Sebastian Guggolz at the Leipzig Book Fair: He gives Wolfram Weimer a lot of counter-culture

Where is Sebastian Guggolz right now? Basically, you can’t go to an important event at the Leipzig Book Fair without Sebastian Guggolz being there. First, he opened the fair in the sold-out Leipzig Gewandhaus with a fiery speech in which he explained to the Minister of State for Culture, Wolfram Weimer, who was also present, that the use of the Office for the Protection of the Constitution in the world of German literature was “unacceptable”. The very next day he awarded – at least – the Leipzig Book Fair prize, opened a panel with writers who are exposed to censorship and repression in autocratic countries, and also received the booksellers who had been deprived of the ceremonial award of the German Bookstore Prize by Wolfram Weimer. He had only been seen in a live interview on ARD’s “Tagesthemen” late the evening before.

Sebastian Guggolz, 44, had just been elected head of the German Book Trade Association when it became known that the Minister of State for Culture, Wolfram Weimer, who is responsible for the industry, had bookstores examined by the Office for the Protection of the Constitution. Since then, Guggolz has been racing from one microphone to the next as if he were in a burning house. And as if he had never done anything other than citing the civil rights movements, he formulates these crystalline, elegant sentences everywhere that must shame the faint-hearted attitude controllers in the federal cabinet simply because of their linguistic elegance.

His manner is always charming and engaging at the same time

One must not forget: Until recently, Sebastian Guggolz was a full-time editor of fine literature. On the one hand, with his own small publishing house, “Guggolz Verlag”, where he makes overlooked literary treasures from Finnish or Estonian available to the German audience. And on the other hand at the large S. Fischer publishing house in Frankfurt. There he edited, among other things, the novels of fine-caliber language artists such as Judith Hermann, Ingo Schulze, Reinhard Kaiser-Mühlecker and several others.

It was not necessarily to be expected that in his new position at the Leipzig Book Fair he would immediately be responsible for a change in mood, the like of which had not happened in the recent past. Editors work in secret, the more invisible they are, the better they are. But it must now be reported from Leipzig that Sebastian Guggolz effortlessly electrifies an entire profession in a way that always looks charming and engaging at the same time. If you want to visualize the temperature difference, you can consider the topics that were used as a source of excitement at previous trade fairs, when the tactility and system relevance of books as a cultural asset were faithfully and, above all, helplessly invoked: e-books, Amazon, dragon novels.

With astonishing naturalness he bundles and channels this energy that is currently emerging

Now the Minister of State for Culture, Wolfram Weimer, with his “autocratic gesture” (Sebastian Guggolz) has created an alliance of booksellers, publishers, editors, former Ministers of State for Culture and, in fact, simply numerous reading people who are almost intoxicated by their resistance in Leipzig. After years of being preoccupied with feeling pushed on the defensive by diffuse market dynamics and looking dissatisfied at the balance sheets, the industry is currently rediscovering itself as a socio-political actor capable of acting. And this energy is transferred to the audience. The bookstores that Weimer deprived of their awards because of “constitutional concerns” have just announced that they have never made as much sales as they have since the exclusion. At its booksellers’ reception, Hanser-Verlag advertises with the slogan, “Bookstores are the best protection of the constitution.” And the projection figure who bundles and channels this energy with astonishing naturalness is called Sebastian Guggolz.