Open Password – Wednesday February 2, 2022
#1024
Homage to the book – Open Password – Simon Verlag für Bibliothekswissen – Threat to the book – Books that moved us – Elisabeth Simon – Gerda Bredemeier – Enthusiasm – Erda Lapp – University Library of the Ruhr University Bochum – Jochen Lennhof – Walter Benjamin – Roland Jerzewski – Features – Confessions – Reflections – Diversity – Gender Gap – Writing Country NRW – Andrea Gerecke – Marzahn Writing Workshop – Renate Zimmermann – Pippi Longstocking – Harry Potter – Barbara Schulz-Bredemeier – Ritter Eric – Hartmann von Aue – Faust – Johann Wolfgang von Goethe – Thomas S . Kuhn – Willi Bredemeier – Will and Ariel Durant – The Story of Civilization – SPIEGEL – Ruhr University Bochum – 1968 student movement – Books as a free good – Multimedia – Creative Writing – Martine Demay – Emancipation of women – Irmtraud Morgner – Beatriz de Dia – Art Oliver Simon – Alfred Döblin – Pardon will not be given – Vivian Stroetmann – 1984 – George Orwell – Surveillance state – Non-existence of clear answers – Encoding of power structures – Helga Schwarz – German Library Institute – Peter J. Hempenstall – Paula Tanaka Machida
A Homage to the Book (I)
An initiative by Open Password
and the Simon Verlag für Bibliothekswissen
with heart, passion and deep knowledge
about books “that moved us”
Now that the book is threatened by short attention spans, lack of reading pleasure and electronic formats, it is time for a tribute to the book. Open Password and the Simon Verlag für Bibliothekswissen have teamed up on the project “Books that moved us” and have recruited 41 authors who report with passion, passion and deep knowledge how they were influenced by a particular book. Willi Bredemeier from Open Password says: “I have always enjoyed collecting contributions, but this time the joy was the greatest.” As with previous projects, Open Password and Simon-Verlag are once again relying on a variety of publication channels, on print and the electronic format.
In the following article, publisher Elisabeth Simon and Gerda Bredemeier, wife of Willi Bredemeier and co-author of “The Other Homeland Novel,” describe how this collection came about and provide insight into the book world of several authors.
A Homage to the Book (II)
Enthusiasm for the book and literature
Isn’t that what literature does for us?
She gives us a double and triple life.
By Elisabeth Simon and Gerda Bredemeier
Publisher and book collector Elisabeth Simon
When a scientist, no, does not stop working, but is about to loosen his institutional ties, his students, colleagues and friends come up with the idea of dedicating a commemorative publication to him. Although Willi Bredemeier also did scientific work, he did a lot of other things and we don’t want to be tempted to summarize everything. But this collection of contributions resembles a Festschrift in that it was written by Willi Bredemeier’s friends and their friends, and they do not belong to one discipline and certainly not to a sub-discipline. Nevertheless, they are connected to one another in a commonality. This is her enthusiasm for the book and literature. Literature includes non-fiction books and books for children.
The forerunner of this book came about when Erda Lapp, the head of the university library at the Ruhr University Bochum, and Willi Bredemeier from Open Password met in other contexts and went astray discursively. At the end of the conversation, it was decided to hold an event entitled “The Book That Changed My Life” at which book enthusiasts reported on their reading experiences.
This event is still supposed to take place, but because of Corona it had to be postponed, first to 2021 and now to 2022 or even later. But we had wonderful experiences before. Although there was no new date in sight for the event, most of the authors scheduled to give presentations prepared their texts and sent them to us in written form. We found these so beautiful and so promising with a view to possible new contributions that we collected further texts, some of them on the occasion of a meeting at Bredemeier’s “in your shady, flowery paradise” (author Jochen Lennhof), especially since almost everyone we spoke to, and certainly everyone , who then delivered, shared our enthusiasm for the book. At the end there was a collection of contributions under the title “Books that moved us”.
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Enthusiasm for the book and literature.___________________________________________________________________
In this collection, 41 book lovers who are also authors, so to speak “reader-authors”, describe how they interacted with one or more books, how a book became particularly important to them, how they set off into another world, immersed themselves, sank in, themselves allowed to be captured and returned to this world changed. And this perhaps again and again and perhaps constantly in wait for a reading moment that “trembles like an arrow in the heart of the day” (Walter Benjamin quoted by the author Roland Jerzewski), combined with ever further discoveries, so that in this other There was still something new and valuable, even transcendent, to discover in the world. So there is no collection here for the features section, in which the quality of an article can possibly be conclusively assessed for others. We doubt that this could be possible. Rather, we assume that the value of an article can be determined independently of the experience of its readers and can therefore vary greatly.
This collection consists of confessions about how people acquired another world through engagement with a work and grew and developed in the process. The fact that they were so excellent in their reflections on their most important book and the influence that this book had on their lives, and therefore did so little work for the editors, was because they knew only too well what they were talking about and because they had their hearts let speak.
But what questions our authors asked of “The Book of Their Life” and what answers they heard from it and what effects the book had on them had to be very individual from author to author, and here the term “diversity” is really appropriate .
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Maximum range of selected works. Only Harry Potter received two mentions.
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The book enthusiasts who came together in this collection could be grouped into many groups, as could the books that helped determine their lives. If a “gender gap” were to be identified, this gap would exceptionally be at the expense of men (30 female, eleven male authors). The age group of young people and often particularly searchers could not be missing. Therefore, we worked with “Schreibland NRW” in Minden under the direction of Andrea Gerecke and the “Schreibwerkstatt Marzahn” under the direction of Renate Zimmermann (both multiple book authors) to find “reading authors” – with great success. As we expected, the authors primarily referenced novels, but a number of them were also heavily influenced by non-fiction.
Children’s books from “Pippi Longstocking” to “Harry Potter” were sometimes only discovered as adults, but of course children also devoured them. Author Martina Hellmich heard the message from Pippi Longstocking: “I’ve never done that before, so I can do it,” and concluded: “This optimistic, curious attitude full of drive and courage inspired me even back then – and sometimes my mother and grandmother driven crazy. It was no different in professional life, except that it was superiors who were tearing their hair out.”
In one case, reading Harry Potter and then watching the film adaptations (“Harry Potter”) connected three generations of a family (Barbara Schulz-Bredemeier). In fact, Rawling’s Harry Potter books were the only works chosen by two of our authors as the book of their lives.
The selected novels and other books cover a wide range and range from previous must-reads such as “(Ritter) Eric” by Hartmann von Aue and “Faust” by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe to current fantasy and horror literature. Crime novels, which fill large parts of our station bookstores, were not chosen as the “book of life”. The same applies to purely scientific works, although according to Thomas S. Kuhn these form a subsection of fiction in the reception of our editorial team.
Now enough of the classifications. Or to speak to our editor when he wrote about his reading about the philosopher “Spinoza” in Will and Ariel Durant in “The Story of Civilization” (Volume VII: “The Age of Louis XIV”): “I read the chapter Spinoza several times and was always fascinated by Spinoza’s reflections. But by the time the next morning came, I had forgotten all the classifications.”
Authors and book collectors Gerda and Willi Bredemeier
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Isn’t that what literature does for us? She gives us a double and triple life.
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We will now go into more detail about our editor and at the same time one of our authors, in his honor and against his express wishes. We do that because in many ways he is, as far as possible, a typical example for us book enthusiasts. However, Willi Bredemeier comes from a time when books were scarce and reading was not valued by all classes, so he had to fight for any reading material and would even have “murdered” for it, which is probably a literary exaggeration.
In any case, his rural and proletarian environment was not unfriendly, but at the same time astonished and more than a little strange, when our future editor as a child told witch stories from a nearby forest. He occasionally visited the forest with his dog. Once the aunt and uncle with whom the child grew up even called an uncle from Hamburg to help. He took the boy on his lap and said: “I heard that you like to read.” “Yes,” said the child. “Yes, don’t you know that reading so much makes you crazy?” asked the uncle. The boy slid down from his lap, shouted “I ain’t glowing” and ran away. He was later seen, now fluent in High German, walking past the largest mine in Europe (“Gneisenau”) in Dortmund-Derne with SPIEGEL in mind.
So his reputation had to spread. When an aunt from Saxony came to the Ruhr area to visit and sat in the bus, she said to her daughter: “Look, that must be Willi.” “Why?” asked the daughter. “Yes, don’t you see that he is reading?” asked the mother.
“Isn’t that what literature does for us?” writes Willi Bredemeier. “It gives us a double and maybe even a triple life.”
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We have a paradise that you just have to go into. But we won’t go in because it doesn’t cost us anything?
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He was to take this view literally when, after a number of detours, he came to the newly founded Ruhr University in Bochum, where he led a threefold life as a reader. As a student who dutifully ate his way through the required teaching material, as a follower of the 1968 student movement, which set up a completely different binding code for scientific contributions, and as a person who had to fight every semester to get free access to the specialist libraries, and If he was successful, he read everything that seemed somehow interesting to him.
Therefore, when he became a university assistant and free access to the library was thus secured, life would have seemed like a paradise to him, if only the reality, let’s call it the “fourth world”, had not been there. Here he discovered that the joy of questions about meaning, of questions outside the examination and career-relevant tracks, as well as new perspectives and connections, such as the one he had found in the books, was not shared by all people in whatever institutions. He later experienced how the development of books into a “free good” had a negative impact on the enthusiasm for books. We have a paradise that you just have to go to, but we don’t go because it doesn’t cost us anything? Fortunately, this does not apply to the thousands upon thousands, even millions, who have become and remain book enthusiasts and for whom we hope that the multimedia formats of content also take up and try to implement all the advantages of the book.
Willi Bredemeier remembered from his youth that he initially judged the value of books based on their volume. So “the book of his life” could be nothing more than an encyclopedia containing many volumes and several thousand pages. He also brought with him the experience from his work on texts in newspapers and magazines, with non-fiction books, scientific works and novels: “Writing can be even more beautiful than reading.”
In connection with this, he recommends making the boundaries between reading and writing fluid and having the courage to speak your own words: “(As) a big fan of the “Creative Writing” courses (I have) a lot of respect for their products. It saddens me even more that so few people have the confidence to write texts. My recommendations are: renounce the pseudo-religion of literature on distant Olympic heights, before which you would have to kneel. Gain self-confidence and say to yourself: I can do that too. Immerse yourself in an intensive form of self-realization and a new additional form of communication. In this way you gain another additional life for yourself, this time even being the sovereign, unless the people you have invented become independent of you.”
Author Vivian Nestler, who read an incredible amount in her childhood, probably sees it the same way: “And soon I was writing children’s stories myself, which were dark, twisty stories with lots of dialogue.”
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Martine Demay: A female troubador captured in the GDR.
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To which of our other authors should we dedicate a few lines from here on out? We should name them all here! But we only have so much space. Therefore, we continue with the injustices and highlight some of our authors:
Martine Demay moved from Bordeaux to Germany, which was still badly reputed at the time, because of love. There she developed into a great connoisseur and friend of German culture. At that time, German society was polarized between the student rebellion and its surroundings and a majority that remained conventional. A lively debate developed on the emancipation of women, while in France the de facto guardianship of men over their wives had only recently been abolished. Beatriz de Dia, described by the GDR author Irmtraud Morgner, perhaps “the only Provençal minstrel from the 12th century, of whom only five songs have survived, is disregarded as an artist by her lover, the troubador Raimbaut d’Aurenga, although she left her husband Guilhem de Poitiers for him. But how could even a noblewoman in the High Middle Ages dare to sing the most sensual praises to her lover!”
Trobadora Diaz travels back in time to the paradise of the working people, i.e. the GDR, where she has to realize that “the legal and economic equality of women has not brought about a fundamental change in female living conditions,” whereupon she leaves our present again. In this book, the “emancipation debate was conducted without foaming at the mouth,” remembers Demay. By the way, “the romance of that time has lasted to this day.”
Courage and new hope through literature and music. The composer Art Oliver Simon is partially paralyzed after a brain hemorrhage and has found a courageous attitude in literature and music. What he likes about Alfred Döblin’s “Pardon will not be given” as in music is “what I also pursue in music: simple and clear language and a clear statement, no escape from the content, as is always the case with reference to the new ones media and the so-called sound arts. … So I have good companionship in my attempts to compose again in loneliness and with a fate that needs my courage and new hope every day.”
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Vivian Stroetmann: 1984 read differently – laconic acceptance of betrayal and instrumentalization of language for power structures.
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Vivian Stroetmann from the University Library of the Ruhr University Bochum asks what the “Book of my Life” means to her and perhaps also to others: “These stories initially follow you in an unpleasant and persistent way. But over time they become companions and old ones confidants. You don’t necessarily like them unconditionally, but you are always attracted and fascinated by them and they become a constant in your life for which you feel affection.”
Ms. Stroetmann could have chosen a second book, but she chose 1984 by Eric Arthur Blair (better known as “George Orwell”), which is discussed primarily from the perspective of “surveillance state.”
“I was more struck by the fact that I found myself in an inner conflict about the wisdom of Winston’s resistance”… “I was confronted for the first time with the laconic acceptance of betrayal… (and wondered) whether it wouldn’t have been better for Winston , to save yourself the resistance and suffering if it would fizzle out without a trace anyway… (This is how I learned that) sometimes there can be no clear answers – not only between different people, but even within oneself. Since I couldn’t clearly solve the questions for myself, they stayed with me – and with them the book. And over time I noticed that I answered the questions differently at different times in my life… (I was also) fascinated by the power of the targeted use of language and therefore specialized in the field of pragmatics in my English studies on the encoding of power structures in discourses.”
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A new challenge in Polynesia.
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Helga Schwarz received her doctorate at the age of over 80 and presented the downfall of the German Library Institute in minute detail as a lesson for all libraries. She had already immersed herself deeply in the culture of Samoa and was reflected in her commitment through the book “The Lost Man: Wilhelm Solf in German History” by Peter J. Hempenstall and Paula Tanaka Mochida”. When we met her in Berlin after her doctorate, she was learning the Samoan language so that she could communicate better with her friends in Samoa. She has since discovered that consonants are declining in South Pacific languages. This is well proven empirically, but the question of “Why?” has been left out. Helga Schwarz: “A new challenge! That needs to be investigated. … So Samoa, Polynesia, its wonderful culture and its languages will probably accompany me for the rest of my life.”
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