, of course, by torture. Consequently, he struggled tenaciously for every word, for every formulation. [. . .] In the last instance, I think that both acted for motives that went beyond any narrow, selfish end: Novski struggled in his death, in his fall, to hold on to his dignity, as any revolutionary would; Fedukin was attempting, within his investigation of the fiction and conjectures, to hold on to what was strictly consistent with revolutionary justice and with those who created that, for it was better to sacrifice one man’s or a tiny organism’s truth, than to put into question on their behalf principles and interests that were much more sublime.

  If the Karl Marx was the most emblematic bookshop in East Berlin, Autorenbuchhandlung was and still is the most influential in West Berlin. Charlottenburg was the centre of the federal half in the divided city and the shop is a few steps away from Savignyplatz, close to the street where Walter Benjamin wrote One Way Street, the urban manual that—like Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities—helps one finds one’s bearings in any metropolitan psycho-geography in the world. The bookshop was inaugurated in 1976 by Günter Grass. As if to signal that its mission was not entirely solemn, Ginsberg turned up a few weeks later—and yet again in this bookshoppy book—to re-inaugurate it with a poetic performance. Until the fall of the Wall, it was a focus for debates about communism and democracy, repression and freedom, with invited speakers like Susan Sontag or Jorge Semprún. In the 1990s it concentrated on cultural reunification, paying great attention to and championing literature from East Germany. As its name suggests, its main distinguishing feature was that it was set up by a group of writers, who took it upon themselves to disseminate the German literature they were producing and reading. The bookshop physically resembles Laie in Barcelona, Eterna Cadencia in Buenos Aires and Robinson Crusoe 389 in Istanbul: sober, elegant and classical. It is fitting that the protagonist of Cees Nooteboom’s All Souls’ Day, a novel with obvious European ambitions, buys his books there.

  The axis articulating Europe Central is Germany and Russia. In Nooteboom’s novel we read:

  It was as if those two countries professed mutual nostalgia for each other that could barely be understood by an Atlantic Netherlander, as if that boundless plain that seemed to begin in Berlin exercised a mysterious power of attraction, from which sooner or later something must again emerge, something that cannot be understood at this point in time but that, despite all appearances to the contrary, would give another twist to European history, as if that huge landmass could thus turn, twist and drop its western edge like a sheet.

  Like atomic bombs with lethally similar content, the regimes of Hitler and Stalin exploded simultaneously in two geographical areas condemned to dialogue after Karl Marx, the Prussian Jew, developed his political ideas. When he was in a seminary, the young Stalin sought freedom to read in the bookshop of Zakharyh Chichinadze, afraid that the books he borrowed from the public library might be checked and lead to reprisals. At the time, imperial censors ruled St Petersburg with an iron hand and encouraged the production of lubki, the Russian equivalent of chapbooks or pamphlets that exalted the figure of the Tsar, retold great battles or reproduced popular stories (much to the indignation of pre-revolutionary intellectuals who accused them of being reactionary, anti-Semitic and pro-Orthodox) in Moscow—concentrated in Nikolskaya Street and its vicinity. After the 1917 Revolution they were airbrushed from history. The Great Encounter took place in Chichinadze’s bookshop, Stalin having access to Marx’s texts. In retrospect, the mytho-maniac transformed the experience into an adventure. By his account, he and his companions surreptitiously entered Chichinadze’s premises and, hard up, took turns copying the banned books, as described by Robert Service in his biography of the genocidal Soviet leader:

  Chichinadze was on the side of those who opposed the Russian establishment in Tbilisi. When the seminarians visited his premises, he surely greeted them warmly; and if copying took place, it must have been with his express or implicit permission. The spread of ideas was more important to the metropolitan elite than mere profit. It was a battle the liberals could scarcely help winning. Chichinadze’s was a treasure house for the sort of books the youngsters wanted. Josef Dzhughashvili was fond of Victor Hugo’s Ninety-Three. He was punished for smuggling it into the seminary; and when in 1896 an inspection turned up a copy of Hugo’s Toilers of the Sea, Rector Gemorgen meted out “a lengthy stay” in the solitary cell. According to his friend Iremashvili, the group also got hold of texts by Marx, Darwin, Plekhanov and Lenin. Stalin recounted this in 1938, claiming that each member paid five kopecks to borrow the first volume of Marx’s Capital for a fortnight.

  When he won power, Stalin developed a convoluted system of controlling texts, thanks partly to these personal experiences, which had made him realize that all censorship has its weak points. Books have always been key elements in maintaining control of power and governments have developed mechanisms for censoring books, just as they have built castles, fortresses and bunkers that—inevitably—are in the end seized or destroyed, as if unaware of the comment by Tacitus: “On the contrary, the standing of persecuted talent grows, and neither foreign kings nor any that operated with similar fury managed to produce anything but dishonour for themselves and glory for them.” It was of course with the printing press that countries began to experience serious problems when they tried to curb the traffic in banned books. And it was under modern dictatorships that the greatest political credit was gained from the public burning of books, at the same time as huge amounts of the national budget were allocated to subsidize organs of reading.

  In the first centuries of the modern era, Spain pioneered not only massive systems for spying on and repressing readers (how else to describe the Holy Inquisition?) but also routes for importing slaves, concentration camps, schemes for re-education and strategies for extermination. It is hardly surprising that Franco’s great rhetorical model for his state was Imperial Spain, the National-Catholic paraphernalia of the conquest of America. The Málaga bookseller Francisco Puche has written about the symbols that were counterposed to the Francoist ones:

  All booksellers who suffered Francoist censorship, police persecution, and fascist bomb attacks were marked for ever by this period and have always believed that a bookshop is more than just a business. We picked up the torch from the last man executed by the Inquisition, a bookseller from Córdoba who was condemned in the nineteenth century for introducing books banned by the Church. And this period made it quite clear, once again, that that reflex action dictatorships have of burning books is no coincidence but the product of two incompatible realities. And it also clearly demonstrated how important independent bookshops are as instruments of democracy.

  However, one cannot consider the problematic relationship between aristocratic, dictatorial and fascist regimes and the free circulation of written culture from a Manichaean stance that completely exonerates parliamentary democracies, although fortunately many of them do not have to resort to physical punishment or the death penalty. The United States is the prime example of how freedom of expression and reading have been perpetually besieged by mechanisms of control and censorship. From the 1873 Comstock Law, which focused on obscene and lascivious books, to the present proscription of books enforced by thousands of bookshops, educational institutions and libraries for political or religious reasons, or the ways in which the Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets Control boycotts the diffusion of works from Cuba and other regions in the world, one can see the history of North American democracy as an endless round of negotiations in the fragile area of intellectual freedom. In our era, when any sensational news story is broken, book-burning inevitably catapults onto front pages. As Henry Jenkins has shown in Convergence Culture, the books that caused the
most controversy in the first decade of this century were the Harry Potter series. In 2002, the books were at the centre of more than five hundred different court cases throughout the US. In Alamogordo, New Mexico, the Christ Community Church burnt thirty copies together with Disney films and Eminem CDs because, according to Jack Brock, the church’s pastor, they were Satanic masterpieces and instruments for self-education in the black arts.

  It was at the end of the 1980s, however, when the publication of The Satanic Verses by Salman Rushdie not only illustrated for the umpteenth time the United States’ problematic relationship with direct or indirect censorship, but also placed a much more crucial issue on the agenda: the geopolitical migration of threats to freedom of expression. If for half a century these had been concentrated mostly in Eastern Europe and Asia, from the 1990s they would shift to the Arab world, the difference being that changes in economic relationships and, above all, the media meant that domestic or national polemics could no longer be hurriedly buried by the powers-that-be. From The Satanic Verses onwards, the damnation of which coincided with the fall of the Wall, the violence in Tiananmen Square and the unstoppable expansion of the Internet, whenever freedom of expression and reading were under attack, the consequences would automatically be global.

  In his memoir Joseph Anton, Salman Rushdie recounts the details of his case. Publication initially followed its usual course