Title: A Riot at the Book Fair
Author: Peter Weidhaas
Year: 1968


At the 20th Frankfurt Book Fair, my first Book Fair as part of the organizational team, I participated only as an observer. As a new colleague in the exhibition department, I was not directly involved in the work of the Fair, though here and there I did my part with smaller tasks and errands. I could therefore look at the events on the fairgrounds with a certain cool composure.

It was quite the opposite for Sigfred Taubert, who despite all declarations to the contrary was deeply affected in his self-understanding as director of the Fair, something which in my opinion a few years later factored into his decision to take an early retirement.

I was cool and collected, but I was certainly far from being able to get a general picture of things. In my memory, I see myself drawn again and again into excited and wildly gesticulating discussion groups. Due to the crowded corridors in the Fair, it was not possible to be at all moments at the center of the action, and so most of the time I tried to find out in the offices of the Fair management when and where something had actually happened. However, hundreds of disgruntled exhibitors and Fair visitors were on the same mission. The result was that here as well as outside in the halls the chaos unfolded like a giant battle royale, in which otherwise well-mannered and respectable people suddenly lost their composure and advanced on the supervisors with wild screams in order to register their complaints, their problems, and their demands.

Once I grabbed a well-known author by the arm as he insisted with choleric hiccups on seeing the fair director on the spot, followed by an old publisher who was foaming at the mouth. Then I started in with the words “whoever is screaming is wrong” in a counterattack on an excited contemporary (the author of The Revolution Releases its Children), whom the bookkeeper Ingrid Lenz was holding onto tightly. Snarling with rage, he then turned on me and would not let go of my jacket collar for a good ten minutes. An unholy bedlam reigned over the entire Fair, and hardly anybody could carry out any business dealings, which was the supposed reason for their being here.

Only at the end of each day of the Fair could we employees pry from a visibly exhausted Fair director just what had happened that day. On the following morning we received the reports in the press that were played out with relish, but which seriously differed from the internal reports.

The Book Fair began on a Thursday, and went relatively smoothly with regard to the practical matters of the Fair. The supervisory board of the Exposition and Fair Company and the management of the German Publishers Association basically had the building on lock-down after the previous year’s spontaneous demonstrations against the right-wing publisher Axel-Springer and the occupation of the Greek national stall. The security arrangements were very intrusive. Every visitor was affected and had to undergo heightened security checks when entering the fairgrounds. Placards and signs were confiscated at the entrance.

The Fair management and the supervisory board had decided on another classic measure. Groups of hundreds of policemen were stationed on the fairgrounds with all their standard equipment of police cars, paddy wagons, water cannon and riot shields.

On Friday the author, Minister of Finance and controversial politician Franz-Josef Strauss, insisted on giving an interview to German television at the stand of the Seewald Verlag. An apprehensive Sigfred Taubert accompanied the Minister through a below-ground entrance to the site of his appearance. Then, without any seeming provocation, he ordered the police to remove the waiting German and foreign journalists. Apparently in the group he had seen the two Socialist German Student Union leaders Daniel Cohn-Bendit and Hans-Jürgen Krahl and a half-dozen others who appeared to be protesters.

In his memoirs here is the way it reads:

“I took the megaphone… and looked at the crowd, where Daniel Cohn-Bendit and Hans-Jürgen Krahl were setting the tone. I suffered under no illusion that I could achieve anything with my words. I was powerless against the crowd. In vain I demanded that the corridor in which the publishing booth was located should be kept clear.”

While this confrontation was limited to the immediate area of the Seewald Verlag in the large Hall 5 (today Hall 8), on the following day, a Saturday, the situation got much worse in Hall 6, where German belles-lettres was located.

The Socialist German Student Union (the Sozialistische Deutsche Studentenbund or SDS) had called for a teach-in on Saturday, September 21, 1968, at 4 PM, in Hall 6, stall 1148 of the Diedrich Verlag, a company which had published the works of that year’s recipient of the peace prize Léopold Senghor. The teach-in was to discuss his important role in his own country and the Afro-American revolution in general.

Taubert:

“If we assumed the passive attitude of a well-intentioned Fair management, I could not count on the literary publishing houses set up in Hall 6 being able to withstand an hours-long SDS program. I also doubted how they might greet such a passive attitude from management. I finally settled on the tactic of direct intervention.”

And so at 2 PM, the time at which the general public had access to the Fair, he had Hall 6 closed by the police. Whoever was already inside had to remain inside, and whoever was outside could not get in. Only exhibitors and journalists were exempted from this regulation. Only one person, who was neither the one nor the other, got into Hall 6 without being bothered by the police and soon left again—the chairman of the neo-Nazi NPD party Adold von Thadden, who had apparently gotten in with a press pass. It was obvious that this sideshow had great symbolic power, and it was played up by the press and by protesters with great fanfare.

Indescribable scenes played out at the entrances to the Hall. Whoever is familiar with the highly sensitive public intellectuals of our Fair can imagine the reaction elicited by such sudden restrictions on their freedom of movement.

When Sigfred Taubert finally understood that the teach-in under the given circumstances affected only small parts of Hall 6, he had the police withdrawn and the Hall reopened.

It got even worse the next day, Sunday. Before and during the celebrations around the awarding of the Frankfurt Book Fair Peace Prize to Léopold Sédar Senghor, serious street battles with the police broke out. The SDS led a full charge against the ceremony’s attendees under the publicity-savvy leadership of the Parisian May agitator Daniel Cohn-Bendit. Honored guests, such as the German Federal President Heinrich Lübke and his wife Wilhelmine and the prize-winner himself, could be brought safely into St. Paul’s only under unprecedented security measures.

At the end of the ceremony, the major portion of the demonstrators started moving toward the Fair. That completely wrecked the director’s nerves, and Taubert ordered that the eastern entrance of the Fair, the one closest to the city, be closed.

The decision was understandable. Once it was decided to maintain order with the traditional state mechanisms, it was not possible to change course and move gradually to more flexible measures as the clashes escalated. In addition, the organizers felt truly exposed. The main bulk of the police force had been withdrawn into the city, and only the common Fair guards and a few dozen officials had remained at the fairgrounds. The turn of events had instilled in everyone a siege mentality. The only course of action left was to raise the drawbridges, strengthen the walls and pray for reinforcements.

These came just in time in the form of several hundred policemen. Now the civil war in miniature that had broken out at St. Paul’s continued at the entrances to the Fair. The demonstrators tried to scale the fences and storm the gates. A Hall guard was severely injured as he rushed to close off a side gate against the storm of students (to be sure, the injury was caused by a police car, a fact which was not always clear in the reports published afterward). Flags of exhibitor countries were ripped down, and everywhere it came to hand-to-hand combat. It is obvious that under such circumstances the orderly flow of normal Fair business could not be guaranteed. The Fair management and the German Publishers Association came under heavy pressure from an influential group of publishers because of how the police had been used. These publishers either closed their stalls or threatened to withdraw altogether. For three hours the Fair entrance was closed, but shortly before the end of the Fair on this eventful Sunday, it was reopened.

A sensitive instrument like the Frankfurt Book Fair, which lives on unrestricted communication, and the easy contacts made among the professional public, could only have been wounded to the core by all the violence.

[You can read the rest of this story in Peter Weidhaas's LIFE BEFORE LETTERS!]