Laurie Halse Anderson is straight from Sweden. In the Stockholm Concert Hall, Crown Princess Viktoria awarded her the “Astrid Lindgren Memorial Prize 2023”, the most valuable prize for children’s and young adult literature, worth almost half a million euros. 1000 people were there in the hall, Anderson in fine robes. In Munich’s Blutenburg, in the simple Jella Lepman Hall, named after the Jewish founder of the International Youth Library, things are more casual. The US writer talks about her work and her country under a large number of white paper lamps, which are believed to be of Swedish origin.
It will be an entertaining and also somehow depressing evening in front of a specialist audience, which coincidence or Anderson’s flight plan placed exactly between two historical events: May 8, 1945, when World War II ended in Europe, and May 10, when the National Socialists burned books in Germany.
“Books strengthen us and help to lay the foundations for morality and wisdom,” said Laurie Halse Anderson when accepting the “Astrid Lindgren Memorial Prize 2023” in Stockholm. Lindgren, here in 1972 with the two main actors of her book adaptation “Michel aus Lönneberga”, is a great role model for the US youth book author.
(Photo: picture alliance/dpa)
US Consul General Timothy Liston, who greeted the audience with “Ladies and gentlemen, servus beinand”, but then switched to English because of the guest of honour, talked about a short chat with Anderson: “We are very close to solving the world’s problems came.” Bitter irony, of course, because the world is currently “a mess”, a heap of chaos. Liston invokes transatlantic friendship, cohesion in the Ukraine conflict and the common struggle for freedom of speech. And that’s exactly what it’s all about that evening in the Bücherburg in the west of Munich, where tens of thousands of stories for children and young people are kept and read behind defiant walls.
Not something to be taken for granted, but a very valuable asset, as Laurie Halse Anderson emphasizes more than once. Where does lack of freedom lead? Her father liberated the Dachau concentration camp as a very young US soldier in 1945 and became depressed and addicted to alcohol. And now, in the US of 2023, her books would be banned from libraries and curricula. Religious fanatics and the political right accuse her of pornography. Laurie Halse Anderson’s most famous book “Speak” from 1999 (German TV series Hanser) is about a girl who, like the author herself, was raped and very slowly finds her voice again.
At the bar tables in the Blutenburg, people think for a long time that evening about how freedom of speech really is in a city like Munich, where politicians – like in the USA – get excited about a children’s book reading by drag queens. Laurie Halse Anderson’s farewell sentence is good for that: “The World needs libraries”. The world needs libraries.