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Tomorrow is Here

E-BookEPUB2 - DRM Adobe / EPUBE-Book
310 Seiten
Englisch
John Wiley & Sonserschienen am06.10.20221. Auflage
Navid Kermani is not only one of Germany's most distinguished writers and public intellectuals, he is also an outstanding public speaker who mesmerizes audiences with his well-crafted sentences and turns of phrase. Whether he is speaking about the plight of refugees or delivering a eulogy at his father's graveside, Kermani finds words that surprise his listeners, enlighten them, provoke them, disturb them or move them to tears.

As a German of Iranian descent whose parents settled in Germany, Kermani is particularly sensitive to the issues raised by migration and the perceived tensions between Islam and the West. His speeches are a powerful demonstration of how much we stand to gain by adhering to the values of openness, tolerance and mutual respect for the beliefs and practices of those from other cultures who live among us.


Navid Kermani is a writer and scholar who lives in Cologne, Germany. He has received numerous accolades for his literary and academic work, including the 2015 Peace Prize of the German Publishers' Association, Germany's most prestigious cultural award.mehr
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Produkt

KlappentextNavid Kermani is not only one of Germany's most distinguished writers and public intellectuals, he is also an outstanding public speaker who mesmerizes audiences with his well-crafted sentences and turns of phrase. Whether he is speaking about the plight of refugees or delivering a eulogy at his father's graveside, Kermani finds words that surprise his listeners, enlighten them, provoke them, disturb them or move them to tears.

As a German of Iranian descent whose parents settled in Germany, Kermani is particularly sensitive to the issues raised by migration and the perceived tensions between Islam and the West. His speeches are a powerful demonstration of how much we stand to gain by adhering to the values of openness, tolerance and mutual respect for the beliefs and practices of those from other cultures who live among us.


Navid Kermani is a writer and scholar who lives in Cologne, Germany. He has received numerous accolades for his literary and academic work, including the 2015 Peace Prize of the German Publishers' Association, Germany's most prestigious cultural award.
Details
Weitere ISBN/GTIN9781509550586
ProduktartE-Book
EinbandartE-Book
FormatEPUB
Format Hinweis2 - DRM Adobe / EPUB
FormatFormat mit automatischem Seitenumbruch (reflowable)
Erscheinungsjahr2022
Erscheinungsdatum06.10.2022
Auflage1. Auflage
Seiten310 Seiten
SpracheEnglisch
Dateigrösse410 Kbytes
Artikel-Nr.9953816
Rubriken
Genre9201

Inhalt/Kritik

Inhaltsverzeichnis
Editorial Note

Preface


On the Presentation of the Special Award of the Erich Maria Remarque Peace Prize to the Iranian Writers' Association

On the Death of the Unborn Sofía

On the 65th Anniversary of the Promulgation of the German Constitution

On Receiving the Joseph Breitbach Prize

At the Public Commemoration of the Victims of the Paris Attacks

On Receiving the Peace Prize of the German Publishers' Association

Eulogy for Rupert Neudeck

Eulogy for Jaki Liebezeit

On the Twentieth Anniversary of the Founding of the Department of Jewish History and Culture

On Receiving the State Prize of North Rhine-Westphalia

Eulogy for Djavad Kermani

Eulogy for Karl Schlamminger

On the Seventieth Birthday of FC Cologne

In Memory of Egon Ammann

Dinner Speech at the Investment Conference of Flossbach von Storch AG

Keynote Address to the Congress of the International Association for Analytical Psychology

Statement before the Opening Reading of the Harbour Front Literature Festival

On Receiving the Hölderlin Prize of the City of Bad Homburg vor der Höhe

On a Concert by the WDR Symphony Orchestra in the Broadcast Series 'Music in Dialogue'

Epilogue: On My Bookseller, Ömer Özerturgut


Notesmehr
Leseprobe

PREFACE

Of all the forms of public communication, the most peculiar seems to me to be the delivery of a prepared speech. When a person speaks without a script, whether at a lectern or as a member of a panel, they finish their ideas as they are speaking, all advance preparation and practice notwithstanding. They can react to the incomprehension, the sympathy, the surprise, the boredom, the displeasure they read in the faces of the audience or hear in the form of interjections, applause and coughing. They can hurl interjections of their own at those leaving the room before the end, and in many cases that makes the speech all the more lively, especially if the protest becomes a dialogue, heated though it may be.

At an author s reading, on the other hand, one of the conventions is that the text being read aloud does not directly address the listeners present. Hence the reading is a more pleasant format for most writers, more closely aligned with their working situation. The reading adheres to the stylistics of written text; the speaker s modulation is not aimed at any particular addressee. For that reason, the speaker rarely looks up to make eye contact, to establish a connection with the listeners. I myself, at least, instinctively tend to concentrate during my readings on the book lying on the table in front of me, shutting out everything that impinges on me from outside. Even the clicking of a camera - which wouldn t bother me during the introductory remarks or the conversation with the host afterwards - can be so disturbing that I interrupt my reading to ask people not to take photographs. It looks affected when that happens, I know, but it is still better for the audience than if I were to go on being distracted and annoyed by every click.

A written speech is a contradiction in terms, and the thing designated by those terms is still more paradoxical: the speaker speaks to a specific audience, directly addressing the listeners present in the salutation and in the delivery, but what the speaker seems to be saying spontaneously has actually been thought out in advance, word for word. In a way, the speaker is imitating an extempore speech. Naturally, the speaker can deviate from the script if a new idea occurs to him; he can respond to listeners who interject comments or applaud. But afterwards he generally goes on with his speech as planned, reading the text as he prepared it well ahead of time, even if he now realizes that different words would be more fitting. If the discrepancy between the written thoughts and those of the moment becomes too great, the speaker can also put aside the script completely. In writing the speech, however, he is not likely to have planned an improvisation, since that brings with it new imponderables. No, the intention in writing a speech is to imagine a situation so well, although it is still in the future, that you will say at every moment exactly what you want to say - only more precisely, more elegantly and more profoundly than you ever could spontaneously. Because speaking from a script is by no means simply deficient, as speakers are occasionally told: putting a text in writing, and thus making it literary, can also be an advantage and, on many occasions, or for some rhetorical talents, may be imperative. The impromptu speech is not necessarily more free. In order to be artful, persuasive and memorable, it must - if only to fit in the speaker s own memory - follow rhetorical, homiletic rules and topoi - that is, literally, commonplaces . In the best case, because the prepared speech permits more complex sentence structures and thematic sequences, it gives the mind more space. It is admirable that people speak without a script in Parliament, let s say, and the listeners gladly tolerate a certain amount of imprecision, awkward syntax or polemics born of the fervour of the moment. But it is no less imperative that, in a speech about Auschwitz, let s say, no word is spoken rashly. To be exact, we are talking about two different genres, and so the present volume contains not speeches but texts which have been delivered publicly.

A person writing a novel or an essay also takes the readers reactions into account. Hoping he knows the reader s expectations, the author plans to fulfil, disappoint or disregard them. Writing a speech is no different in this respect: the speaker at his desk allows the imagined applause, annoyance, disappointed expectations, and even the protest he anticipates at certain points, to take their places in his train of thought. The difference from a book or an essay, of course, is this: a person writing a speech has the advantage, or the disadvantage, that he will experience those reactions in person. The author looks at the people he is addressing and immediately notices, as a rule, if they bristle, lose the thread, approve enthusiastically, or roll their eyes. In the worst case, the speaker will wish he could vanish into thin air - something not given to any speaker so far, unfortunately. The suspense and the strain that I feel at the beginning of every speech come from the uncertainty whether the audience will actually follow the ideas that I have already set down - and the knowledge that, even if they turn away, figuratively or literally, I will have to persevere.

When, for example, I stepped up to the lectern in St Paul s Church in Frankfurt in 2015 to deliver my thanks for the Peace Prize of the German Publishers Association, only a few friends with whom I had discussed my manuscript knew how the speech would end: that I would ask my listeners to stand up to pray, or to meditate on their wishes, for Father Jacques Mourad, Father Paolo Dall Oglio and the other hostages in Iraq and Syria. Thus I imagined, as I began to speak, the embarrassment that would be mine when the audience remained sitting in spite of my request. I was also nervous because my script was about twice as long as the time allotted for the ceremony, which was being televised live, and the speaker who had introduced me had already gone over time. By the end of my speech, I imagined, there would be hardly anyone left to stand up, and the television crew would long since have gone off the air. Only as I gradually gained confidence, because I read the attentiveness in the faces of the audience and heard the silence between my sentences, my fears dissipated and I was able while I spoke to think of Father Jacques Mourad, Father Paolo and the other hostages, with whom I was carrying on my inner dialogue. The strength, the love and the courage of desperation that the speech may have conveyed did not come from me, I felt; they came - and this was what kept me going and enabled me to ignore the organizers expectations, the listeners possible fatigue and the television programme - the strength, love and courage came from the prisoners in Syria and Iraq.

Thus there is another paradox in delivering a speech that has long since been written down: although the reactions that the speaker witnesses are quite immediate, the speaker is the more persuasive the more apathetic he is to the audience and the less he cares about the audience s expectations. I have often experienced, both as a listener and as a speaker, that you are more likely to reach other people the more you are in touch with yourself; that is, the more your statement expresses an inner concern - Here I stand; I cannot do otherwise ⦠. The opposite can be observed on any anniversary or formal occasion when the speaker is speaking not as an individual but as the representative of a nation, a religion, a business, a city or a congregation of mourners. Literature never comes about vicariously; it is individualistic in the extreme; otherwise it is not literature. It can express common afflictions, longings and demands only by finding the most personal and distinctive words: those moulded by the individual s life experience, personality and situations. But the less literary a speech is, and the more it is influenced by external pressures to be balanced out - the concerns of advisors and advocates, political constraints, commercial expectations, concessions to diplomacy or respect - the greater is the danger of sound bites, stereotypes, run-of-the-mill truths which no one would contradict and which are immediately forgotten. The highest art of public oratory would be to speak for many while saying what only one single person can say: to be literary and at the same time representative. This paradoxical challenge was not obvious to me, as my older speeches especially attest; hence few of them are included in this collection. The self-confidence to retain my own style in speech as in writing, with its rhythmic idiosyncrasies and its convoluted sentences, is something I had to acquire, and so is the chutzpah to say unfitting things at a ceremonial gathering - indecent things, all too heartrending things, discursive, personal, even banal things - if they happen to be important to me at the moment.

It is only natural that, in retrospect, there are some things I would state differently, in spite of the strength of my conviction at the time, and that I have occasionally erred, plain and simple. A speech, more than a book or even a newspaper article, is written for a very specific moment, a specific place and a sharply circumscribed audience. Later, elsewhere and for an indeterminate readership, the world necessarily looks different. Furthermore, an essay, a novel or an academic study may be revised after its publication, but at the lectern there is only the spoken word....
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