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Since a wave of condemnation was ignited last October over the cancellation of an award ceremony for Palestinian writer Adania Shibli, who was to be presented with the LiBeratur Prize at the Frankfurt Book Fair, the attempted silencing of Palestinians and of support for the Palestinian cause by cultural institutions in the West has only grown. At the same time, scrutiny of institutional complicity in Israeli apartheid and genocide has also intensified on a large scale. Significant wins on the part of the BDS movement, including university and corporate divestments, and the recent announcements from both the 2024 Hay Festival and the Edinburgh International Book Festival ending partnerships with investment firm Baillie Gifford, complicit in climate destruction and Israeli apartheid and genocide, BG’s subsequent severing of funding relationships with all UK literary festivals and withdrawal of its stake in mining multinational Rio Tinto, and the halving of major Canadian arts sponsor Scotiabank’s stake in Israeli weapons manufacturer Elbit Systems, all indicate a shift, and point to a significant rift between large corporations and cultural institutions on the one hand, and their workers, audiences, and the broader public on the other.
Major international human rights organizations continue to sound the alarm over horrific and escalating human rights violations by Israel against millions of Palestinians. Many of these were outlined in South Africa’s case filed in December at the International Court of Justice against Israel for the crime of genocide. Despite that court’s January ruling that Israel was plausibly committing genocide, its subsequent rulings that Israel must allow the flow of humanitarian aid and halt military operations in Rafah, and the International Criminal Court’s filing of applications for arrest warrants against top Israeli officials, along with massive student and worker uprisings in support of Palestinian liberation and ending complicity with Israel around the world, its genocidal campaign against the Palestinian people in Gaza continues essentially unchecked by its biggest supporters — the U.S. and other Western colonial powers.
Of particular relevance to writers and publishers is the fact that the Frankfurt Book Fair (FBM), the world’s largest book industry event, has historically warmly welcomed apartheid Israel’s presence. One might think that in the face of Israel’s actions and the context of sharply rising international outrage, cultural institutions like FBM would withdraw such support, condemn Israel for its violations, and sever relationships. However, the Frankfurt Book Fair’s initial position of firm support for Israel throughout its run last October — one that saw statements on behalf of the fair and CEO Jurgen Boos, and plans to make Israeli voices “especially visible” through the addition of special programming, including a panel entitled “Out of Concern for Israel” — appears unchanged to this day, and the FBM has remained conspicuously silent on the unfolding genocide in the months since.
Such vocal and tacit support sits in stark contrast to past national bans on the part of the massive international publishing forum, including an ongoing ban imposed upon Russia ever since 2022, citing the “violation of international law” as a result of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. An FBM newsletter distributed on April 24 includes a highlight entitled “Book Market Ukraine: Ruined Libraries and New Bookstores,” which reads, “There is one question publishers are routinely asked in international events and private conversations: How do you continue working during the war?” Yet FBM makes no mention whatsoever of Gaza, where writers, academics, publishers, libraries, universities, and printers were targeted well before October 7, and have been brutally singled out for elimination in the many months since. This destruction of knowledge has been extensively documented, including in a thorough report written by Librarians and Archivists with Palestine. The UN has since reported on “scholasticide” in Gaza. Every university in Gaza has been destroyed. The fact that the FBM has as yet failed to announce a ban on Israel similar to that imposed upon Russia, nor expressed even a hint of concern over Israel’s violation of international laws, throws an already-existing incongruity into sharp relief.
However, the specifics of Frankfurt Book Fair’s complicity go further than its public messaging, and can only be understood through its close relationships with the German government and two German publishing empires-turned multi-billion-dollar multinationals: Holtzbrinck Publishing Group and Bertelsmann SE & Co. KGaA.
It is necessary to first emphasize the importance of the Israeli cultural sphere — including the publishing and literary world — in upholding Israeli apartheid. The fact that the Israeli state relies heavily upon and collaborates closely with its complicit cultural sector in order to whitewash its image was made publicly clear when Nissim Ben-Sheetrit, former deputy director general of “Brand Israel,” openly admitted to making no differentiation “between hasbara [propaganda] and culture.” Maya Wind’s new book, Towers of Ivory and Steel: How Israeli Universities Deny Palestinian Freedom, details the role of universities specifically for their part in this undifferentiation, collaboration, and complicity. According to Naomi Klein, Wind’s research “reveals countless ways that the nation’s most celebrated and storied education institutions are utterly entangled in the violent machinery of Palestinian dispossession, occupation, incarceration, surveillance, siege and military bombardment.”
This integration of arts and culture with the aims of the Israeli state has long been effectively challenged by the Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (PACBI), a founding member of the Palestinian-led Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement. Launched twenty years ago, PACBI has called on the rest of the world to withhold collaboration with complicit Israeli cultural and academic institutions. To be exempt from the PACBI boycott call, an institution must do two things: distance itself from Israel’s genocide and underlying settler-colonial apartheid regime, and endorse the full rights of the Palestinian people under international law, including the right of return of Palestinian refugees.
The world’s largest book fair and German climate of censure
The 2024 Frankfurt Book Fair program will be made public this month. As we await its release, international censure and alarm have been steadily rising over the German government’s curtailment of civil rights through oppressive tactics undertaken to silence solidarity with Palestine. These have in recent months included the raiding and violent shutdown of the Palestine Congress in Berlin and the barring from entry to Germany and from attendance at the Congress (in person and online) of Palestinian-British surgeon and University of Glasgow rector Dr. Ghassan Abu-Sittah. When he attempted to enter France in May in order to speak to the French parliament on his experiences in Gaza, Abu-Sittah also discovered that Germany had gone so far as to implement a one-year Europe-wide travel ban against him.
Most recently, Germany has passed legislation requiring that new citizens affirm Israel’s “right to exist” as a 76-year-old apartheid regime against the Palestinian people — instead of meeting its obligations to end complicity in that regime.
Behind this state practice of extreme censure is Germany’s enormous military and diplomatic support for Israel. Germany supplies nearly half of Israel’s current arms shipments (second only to the U.S.) and is its largest trading partner in Europe and its fourth-largest export partner in the region.
The German book publishing industry is one of the largest in the world, representing $11.4 billion in 2022; German book sales are enormous, behind only the U.S. and China. The Nazi government’s harnessing of publishing into its propaganda wing demonstrates a dark historical precedent. But the relationship can hardly be described as arms-length today. In a recent example, the Monopolies Commission has been pushing for the removal of fixed-price policy on books designed to protect books as cultural objects, calling the law a “regulatory nuisance of the first order”; such removal would present serious problems for smaller publishers and booksellers and inevitably shrink the presence progressive voices even farther in Germany’s already highly-monitored cultural atmosphere. But the Commission’s free market goals are clear: “the cultural and political interest of national legislature in books must be weighed against the interest in undistorted competition.”
Unique in both structure and scale, the Frankfurt Book Fair annually features 9,000 exhibitors, and its extensive programming is both public- and industry-facing. FBM is a subsidiary of, and organized and run by Börsenverein des deutschen Buchhandels, the German association that oversees all levels of the book trade, including publishing, manufacturing, intermediate wholesale, and distribution, and that also “deals with political lobbying.” FBM has local, regional, and federal governmental relationships, and is deeply entangled with the German state. Funding comes from the German government, including the Federal Foreign Office, along with contracts and registrations from exhibitors and attendees from around the world.
The fair is held each October at the Frankfurt Messe — an enormous trade exhibition and conference facility in the central part of the city. The exhibition center, along with other material holdings, telecommunications holdings, and an international network of offshoot conference venues, is owned and operated by the Messe Frankfurt Gmbh corporation. The city of Frankfurt holds a 60%, and the province of Hesse a 40% stake in Messe Frankfurt. In March 2023, when the City of Frankfurt canceled a Roger Waters concert over his support for Palestine, the city was named in the decision “as shareholders of Messe Frankfurt Gmbh.”
A huge multinational in its own right, Messe Frankfurt has an Israel subsidiary and convention contracts around the world, including Intersec, a “Homeland Security, Emergency Services, Police and CyberExhibition” that has featured Israeli drone, surveillance, and military technology. Intersec’s 2025 edition is set to include a counter-drone workshop with a former IDF contractor and an Israeli digital surveillance company. As Antony Loewenstein details in The Palestine Laboratory, Israeli tech and surveillance industries are developed and used aggressively against Palestinian life, forming testing grounds for brutal military expansionist projects elsewhere. The Messe Frankfurt has also hosted the annual German Israel Congress, launched in 2010 and described as “Europe’s largest pro-Israel event.” Its goal, as reported in Messe Frankfurt’s 2018 report is “to enhance bilateral relations between Israel and Germany on all levels.”
Though the participation of Israeli publishers in the Frankfurt Book Fair seems to have declined in recent years, in 2004 twenty-four publishers appeared in the Israeli national pavilion under the coordination of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the Israel Export and International Cooperation Institute alongside a special exhibit designed to celebrate 40 years of German-Israeli diplomatic relations. “Publishers” included Israeli think tanks, as well as Israel’s Ministry of Defense. In 2018, among those welcomed was Lavi P. Enterprises Ltd. Publishing House, whose publisher was a former IDF intelligence officer.
German publishing multinationals’ massive investments in Israeli tech
In the world of book publishing beyond the Frankfurt Book Fair, two of the “Big Five” publishing corporations, Macmillan Publishers and Penguin Random House, are respectively owned by the German multinationals Holtzbrinck Publishing Group and Bertelsmann SE & Co. KGaA, mentioned above.
Holtzbrinck , owner of Macmillan, and numerous publishers globally, including Scientific American, Springer, and German national news outlet, Die Zeit, has $3.81 billion in assets globally, reported $4.14 billion in sales in 2022, owns 400 companies around the world, and holds at least nine large investment portfolios that include many millions of investments in Israeli tech, AI, surveillance, and security technologies, including recent corporate acquisitions via b2venture and Insight Partners.
Holtzbrinck hosts the Frankfurt Book Fair’s Jerusalem International Book Forum Breakfast, a long-standing annual event at FBM, and has been the lead sponsor of the JIBF’s Birger Fellowship Program with the City of Jerusalem since 1985 when it helped co-establish the program. Holtzbrinck is a donor to the Museum on the Seam, “an Israeli Museum situated on Jerusalem’s east-west division” that claims status as “the first socio-political museum in Israel for contemporary art, promoting equality, human rights and diversity.” The Jerusalem International Book Fair, a previously public-facing now industry-centered event, has canceled its 2024 edition, announcing that it will instead return in 2025, with an oblique reference to “the current situation in Israel and the region.”
Holtzbrinck’s support for Israeli startups goes beyond the financial, and includes the reach of their publishing outlets. One investment portfolio boasts: “in addition to financial resources, we support our portfolio companies with management expertise and an international investor network,” and goes on to describe an “exclusive media-for-equity program [that] offers access to strong brands such as Handelsblatt [a German language business newspaper], Wirtschafts Woche [a German weekly business news magazine], Die Zeit, and Apotheken Umschau [a popular German health magazine], and thus an enormous reach into the respective target groups.”
Bertelsmann, one of the largest media conglomerates in the world, with a reported record profit in 2022 of €32.8 billion, owns Penguin Random House and umbrella corporations that include the international media conglomerate RTL Group, music label and publisher BMG, IT and finance corp Arvato, and a number of Bertelsmann sub-corps in education, printing, and broadcasting. In what seems to be an atmosphere of lax antitrust laws, Bertelsmann’s publishing model has long encompassed all levels of the book market, with holdings not just in publishing, but distribution, bookselling, and printing in Germany. In 2000, former Bertelsmann CEO Thomas Middlehoff was quoted in the New York Times underlining the company’s importance to the Frankfurt Book Fair: “You know,” he said, “it really is my fair… It is the Bertelsmann Book Fair.”
Like Holtzbrinck, Bertelsmann’s global expansion extends far beyond its publishing origins, with investment portfolios around the world, similarly including extensive investments in Israeli tech, AI, surveillance, and security technologies in the millions.
Bertelsmann is responsible for a “German-Israeli Young Leaders Exchange.” In the coverage of a 2019 pitch night, Bertelsmann’s website discusses how “Israeli founders could take advantage of Germany’s process intelligence and planning capacities,” and outlines how German-Israeli relations would benefit. Another Bertelsmann report discusses the state of North Rhine-Westphalia’s suitability to collaborate with Israel in the areas of cybersecurity and intelligence: “In the case of NRW specifically, possible synergies with the Israeli market derive from the high degree of complementarity between the two ecosystems.”
Yet another Bertelsmann report entitled “German and Israeli Innovation: The Best of Two Worlds” discusses the IDF and Israeli Intelligence Corps in terms of support and collaboration. It stresses the IDF’s importance to the high-tech sector and the utility of mandatory military service to the sector through “elite programs that produce entrepreneurs who stay connected through alumni programs,” links academic and scientific communities to these projects, and further highlights the importance of the Israeli Intelligence Corps data collection and decryption to “data-driven or cyber businesses that enjoy an excellent reputation on the market.”
The document also discusses TTOs, “technology transfer offices,” which were created with the explicit purpose of the commercialization of knowledge generated at public universities, and describes Israel’s profit structure, which integrates “armed forces, universities in collaboration with TTOs, government authorities, multinational branch offices and R&D labs, venture capital funds, incubators and accelerators,” as a desirable “innovation ecosystem.”
A statement on the Bertelsmann website from October 23, 2023 that underlines the economic basis for the company’s relationship with Israel remains posted to this day:
“We stand unwaveringly by the side of our Israeli friends and partners as well as the State of Israel. Over the decades, Bertelsmann and Israel have developed close and extremely stable ties of friendship. This friendship extends from the involvement of the Mohn family of shareholders and Bertelsmann Stiftung projects to Bertelsmann’s business and investments in Israel. Our unreserved solidarity goes out to the people of Israel.”
From foundations of Nazi opportunism to complicity today
The historical roots of both Holtzbrinck and Bertelsmann also merit attention. Despite earlier efforts to minimize their ties to Nazi Germany, both companies were exposed in the late 1990s and early 2000s as having explicitly built their publishing empires up through Nazi state collaboration and opportunism. According to pieces in Vanity Fair, the Irish Times, and Radio Free Europe, the Holtzbrinck publishing empire — at that point encompassing Macmillan and numerous presses including St. Martins, Picador, and Fischer Verlag, Die Zeit, and featuring the backlists of many of the English language’s best-known authors — was “built on Nazism.” Bertelsmann had, at the time these articles emerged, recently taken over Random House, which included Knopff and subsidiaries and had already obtained Bantam, Doubleday, Delacourt, and many others.
In what David Margolick deems in his Vanity Fair article a “twist of fate,” Teddy Kollek, whom he refers to as “one of the great heroes of Zionism” had “regularly attested to the character” of founder Georg von Holtzbrinck, whom he referred to as “that former Nazi.”
Ronald Eggleston further delineated this history in his 2002 article for Radio Free Europe. Georg von Holtzbrinck had joined the Nazi party in 1933 and remained loyal to the Third Reich throughout the entirety of WWII. Eggleston also points out that “von Holtzbrinck enjoyed a reputation after World War II as a friend of Israel who cultivated the support of Jewish leaders and gave financial and other support to many institutions in Jerusalem.”
Eggleston describes how Bertelsmann “used its ties with the Nazi regime to transform itself from a provincial publisher of Lutheran religious books into a mass-market publisher.” Bertelsmann’s chairman, Heinrich Mohn “was a member of a group that supported the Nazi SS special police through monthly donations and also aided other Nazi causes.” According to Eggleston, Bertelsmann built its empire on Nazi propaganda, publishing 19 million books of “heroic and escapist literature for Nazi soldiers.” It was the German army’s largest book supplier, including titles “replete with anti-Semitic themes.” An investigating commission on Bertelsmann’s Nazi origins also found that the company used slave labour in a printing house in Lithuania that was used for some of its publications.” The commission concluded that “during the Third Reich, Bertelsmann remained a business enterprise whose publishing decisions were based on turnover, profit, investments, and other fiscal data.”
The idea that Bertelsmann or Holtzbrinck’s decisions were economically rather than ideologically motivated should, instead of absolving malfeasance, draw our attention to the question of why those motivations should seem less horrific if the dehumanization and genocide of a people is the end result — either historically or in the present moment. We should also be prompted to analyze our collective support in the present, in the book industry and beyond, not only of the complicity of entangled institutions like the Frankfurt Book Fair, but of the economic system that facilitates such relationships and so totally and consistently paves the way for dehumanization for profit.