For twenty years, the concept of the “Creative City” developed by the American sociologist Richard Florida could be seen at work in Leipzig under laboratory conditions. At the same time, there was a structurally neglected and civicly exhausted city without any economic activity worth mentioning. And you had a culturally ambitious bourgeois youth. Pop-up galleries, pop-up techno clubs and pop-up late night clubs soon sprouted up on every street corner, and shortly thereafter a favorable investment environment was restored and real estate could once again be marketed profitably.
The inventor Richard Florida was later so embarrassed that the “Creative City” had deserted so many inner cities around the world and made so many districts unaffordable for average incomes that he officially apologized in an essay that hardly anyone noticed anymore. In Leipzig, however, the vocabulary is now being used again, namely in the connotation from the time of the innocent beginnings, when it actually still described civil society interventions in urban space. After the Leipzig Book Fair was canceled at short noticemore than 50 publishers have joined forces to host the “Book Fair_popup” instead.
This alternative fair is not a gathering of recalcitrant, anti-capitalist micro-publishers, the list of participants reads more like a business directory of the high-quality editorial office: Aufbau, CH Beck, Hanser, Klett-Cotta, Matthes & Seitz, Suhrkamp and Wagenbach are among others. The pop-up book fair will take place from March 18th to 20th in the “Werk2” in Connewitz.
The big corporate publishers will not be there
After the cancellation of the book fair, there had been some protests. An open letter from authors who described themselves as “angry, sad, stunned” and who would have liked to present their new books in Leipzig found more than two dozen signatories. A petition with the same wording is currently approaching the mark of 2500 supporters.
Leif Greinus, publisher and co-initiator of the alternative fair, told Deutschlandfunk that around 5,000 viewers will be able to present around 60 readings over the weekend. It was a considerable effort and you would only know afterwards whether you had taken on too much, but the cancellation, according to Greinus, created a lot of energy that you can use now.
The large corporate publishers will not be present at Plant 2 in Connewitz, which is consistent insofar as the trade fair could simply have taken place if these houses had been willing to participate. Nevertheless, the Klett-Cotta publisher Tom Kraushaar, among others, does not want the alternative book fair to be understood as a protest event. The initiative is intended as a one-off event and, according to Kraushaar, is not directed against the established trade fair. And it is also “expressly not directed against the publishers who have canceled their participation in the Leipzig Book Fair for understandable reasons”.