A city. A book.
“ A CITY. A book. “Is a free book campaign that has been taking place in Vienna every year since 2002 . 100,000 copies of contemporary novels by well-known authors are printed and distributed free of charge in the city by bookstores, libraries , adult education centers and sponsors. The authors are invited to present their work in the Vienna City Hall together with Mayor Michael Häupl , who was involved in the selection of the books from the very beginning. The books are published by the echomedia publishing house, which also provides funding from sponsors from the fields of culture and business. Among the authors represented so far are three women.
Originally the idea as One City - One Book comes from Chicago, however, the readers there have to buy the books or borrow them from the libraries; In Germany, a similar series of events has meanwhile been established as a city reads a book .
history
Already at the end of the 1920s the Viennese journalist and social democratic politician Max Winter had a selection of books on world literature appear in handy and inexpensive form as so-called “Wiener Groschenbüchel” in order to give the poor among the Viennese population access to high-quality literature, for example from Gottfried Keller to make it possible.
The campaign, which aims to make reading popular and accessible to all, started on October 22nd, 2002 with a gala evening in the Vienna City Hall in the presence of the author Frederic Morton . At that time, 100,000 copies of Frederic Morton's novel Ewigkeitsgasse were distributed free of charge between October 23 and 25, 2002 in Vienna.
In 2004 and 2005 there was the Vienna Detective Game for children, which was also based on the principle of free book distribution.
In 2011 the campaign was launched under the title “Eine Stadt. A book. Berlin. ”Also carried out in the German capital. Here, too, 100,000 books were given away, on Sunday, October 16, 2011, the first copy of the book was handed over to the governing mayor, Klaus Wowereit . As in Vienna, it was the novel The Storyteller by Mario Vargas Llosa .
The focus of the “One City. A book. ”Is based on contemporary literature. The authors of the books are invited to Vienna and are available for interviews and discussions. As a result, contemporary history can often be dealt with . The literary description of Frederic Morton, born in Vienna as Fritz Mandelbaum, who in his novel Ewigkeitsgasse portrayed the fate of a Jewish family in Vienna during the interwar period, was an occasion in 2002 for the media and parts of the population to look at this chapter of Austrian history to deal with.
List of books
So far the following books have been distributed:
- 2002 - Frederic Morton : Ewigkeitsgasse , German by Hermann Stiehl.
- Frederic Morton is a writer born in Vienna in 1924. In his novel Ewigkeitsgasse (original title: Forever Street ) he described the life of a Jewish family in a fictional area in Vienna. The edition for One City. A book. does not contain the name of the translator (Hermann Stiehl) anywhere, so that for readers not familiar with the author the assumption was obvious that it was written in German - which would have been entirely possible, since Morton comes from Vienna.
- 2003 - Imre Kertész : Step by Step , German by Erich Berger.
- This book is actually a script for the novel The Fateless , for which Kertész received the Nobel Prize in Literature .
- 2004 - Johannes Mario Simmel : The Secret Bread
- Johannes Mario Simmel was born in Vienna in 1924. The setting for his novel Daskret Bread , published in 1950, is Vienna in the post-war period, where Simmel was then employed as a cultural editor.
- 2005 - John Irving : Let Go of the Bears! , German by Michael Walter .
- John Irving studied in Vienna from 1962 to 1963 and started his first novel Let the bears go! (Original title: Setting Free the Bears ).
- 2006 - Toni Morrison : Very blue eyes , in German by Susanna Rademacher .
- The Afro-American Nobel Prize for Literature Laureate Toni Morrison wrote her first novel in 1970: Very Blue Eyes (original title: The Bluest Eye ). It is about the fate of a black girl in the USA in the 1940s.
- 2007 - Nick Hornby : Fever Pitch , German by Marcus Geiss and Henning Stegelmann .
- Nick Hornby's autobiographical debut novel about a football fan was selected as the harbinger of the 2008 European Football Championship taking place in Austria and Switzerland .
- 2008 - Ruth Klüger : Live on. A youth
- In the autobiographical novel, the Viennese native Ruth Klüger tells of her youth during the Nazi dictatorship , her deportation to several concentration camps and finally her escape.
- 2009 - Irvin D. Yalom : And Nietzsche was crying , in German by Uda Strätling.
- The emeritus professor of psychiatry at Stanford University , Irvin D. Yalom, has his novel, first published in 1992, set in Vienna in the late 19th century. Sigmund Freud , Josef Breuer , Friedrich Nietzsche and Lou Andreas-Salomé meet in dramatic encounters.
- 2010 - Dai Sijie : Balzac and the little Chinese seamstress , German by Giò Waeckerlin Induni (the original, written in French, is entitled Balzac et la petite tailleuse chinoise ).
- The story, which was set in China at the time of the Cultural Revolution and is partly autobiographical, is about two students who are exiled to a mountain village for labor service. They get to know the daughter of the local tailor and try to conquer her heart with the help of books that were forbidden at the time. The plan works, but it also leads to the little seamstress starting to emancipate herself.
- 2011 - Mario Vargas Llosa : The storyteller , German by Elke Wehr .
- The subject of this work by the Peruvian Nobel Prize for Literature are the storytellers of the Machiguengas living in the Amazon , who are postmen, entertainers and at the same time tribal memory of the widely dispersed tribesmen.
- 2012 - Rafik Schami : A hand full of stars .
- 2013 - TC Boyle : América , German by Werner Richter. The American original from 1995 was published in New York under the title The Tortilla Curtain .
- 2014 - Anna Gavalda : Together you are less alone , in German by Ina Kronenberger.
- 2015 - Jostein Gaarder : Sofies Welt , German by Gabriele Haefs .
- 2016 - Michael Ondaatje : Katzentisch , German by Melanie Walz .
- 2017 - Stewart O'Nan : Last Night (Original title: Last Night at the Lobster , released 2007)
- 2018 - Hilary Mantel : Every day is Mother's Day (German by Werner Loch-Lawrence, published 1985)
- 2019 - Connie Palmen : The Laws (Original title: De Wetten , published 1991. German by Barbara Heller, published 1993)
Individual evidence
- ↑ see page 13 Universitas bulletin 04/2002 with a quote from an article in the Wiener Standard (accessed on March 31, 2020)
- ↑ Vienna Free Book 2019: "The Laws" by Connie Plamen. February 25, 2019, accessed February 25, 2019 .