A Matter of Translation (IT In Transit #15)

A Matter of Translation

A Matter of Translation issue #15 - april 2013

«The light comes from the north» said Joan Maragall, and it is true that for Catalans German culture has often represented a lighthouse that illuminated the way. The manner in which this insightful poet, translator and thinker —who passed away in 1911— connected with the German cultural legacy reveals a great deal. He translated Faust by Goethe, but not the complete work, just the framework of the tragedy. His translation only includes the scenes with Gretchen –who he calls «Margarideta».

In other words, what he was drawn to was the extreme fragility of the protagonist. Maragall also wrote a long epic poem, but his Comte Arnau does not have much in common with Goethe’s majestic hero, but instead it is oddly similar to a short story by Franz Kafka, Der Jäger Gracchus. Like Kafka’s mysterious moribund traveler, Maragall’s Arnau cannot live or die, he is a man trapped in a never-ending state of distress, always fl eeing from some danger or pursuing some impossible goal, without any recognition or glory whatsoever... It becomes clear that the two heroes, worn out from fi ghting, speak to us of the fragility of peoples that don’t quite know if they are still “alive” or whether they have ceased to exist in everyone’s eyes.

The Catalan culture and the German culture are, therefore, two different —and in some cases, diametrically opposed— cultures. One is big and the other is quite small; one not only is internationally recognized, infl uential and powerful, but has also been strongly marked by the abuse of power in the 20th century, while the other, in exchange, is fragile, insecure and has been systematically persecuted for decades throughout that same century. How did these two cultures ever fi nd each other? How could two peoples with such different histories establish any sort of dialogue, especially considering these two countries are situated at opposite ends of the European continent? Often we forget that the simplest defi nition of culture could be a space within which we are willing to understand others, where we accept our insurmountable differences and we interest ourselves in other destinies that have nothing to do with our own worries.

In 2007 Catalan culture was the guest of honor at the Frankfurt Book Fair. It would be wrong, however, to think that this milestone marks a beginning. Instead, Frankfurt 2007 was an opportunity to offer the world a glimpse of everything that, in fact, already existed. At the start of the 20th century the German Romance scholars, thanks to their studies and methodology, gave an important boost to the process of modernizing the Catalan language, as can be seen when we observe the similar nature of the lexical entries of the Brothers Grimm Deutsches Wörterbuch and the ten volumes of the Diccionari català-valencià-balear by Antoni M. Alcover. In the end it was Pompeu Fabra’s reform of the Catalan language that gained the largest number of supporters, as people (of their own accord) accepted his standard because it was useful. And the proof of this is that in the early years of Franco’s dictatorship the authorities permitted the publication of an extremely limited number of books in Catalan, but those few titles had to be written with the pre-Fabra Catalan spelling. If the regime had managed to impose this measure, then Catalan would have become a divided and weakened language, reduced to a mere folkloric ornament.

One of the most exciting moments in the history of German culture’s infl uence is quite possibly the year 1943. That year Carles Riba, who had been forced to abandon his native land and settle in a small French town, evoked the temple of Sounion. Carles Riba had lived through the defeat of the Republican democracy, and when he decided to write a familiar lament for the lost home he knew how to best make it sound like an elegy. There is no doubt that his master had been Friedrich Hölderlin. Les elegies de Bierville by Riba evokes the dark trees and the slender columns of a Greek temple, and by uniting these two opposites in a single gaze he was better able to express his grief. But it is also good to know that only fi fteen copies were published of Carles Ribas’ translation of Les Versions de Hölderlin, and with a false publication date and location— refl ecting the diffi cult conditions of the Barcelona of 1944, when any kind of translation into Catalan was strictly forbidden.

It should be no surprise, therefore, that Catalonia has practically adopted authors like Bertolt Brecht or Rainer Maria Rilke. Salvador Espriu, who copied by hand entire poems by Rilke for his private archive, today has his entire poetic works translated into German. And the fi rst translation of Kafka on the Iberian Peninsula was also into Catalan; El procés was translated in 1966 by Gabriel Ferrater with a degree of sensibility that is only possible when a poet recognizes himself in the voice of another poet. By analogy Catalonia can also easily understand Thomas Bernhard’s critical view of Austrian identity (which was based on amnesia), as in Spain the offi cial optimism Spanish Transition’s silenced many infamies. It is also no accident that Paul Celan is the German poet who has most infl uenced young Catalan poets.

Simona Škrabec

seven communities, one languageeurocatalan newsletter

EDITORIAL

In other words, Pedra de tartera by Maria Barbal or Les veus de Pamano by Jaume Cabré, which achieved enormous success after the Frankfurt Book Fair of 2007, were not without their predecessors. But the case of these two novels is also interesting because in these two books German readers —perhaps unconsciously— found the predominant genre of their popular literature of the 19th century, the Dorfgeschichte, except this time it was not an idyllic tale about rural life, but instead the story was set in a Pyrenees wilderness full of deep wounds.

In Europe, translation is not just the only language we share, it is our only reality: we are constantly encountering concepts that are unfamiliar to us, but we rework them, we adapt them, we “translate” them and we end up using them. In the botanical garden of Blanes, engraved in the rock of a cliff, Goethe’s verses ask us: «Weisst du das Land wo die Zitronnen blühn?» [Do you know the land where the lemon trees bloom?] In how many more rocks of the Mediterranean could we potentially fi nd engravings that say the same, that refl ect the beautiful dream of a German poet seeking his South? Thus it is that between the light of reason imagined by Maragall and the lemon trees dreamt by Goethe, a tension is forged that can explain a great deal. We are living on a continent made up of contrasts and differences, but this capacity to move from north to south and south to north, in a never-ending fl ow, is precisely what has made European culture so rich.

Walter Benjamin died shortly after crossing the French border occupied by the Nazis in the small Catalan town of Portbou. His tomb can also be found above a cliff, looking out over the sea. Indeed, this philosopher was able to explain, better than any other, how we live in a fragmented world. This is why history can no longer be understood as an unbroken line of causes and effects, of defi nitive answers: the past is a compendium of events that always have to be reconsidered, again and again.

Simona Škrabec (Ljubljana, 1968) is a writer and translator. She focuses on the study of European literature of the XX century and the relationship between literary works and the formation of identity and memory of the past. She is the author of the books L’estirp de la solitud (2002) on the sense of tragedy in short narrative works of the XX century and L’atzar de la lluita (2005) on the concept of Central Europe. She coordinated with Arnau Pons Carrers de frontera (2008-2009), a comprehensive study on the relationship between German and Catalan cultures. She has translated books by Jesús Moncada, Jaume Cabré, Gabriel Ferrater and Maria Mercè Marçal into Slovenian, and into Catalan authors like Drago Jančar, Danilo Kiš, Boris Pahor o Aleš Debeljak, among others. She is the editor of the digital magazine Visat, published by the Catalan PEN, devoted to literary translation. She is also a member of the InTransit Editorial Board.

Photo by Margaret LuppinoTranslated from Catalan by Margaret Luppino

Afterword Informationen Über Katalonien - Jocs Florals de la Llengua Catalana - Tübingen 1970


If in the preceding pages our Catalan friends presented the relations between Germany and Catalonia in the kindest possible way –and above all from an academic standpoint—nonetheless we cannot forget that there was also an inhumane side to these relations. We all know just how much the German military forces contributed to the destruction of Catalonia between 1936 and 1939 and it is also well known that no fewer than 3,000 Catalans died in the concentration camps of the Third Reich. That is to say, alongside the testimonies of the researchers and scholars who have lovingly devoted themselves to the Catalan culture and language –a good example would be the letters of philologist Bernhard Schädel that we have included in this volume—we should also have included reports, diaries or memoirs written by soldiers or even a war criminal.

But why didn’t we? Because a perverse effect of that ideology, of those warped plans for destruction and division, is that within that way of thinking all differences between the victims disappear –there is no difference between a Marxist and an Anarchist, between an Atheist and a Catholic, between a Pole and a German, nor is there any difference between Catalans and Castilians.

With this publication we wanted to contribute to supporting the right to think based on such “differences,” at least in part. Nonetheless, some questions remain: What was the real spirit that fueled the repression of the Catalans during Franco’s regime?

What degree of terror was reached in a regime that was capable of denying a third of the country’s population —here we also include the Basques and the Galicians— the most important instrument of self-identifi cation, their mother tongue?

And what is it in general that drives all social systems –objectively and subjectively—to exclude whole groups and lower them to the level of outcasts?

These are questions that without a doubt do not just apply to the situation in Spain, but are equally relevant for the current circumstances in Germany. It is enough to think of the immigrant workers. If my theory is correct and if the degree of humanity in a social system is measured by how its minorities are treated —minorities in any sense of the word—then the question I have just asked also rather uncomfortably affects the citizens of the German Federal Republic.

NOTE

Extracted from: Lüdke, Jens; Pous, Antoni (eds.), Informationen über Katalonien. Geschichte. Sprache. Literatur. Tübingen: Catalan Lectorate of the Seminar of Romance Studies at the University of Tübingen, 1970, p. 75-76. Publication edited on the occasion of the Jocs Florals of the Catalan Language that were held at the University of Tübingen (Germany) on October 25th, 1970.

Translated from German to Catalan by Simona ŠkrabecTranslated from Catalan to English by Margaret Luppino

Erhard Lucas


FURTHER READING

Traces of Catalan Theater in GermanyCarrers de Frontera - Grenzen sind Straßen


In 1984 I arrived in Munich, and thanks to a generous grant from the Goethe-Institute, the German Foreign Affairs Ministry and the International Theater Institute, I began to work in the Münchner Kammerspiele (which was where Bertolt Brecht began his theater career). Among the German intellectuals I met there that year –such as George Tabori, Thomas Bernhard, Herbert Achternbusch, Heiner Müller, Bernd Wilms, Bruno Ganz, Hanna Schygulla and many others— no one, or hardly anyone, had ever heard of Catalan theater. The lack of awareness about our theater was so great that throughout the nearly three years I acted in the Greek Army, torturing and mistreating Les troianes [the Trojans] of Èsquil, in the version by Walter Jens and George Tabori, my cries onstage, in fl awless Catalan, were thought to be an archaic Greek or some truly exotic tongue, incomprehensible and a product of Tabori’s genious as a stage director. This does not mean that the people of Catalan theater who had worked in theater in the German language before me —whether in Austria, Switzerland or the two Germanies, men of theater such as the master Ricard Salvat, among others— had not left a mark. But in the ocean of German-speaking theater, with over one hundred and fi fteen national and municipal theaters and their respective premieres that ranged from fi ve to twelve each year —more or less one thousand to one thousand two hundred premieres each season, in addition to the numerous smaller subsidized theaters— the traces of a few Catalan pioneers were practically imperceptible, but nonetheless, they did leave behind strong ties of friendship and opened channels of interest.

In all the years that I worked as a stage director, putting on a dozen plays throughout the German-speaking lands, I never had the opportunity to work with a play by an author who wrote in Catalan. Aside from an attempt to bring to the stage a selection of pieces by Joan Brossa in the Künstlerhaus Bethanien, a few meters away from the Berlin wall, between 1985 and 1986, the closest I came was in 1994 when for the fi rst time in Austria the Kleines Theater of Saltzburg brought to the stage the work ¡Ay, Carmela! (which had premiered in Germany a couple of years previously, in the Berliner Ensemble), the work of a man with close ties to modern Catalan theater and who had promoted it enormously through his Teatro Fronterizo and the Sala Beckett of Barcelona: José Sanchís Sinisterra. I mention him because while I was getting to know contemporary German theater, little by little the rising star –or better put, the tip of the iceberg of Catalan text theater and someone who started out as part of the Sala Beckett group— began to appear: Sergi Belbel, an author I will talk more about later on.

At the same time, throughout the 1990s the Catalan theater groups Comediants, Els Joglars and, above all, La Fura dels Baus, were at the forefront of Catalan theater, recognized and admired by a public made up mostly of young people. The shows by La Fura in Berlin, in the Tempodrom tents close to the Reichstag, were something people looked forward to year after year, receiving excellent reviews and almost always packed. Their trademark aesthetic that overfl owed with energy, which in Germany was often called “Theater der Gewalt” (‘theater of violence’), meshed perfectly with a Berlin destroyed by a war that was distant yet still present, a Berlin broken in two by another war of cement and networks of barbed wire that had turned cold yet still smoldered, and an alternative Berlin of a breathtaking clash of creative forces that had set off the shockwaves that caused the wall to fall and that are still reverberating today. Many theater groups, directors such as Franz Castorf and plastic artists allowed themselves to be infl uenced directly or indirectly by this group from Moià, so quirky and provocative, and of such a mysterious name. And not just the artists, but the German automobile industry as well; Mercedes-Benz and Volkswagen hired La Fura to promote their products. What more could you ask for? For the Germans it was a completely new form of theatrical expression, because being able to connect La Fura or Comediants with the tradition of urban or medieval street theater, with the dances of death, with the Patum – all of this was practically impossible in Germany, or at most it was the work of ethnologists. Similar popular theatrical manifestations had disappeared centuries ago from the colletive consciousness of Central Europe, and the only traces left can be found in the Carnival festivals, or in the Fastnacht of Basel, in the Swiss Alps, or the German Fasnet, all very distant.

If we speak of visual theater with music and movement, I must mention [the choreographer and dancer] Cesc Gelabert, who was closely connected to the German tradition of “Ausdruckstanz.” Since the performance that he put on in the Akademie der Künste in Berlin in 1985, he has regularly participated in the TanzWerkstatt (‘Dance Workshop’) of the Hebbel-Theater, in the Komische Oper and, of course, in the dance festivals of the Akademie der Künste since 1988, both with the Gelabert-Azzopardi Companyia de Dansa as well as on his own. For his interest in work as a choreographer he was awarded with a grant from the Deutscher Akademischer Austausch Dienst (DAAD) in 1992. He is admired for his work not only in Berlin, but also in Leipzig (1998), Dresden (2003), Munich (2006) and many other places.

Víctor León-Oller


FURTHER READING

Obviously it is impossible for me to review all of the appearences, “bolos” [informal performances in little towns], of the numerous Catalan groups and companies that have preformed over the last twenty-fi ve years in German-speaking lands, not even those I have already mentioned, but I do wish to point out how quickly Catalan theater and culture have been gaining recognition in the German theater setting and among Central Europeans. This has not just been due to the efforts of the institutions but above all thanks to individuals with very different interests who enthusiastically dedicated themselves to spreading the word about Catalan theater. And they did so above all because they felt that certain works written or created in Catalonia would interest the German public. Translating a work involves distancing it from it cultural context and introducing it into another, whether we like it or not, even though we can express it the other way around too. To put it even more plainly: a Catalan theater text, for it to be preformed in Germany someday, will be perceived as a German theater work translated from Catalan. Your everyday Bavarian, Saxonian, Swabian, or Prussian will not distinguish (if it isn’t explicitly made known) the “Catalan-ness” of the text they are watching and listening to in “High German” or “German of the Bible,” the language that has been used onstage for centuries. In other words, I don’t think that the theater public of the work Mar i cel, by Àngel Guimerà / Xavier Bru de Sala, translated and staged by Hartmut H. Forche in the Opernhaus de Halle in March of 2007, understood it as a classic of Catalan theater, disguised in the form of a musical. Instead, they must have seen refl ected in it the confl ict that they are experiencing –in Halle and elsewhere—between the German European Christian culture and the Turkish Eastern Muslim culture. Just like when we see Romeo and Juliet in Catalan, we don’t think about English culture, no matter that Shakespeare wrote it, but instead we allow ourselves to be directly transported to Italy or the confl icts between the important families of our lands or the tragedies of forbidden loves. The same universal nature of translated dramatic works often blurs the particularities of their origins.

This is why the efforts of those German intellectuals, researchers and professionals who have been introducing Catalan theater to their country are even more worthy of praise. One example is Wolfgang Schuch, the former director —now retired— of the publishing house Henschel Schauspiel, which during the dark times of the German Democratic Republic translated and published Meridians i paral·lels by Jaume Melendres, despite the risk that it might never premiere on stage. As he explained to me, a German director who worked in Barcelona had spoken to him of a very interesting young author who had just presented a work, Tàlem; he got in touch with this author and obtained a copy of his new work, Carícies. The young author was none other than Sergi Belbel. At the start of the 1990s he was invited to give talks about his theater pieces in the Deutsches Theater and the Literaturhaus Berlin. Despite this, it took the publishing house, which also acts as an agent, two years to get a theater to be interested in putting on the works of Belbel, even though Klaus Laabs had already translated them for the Henschel publishing house.

On March 25th, 1995, Carícies debuted at the Münchner Kammerspiele, where I had also started my German adventures. The piece was well received, but speaking with the actors I came to realize –and it was later confi rmed—that they had been enthusiastic about the text, which had allowed them great creative freedom when it came to the acting; the public and the critics, in exchange, did not feel this same enthusiasm, although in general we could speak of success for the fi rst of what will now have been seven mises en scène of Liebkosungen. Not long after that, on November 17th of the same year, the Schauspielhaus of Hamburg put on Després de la pluja (“Nach dem Regen”), also in translation by Klaus Laabs, the fi rst big success of Belbel in a German-speaking context. Thirty-seven mises en scène in different theaters can give us a feel for how extremely well-received this text was. A year and a half later, on March 25th, 1997, at the Landesbühne Esslingen in Württemerg, Tàlem premiered, which in the translation of Klaus Laabs was given the title of Spielweise, zwei im Quadrat. The fi rst time it was brought to the stage in Switzerland was six months later in Basel at the hand of the Catalan director and translator Maurici Farré; to this date there have been seven different productions of this work in German. On September 18th, 1998, En companyia d’abisme (“In Gesellschaft von Abgrund”) opened at the Theater Bielefeld together with the short piece L’ajudant, of which two productions were made. But four months prior to this, on May 30th, 1998, the state theater of Dresden (Staatsschauspiel Dresden) produced what would be Belbel’s second great success in Germany: the translator, almost a specialist of Belbel at this point, gave it the German title of Ein Augenblick vor dem Sterben, the original in Catalan is Morir. Thanks to the thirty-two productions of this work, Sergi Belbel became known throughout Germany-speaking territory as a theater author, and Catalan theater at last began to make a name for itself within the Central European contemporary theater scene. Since the start of the new millenium we have witnessed the premieres of Sang (Mannheim, 2000), with fi ve different stagings; El temps de Planck (Frankfurt, 2002), with four different stagings; Forasters (Leipzig, 2006), with an excellent title in German, Wildfremde, by Klaus Laabs, and the new and highly popular comedy, Mòbil (Hannover, 2006), of which eleven different stagings have already been produced. Even though the staging of it at the Deutsches Theater, in Berlin, was highly unpopular, there are others, like that of Hans Otto Theater, in Potsdam, that have been a complete success. A few months ago, at the end of 2007, the publishing house Henschel Schauspiel even released a book with three works by Belbel. Wolfgang Schuch’s dedication has borne fruit: Klaus Laabs, who was the Spanish and French translator, at the age of nearly fi fty chose to learn Catalan so that he could translate Belbel directly.

And now it is time for others to join Belbel. Josep Benet i Jornet has fi ve works translated into German, also by Klaus Laabs. Three of these have been brought to the stage: Desig (Bonn, 1977), which was staged four times; Testament (Constance, 2000), which opened in Constance, and Això, a un fi ll, no se li fa (Graz, 2002), Slips in German, which was staged three times. The publishing house Merlin has translated four works by Carles Batlle, and they have edited the work Trànsit together with an interview of the author. Versuchung opened in German at the Burgtheater, in Vienna, on December 3rd 2004, and I know of a mise en scènce of this work in Tübingen (2005) and Krefeld (2007). El mètode Grönholm, by Jordi Galceran, is another success: more than fi fteen stagings since its fi rst opening confi rm this, and if I’m not mistaken, today it is being preformed in three German theaters simultaneously.

New Catalan drama is consolidating itself in German-speaking countries, without a doubt. Many years have passed since my exotic-sounding cries on the stage of the Münchner Kammerspiele, and today —after the many avatars of Catalan theater people in Germany, the always meager help offered by the institutions for possible translations of drammatic works, the Olympic Games of 1992 and the Frankfurt Book Fair of 2007— there are few, very few intellectuals or regular German citizens with a passing interest in the arts who know nothing about Catalan culture and Catalan theater.

Translated from Catalan by Margaret Luppino

Catalan Studies in Germany


Preliminaries

Germans have always had a longing for the South. Our Germanic ancestors invaded the countries of the Mediterranean in the fi fth century. Charlemagne, three centuries later, expanded his area of interest down to the Catalan regions near Barcelona. In the 15th century the German-Tyrolese polyglot troubadour Oswald von Wolkenstein, in a song dating from 1416, shows that he is proud of singing and speaking Catalan, among other languages. He manages to work several times with Catalan rhyme words making them rhyme with German words, for instance «racaides» (modern Catalan: arracades, earrings) with German «tuen dir die ring nicht laides» (don’t they hurt you). Quite a polyglot poet! He takes for granted that one has to know Catalan when one moves about the Catalan-Aragonese Empire, which was at that time one of the most powerful of the Mediterranean.

Already at the end of that century German merchants needed a German-Catalan dictionary to communicate with their Catalan colleagues in the South. So the German printer Johann Rosenbach, from Heidelberg, had such a dictionary printed in Perpinyà in 1502 that provided the German-Catalan or Catalan-German equivalents. In 1991 I published a facsimile edition of this precious document, of which only one copy exists in the Catalan National Library, just in time for the celebration of 490 years of German-Catalan lexical interrelationship at the Barcelona Olympic Games of 1992. Rosenbach thus represents one of the German printers who introduced this new printing technique to the Catalan-Aragonese Crown.

The classic and Mediterranean interests of our most illustrious Frankfurter, Johann Wolfgang Goethe, born here in 1749, were directed across the Alps to the «Land, wo die Zitronen blühn», the land where the lemon trees bloom, which was not a reference to the cítrics (citrus –above all, orange— trees) of the País Valencià (Valencia), but to the lemon trees of Italy. The quotation is part of the title of a poem that Goethe wrote in 1783. A year before, in 1782, J. C. C. Rüdiger had published his Grundriss einer Geschichte der menschlichen Sprache nach allen bekannten Mund- und Schriftarten (A survey of the history of human speech based on all known oral and written languages) which said of Catalan: «Aragonese differs a bit from the provincial dialects, Valencian does so a bit more, but Catalan differs the most.» [1] It seems that Rüdiger correctly grasps the individuality of Catalan, but hasn’t yet made up his mind whether or not to grant the status of language to an idiom that does not have a state of its own. Germans were nevertheless impressed by the Catalan countries. The description of Montserrat as a symbol of peace of mind and reconnection with our inner selves, which Wilhelm von Humboldt sends to Goethe in 1800, is echoed in Goethe’s epic fragment Die Geheimnisse (1816) and in Faust II (1832). And the poem «Montserrat» is commented by Goethe and Schiller in their correspondence.

Catalan Studies in Germany

But the foundations of what we call Catalan Studies (catalanística) today can be traced back to right after Goethe’s death in 1832 with the development of German Romance Language Studies, which followed the model of Germanic Language Studies founded by Jacob Grimm (1785-1863). Without the linguistic research that Prof. Grimm began publishing in 1819 in his Deutsche Grammatik – which in reality is a comparative historical grammar of the Germanic languages – the subsequent development of Romance Language Studies wouldn’t have been possible. So it is not surprising that Germany turned into something akin to a nest for this science. What is remarkable, though, is that German universities continue to be the one place in academia where Romance language studies enjoy the highest level of cohesiveness. A good number of these German universities still have institutes of romance philology or romance languages, where those of us dedicated to these languages can work together. This is a great advantage for Catalan, as I will go on to explain, and it can help us understand why we have had seen on average some thirty German, Austrian and Swiss universities offering Catalan over the last few decades – more than any other academic system in the world, and much more than in Spain. (You can see the academic offerings of Catalan and Catalan Studies of the last 25 years in the annual account of the Zeitschrift für Katalanistik – Catalan Studies Review – which I founded in 1988).

Friedrich Diez

In the second third of the 19th century the fi eld of Romance Studies was founded by Friedrich Diez (1794-1876), who began publishing in 1836 (and continued until 1842) his Grammatik der Romanischen Sprachen – Grammar of the Romance Languages. In the second edition of this work (Bonn, 1856), the Catalan language makes its entry as a language in the scientifi c fi eld of German philologists. Let us take a look at this striking quotation (p. 112-113):

Die catalanische Sprache (denn so dürfte man nach der zunächst liegenden Provinz die über den spanischen Osten und die Inseln so wie über die franz. Landschaft Roussillon verbreitete nennen) steht zur provenzalischen nicht eigentlich im Verhältnis einer Mundart: sie ist vielmehr ein selbständiges mit ihr zunächst verwandtes Idiom.

Tilbert Dídac Stegmann


FURTHER READING

In English: «The Catalan language – as we can call the language according to the name of the province in the Spanish east where it is spoken, and which extends over the islands and the French Roussillon region– is really not a dialect of Provençal [i. e. Occitan]: Catalan is, on the contrary, a separate language, though related in the beginning.»

Prof. Diez states clearly that Catalan is spoken in the Balearic Islands and in the Roussillon as well as in the whole east of the Peninsula. In continuation he mentions, that Catalan has been used for prose texts since the 13th century. He also acknowledges that in the País Valencià people speak Catalan and that there is just a small difference in pronunciation. [2]

We can say, therefore, that starting with the second edition of Diez’s Grammatik the individuality of the catalanische Sprache is clear. There is a certain contradiction in an earlier sentence on page 104, where Diez extends the designation «provenzalisches Idiom» to Catalonia, Valencia and the Balearic Islands and mentions the common denomination used by the Catalans themselves of llemosí, but I interpret this as a remnant of the fi rst edition, when Diez still was hesitating about the point. Just a page later (always following the 2nd edition) he differentiates clearly between the Provençal and the Catalan-Valencian idiom.[3] And later on in Diez’s work (for instance on page 96 of the 2nd volume), he gives Catalan the clear designation of catalanische Sprache even if Catalan is just treated as an addition to the other languages.

At any rate, what is clear is that the comprehensive perspective of German Romance Studies, inherited from Germanic Studies, was what allowed Catalan to be present from the beginning of Romance Studies: every romance language was a precious document for detecting how popular or vulgar Latin had evolved differently in each territory. Even the languages that didn’t have a state of their own were important. The more languages that were included, the more scientifi cally the laws of phonetic shift —which Jacob Grimm had already established for the Germanic languages— could be documented.

Catalan literature

With regard to Catalan literature, German philologists dedicated themselves unequivocally to Catalan as an individual language. In 1842, Karl Lanz published the wonderful 14th century Crònica of Ramon Muntaner (translated into German) in two volumes, in Leipzig. Then in 1844, in Stuttgart, at the Literarischer Verein, the Catalan text of the edition of València of 1558 was presented with close to six hundred pages. I am sure that it was the study of this long medieval Catalan text that convinced Diez about the individual personality of Catalan and which accounts for the changes to the 2nd edition of his Grammatik (We should recall that he fi nished his fi rst edition in 1842). The other works that demonstrated the importance of Catalan literature and language were: Adolf Helfferich, Raymund Lull und die Anfänge der catalanischen Literatur (Berlin, Julius Springer, 1858); Eberhard Vogel, Neucatalanische Studien (Paderborn, 1886), and, especially, the impressive work of 540 pages by Viktor M. O. Denk, published in Munich in 1893, Einführung in die Geschichte der altcatalanischen Litteratur von deren Anfängen bis zum 18. Jahrhundert (Introduction to old Catalan literature from the beginnings until the 18th century). Three years before, Johannes Fastenrath, from Cologne, an enthusiast of the Catalan Jocs Florals, had published an extensive anthology of 570 pages with more than 200 Catalan poems and with the title Catalanische Trobadoure der Gegenwart (Contemporary Catalan poets, Leipzig, Carl Reissner, 1890). The 70 introductory pages by themselves already represent a history of Catalan literature. In the ethnographic fi eld we must not forget to mention the Archduke Ludwig Salvator, s’Arxiduc as they called him in Mallorca. With his magnifi cent work Die Balearen: In Wort und Bild geschildert (published between 1869 and 1891 by Brockhaus in Leipzig) in seven huge volumes illustrated in colour, he showed himself to be a very important exponent of the Austrian dedication to one of the Catalan countries. He himself also edited translations of Majorcan fairy-tales into German and even published his own tales written in Catalan (Somnis d’estiu ran de mar, 1912; Summer dreams at the sea-coast).

The Grundriss of Gustav Gröber

In 1888, twelve years after Diez’s death, the fi rst collective work of German and European Romance Studies appears, organized by the university of Strasbourg (at that time on German territory) and its Romanist Prof. Gustav Gröber (1844-1911), the Grundriss der Romanischen Philologie (Strasbourg, Karl J. Trübner), a compendium and opus magnum in which the Alsatian Romanist Alfred Morel-Fatio dedicated an article of 20 pages, written in German, to «Das Catalanische» (p. 669-688), in the section «Romanische Sprachen». On page 671 he dedicates part of a chapter to the «Entwicklung der catalanischen Sprache», thus clearly speaking about the Catalan language. At page 669 he even mentions the Catalan spoken in Cuba and Argentina, and points out that the Catalan there «maintains its independence with regard to Spanish». In the 2nd edition of the Grundriss (1904-1906), we fi nd Morel-Fatio’s article on Catalan nearly doubled in size by the Lorrain Romanist Jean-Joseph Saroïhandy (p. 841-877), a fact that shows a rising interest in Catalan. Gröber himself, already in his long introductory study in the fi rst edition of the Grundriss, differentiates clearly between the Catalan language and Spanish and Occitan. Gröber’s compendium was an unquestioned authority on Romance Studies. Other Romanistic manuals, such as the Handbuch der romanischen Philologie, by Gustav Körting (Leipzig, Reisland, 1896), also clearly differentiate Catalan from Occitan and other languages (see the pages 605, 608 and 639-640 for instance).

But one important Swiss Romanist didn’t agree (and some others with him): Wilhelm Meyer-Lübke (1861-1936), who published his Grammatik der romanischen Sprachen between 1890 and 1902. He maintained the hypothesis that Catalan was an offshoot of Occitan. This was quite different from the conclusions of Diez and Gröber, as we have seen. But in 1923 Meyer-Lübke moved in Alforja (near Tarragona) with his family and thus got to know Catalonia better, which is what seems to have brought him to take up Gröber’s position. He would go on to dedicate an entire book to Catalan, published in Heidelberg (at the Carl Winter Universitätsbuchhandlung, in 1925) with the title Das Katalanische: Seine Stellung zum Spanischen und Provenzalischen, sprachwissenschaftlich und historisch dargestellt (Catalan: its position to Spanish and Occitan, described linguistically and historically). The book was in some ways an apology to the scientifi c community and to the Catalans for not having researched Catalan more thoroughly before. But doubts persisted about whether he really gave Occitan and Catalan the same weight as two languages that had developed out of vulgar Latin at the same time. In 1931 the author of the enormous ten volume Catalan dictionary, Francesc de Borja Moll,[4] wrote an exhaustive Catalan supplement to Meyer-Lübkes lexical work, «Suplement català al Romanisches Etymologisches Wörterbuch de Meyer-Lübke», so that the 3rd edition of Meyer-Lübke’s dictionary, in 1935,[5] could be more balanced with regard to Catalan.

Bernhard Schädel

Going back to the beginnings of the 20th century we come across a young German Romanist named Bernhard Schädel (1878-1926), born in Giessen, which is slightly north of Frankfurt. Schädel arrived in Mallorca around the year 1903 on his voyage through several Romanic countries and came into contact with Antoni Maria Alcover who was preparing the aforementioned Catalan language dictionary, which Francesc de B. Moll would go on to complete after Alcover’s death. Alcover appreciates Schädel’s excellent professional preparation in Romance Studies (Schädel had studied with Gröber) and especially in phonetics, and a year later Schädel goes on to publish Untersuchungen zur katalanischen Lautentwicklung (Investigations on the phonetic evolution of Catalan; Halle, 1904). In the autumn of 1904 Schädel offers a Catalan seminar at his University of Halle, which is said to be the fi rst of its kind in Germany. He repeats the seminar the next year. In the summer of 1906 he and Alcover undertake a philological six-week excursion across the Pyrenees, which is documented in Alcover’s famous Dietari. During this excursion they also meet Saroïhandy, who contributed to Gröber’s Grundriss published that same year, as already mentioned. And in October 1906, at the First International Congress of the Catalan Language in Barcelona[6], Alcover ends up presenting Schädel’s contribution «Über die Zukunft der katalanischen Sprachstudien» (About the future of Catalan language studies), as Schädel has had to return to Germany, his mother having fallen gravely ill. The contents of this text are further developed by Schädel in a later text that Alcover publishes in Catalan in the Bolletí del Diccionari de la Llengua Catalana (núm. 4 [1908], p. 24-30), with the title «Memorandum sobre la necessitat de promoció de la fi lologia nacional catalana y els medis am qu’es pot obtenir y el fruit que’n sortirà» (Memorandum about the necessity of promoting the national Catalan philology and the means by which it can be obtained and the fruits it will yield). Schädel made very detailed propositions and instructions for the future of Catalan philology that Alcover then put into practice. This clearly shows the importance of German Romance Studies for the development of Catalan Studies, and Schädel clearly illustrates this. Even the founding that same year of the Institut d’Estudis Catalans, the Institute of Catalan Studies, had been proposed by Schädel. In 1908 three Catalan scholars, Manuel de Montoliu, Pere Barnils and Antoni Griera, accepted Schädel’s invitation to study at his University of Halle for six terms, which turned out to be very profi table for the Catalans, yet they ended in disagreement with Schädel and the relationship took quite a few years to heal.

From 1903 to 1908 Schädel published Kritischer Jahresbericht über die Fortschritte der Romanischen Philologie,[7] which included fascinating summaries of new publications in the fi eld of Catalan language and literature. Throughout this period he would even go on to publish articles about Catalan in newspapers and reviews. In 1908 he publishes his Manual de fonètica catalana (in Cöthen, Otto Schulze[8]) in Catalan (!), which Alcover uses from then on as a fundamental tool for the phonetic transcriptions of his dictionary. In 1909 Schädel publishes a long article, «Die katalanischen Pyrenäendialekte», in his new review Revue de Dialectologie Romane, but starting in 1911 his interest in Catalan themes starts to wane when he is made professor at Hamburg University and dedicates himself to studying the whole of Spain and of South America. There is only one more Catalanistic article of his that Alcover publishes in 1921: «Redaktionelles Schema für das Diccionari»[9] (Editorial scheme for the Diccionari), yet another example of his role as an advisor. In 1921 he introduces the young Francesc de B. Moll to a course in phonetics and dialectology in Mallorca – valuable knowledge for putting together the Diccionari.

Eberhard Vogel

Another Catalanist of the early 20th century is Eberhard Vogel (1861-1934), previously cited as the author of the doctoral dissertation Neucatalanische Studien from 1886, who between 1909 and 1920 publishes (translated into German) several contemporary novels by Prudenci Bertrana, Raimon Casellas, Víctor Català and Josep Pous i Pagès, and who edits, in 1911, the fi rst modern Catalan-German dictionary: Taschenwörterbuch der katalanischen und deutschen Sprache = Diccionari portàtil de les llengues catalana y alemanya (Berlin, Langenscheidt); the German-Catalan part appears in 1916. This is an important lexicographic moment in the relationship between these two languages.

Characteristics of Romance Studies in Germany

I should make a general observation about German Romanists to put into perspective the positive consequences of the comprehensive Romanistic vision that I had pointed out at the start of this article. Schädel is a typical example, and this is still how things work today: after candidates go through the selection process, professors are frequently offered a chair or a professorship of Romance Philology either in the fi eld of linguistics or in literature. In the case of the literature specialists their chairs are ascribed –and limited– to specifi c languages (French and Italian, or Spanish and Portuguese, are common). But when it comes to linguists it was —and still is— customary for them to cover a much wider range of Romance languages. Once the professor is nominated to a chair, she has a certain amount of liberty to offer any subject that enters in the general study plan and that combines with what her colleagues are offering during the term in question. The result of this is that the professor can include in her courses, mainly through her own decision, languages like Catalan, Romanian, Portuguese (if it wasn’t already being offered), Occitan, and even Sardinian, Retoromanic or any other language she wishes, with their accompanying literatures, if she can motivate students to enter these fi elds with her. This represents the Humboldt ideal of the unity of investigation and teaching. But this freedom also has a disadvantage: if a professor chooses to stop researching that particular fi eld and language, then it disappears from that university if there is no colleague to take over the subject. In the case of Schädel at the University of Hamburg, he was hired to focus primarily on Spanish and South America and no one required him to continue with Catalan. Thus, if I stated at the beginning of this article that an average of thirty German-speaking universities offer Catalan Studies or Catalan courses, we must be aware that their continuity rests on two pillars: on the one hand, the interest —or at least the willingness— of the professors teaching at that university, and on the other hand, the Catalan lectorates that are fi nanced almost entirely by the Institut Ramon Llull in Catalonia. The institutionalization of these lectorates is a determining factor for the continuity of Catalan Studies.

What’s more: if we want to critically analyse the academic offering of Catalan Studies today, we have to admit that at the majority of German universities the lecturers are the only ones actually teaching these courses. There are only a handful of universities where full professors are the ones teaching these classes: the universities in Berlin (sometimes at the Freie Universität, sometimes at Humboldt Universität), Bochum, Frankfurt, Freiburg, Hamburg, Leipzig, Tübingen and Vienna. The disadvantage of this is that at all the other universities students of Catalan Studies don’t have a professor who can examine them directly on their subject. It is up to the students to fi nd a professor of Romance Studies willing accept a Catalan theme for their fi nal academic work or their thesis, and fortunately they are able to quite often, as we will see later on.

Hamburg

Coming back to Schädel, who started working in Hamburg in 1911, one must specify that he assembled a good team of collaborators who continued to work in the Catalan fi eld while he was there. Fritz Krüger, who had come with Schädel from Halle and became his successor in 1926, is author of Die Hochpyrenäen (The High Pyrenees), published in three volumes from 1935 to 1939. In 1923 Rudolf Grossmann publishes a new and comprehensive anthology of Catalan poetry, Katalanische Lyrik der Gegenwart, and Wilhelm Giese publishes studies of the important 14th century Catalan chronicles, which Diez had studied previously. Grossmann and Giese were still at Hamburg University in 1961 when I started studying with them. I also had the chance to get to know the Spanish lecturer from València, Josep Maria Navarro, who offered a course on Ramon Llull in which I participated and who motivated me to join him and take part in the II Col·loqui Internacional de Llengua i Literatura Catalanes, in 1970, in Amsterdam. That congress was my initiation into Catalan matters. In a certain way I might consider myself as a part of the Hamburg group, in addition to Leo Spitzer, who published works about Catalan lexicography. In 1985 Catalan linguistics at Hamburg have been further safeguarded by Conxita Lleó, whose chair was explicitly destined to Catalan and Spanish linguistics. The Ibero-American sections of the University’s libraries are excellent regarding Catalan matters.

Freiburg

Another key focus point of Catalan Studies in Germany was the University of Freiburg (Freiburg im Breisgau), where the most important centre of historians of the Catalan-Aragonese Crown developed, headed by Prof. Heinrich Finke (1855-1938), who published, between 1908 and 1922, the Acta Aragonensia. His predecessors in Germany were Ernst Alexander Schmidt, author of the Geschichte Aragonien’s im Mittelalter (Medieval History of Aragon), published in Leipzig in 1828, and Georg Gottfried Gervinus, author of the work Versuch einer inneren Geschichte von Aragonien bis zum Ausgang des Barcelonesischen Königsstammes,[10] published in Frankfurt in 1833. As we may recall, these years also coincided with the beginnings of Romance Studies dedicated to Catalan. Finke encouraged many of his students to work and publish on Catalan-Aragonese subjects. The most important of these students was Johannes Vincke (1892-1975), also Professor at Freiburg. Today the young investigator of the Catalan-Aragonese Crown, Nikolas Jaspert, from the University of Bochum, has published a detailed bibliography of German historians who dedicated themselves to studying Catalan medieval history.[11]

At the same University of Freiburg, the theologian and philosopher Friedrich Stegmüller founded, in 1957, the Raimundus-Lullus-Institut in the Faculty of Theology. This Institute has been dedicated to publishing all of Ramon Llull’s Latin books and lately even Llull’s Catalan texts. We should point out that north of Freiburg, the Badische Landesbibliothek of Karlsruhe preserves the most valuable Catalan manuscript in Germany. It is the Breviculum by Ramon Llull, from 1321, which is an autobiography of sorts, magnifi cently illustrated, and partly a comic book avant la lettre, with images that show Llull himself, and with incredibly well conserved colours.

Near Freiburg, in Basel, in 1967 Prof. Germà Colon created an important centre of Catalan Studies that existed for thirty years, where he formed scholars like Curt Wittlin, Gret Schib, Rolf Eberenz, Michael Metzeltin and Pere Ramírez-Molas, who later would go on to occupy important university chairs.

Erlangen-Nürnberg

My own Catalan career started, as I mentioned, with my participation in the International Congress of Amsterdam in 1970. That is when I started to learn Catalan (I was 29 years old), a language that I hadn’t learned despite being born in Barcelona where my father had been Director of the German School. I frequently went to stay in the Empordà and Barcelona with Ramon Aramon i Serra, the Secretary General of the Catalan Academy (Institut d’Estudis Catalans), and his family, which was half German. In 1974 I published all the Catalan texts written by Dalí, translated into German. I was then assistant professor at the University of Erlangen-Nürnberg, where Prof. Heinrich Kuen, Rector of the University during a certain period, had published a magnifi cent grammar of Alguerese Catalan in Sardinia.

Setmanes Catalanes a Berlin

In 1976 I was nominated professor at the Freie Universität of Berlin, and in 1978 I convinced the Senate of Berlin that they should dedicate the Berlin Summer Festival of that year to Catalan culture, which had only recently escaped from the dreadful oppression of the dictatorship. These Catalan weeks turned out to be the most exhaustive international presentation of Catalan culture and of the reality of Catalonia that had ever been attempted. There were around a hundred activities and expositions of every kind, many of an academic nature with numerous presentations of Catalan literature and Catalan authors in addition to a Catalan sociolinguistics congress.

Some of my books from that period were consequences of that festival in Berlin, such as my bilingual anthology of the Catalan Nova Cançó or an anthology of the Catalan poetry of the 20th century, also bilingual, to which Antoni Tàpies contributed the pictorial part. Or even the book the editor Josep Maria Espinàs asked me to write, Catalunya vista per un alemany (Catalonia as seen by a German), which to my surprise turned into a best-seller and arrived at thirteen editions.

Frankfurt

In 1981 I was appointed professor at the University of Frankfurt, where I had as a colleague the linguist Prof. Brigitte Schlieben-Lange, who had written her doctoral thesis on the Catalan (and Occitan) verbal system. I worked closely with her during the years that she was in Frankfurt (until 1991) and we had the ideal situation of having a Catalan linguist and a Catalan literature professor at the same university. At Frankfurt I founded the Biblioteca Catalana that nowadays has thirty-fi ve thousand volumes, and is the biggest library in the world outside Catalonia that is exclusively dedicated to Catalan books and Catalan themes. It has been qualifi ed as one of the seven international treasures of Catalan Cultural Heritage.

In 1983, during the course of a new Catalan festival (Setmanes Catalanes a Karlsruhe), which the land Baden-Württemberg had agreed to dedicate to Catalan culture, we founded the Deutsch-Katalanische Gesellschaft (Associació Germano-Catalana, today Deutscher Katalanistenverband), which peaked at 800 members in the period when I was its president.

Afterwards, in 1988, I founded the Zeitschrift für Katalanistik (Revista d’Estudis Catalans), which has been published for 25 years now and is still today the organ of German investigations in the Catalan fi eld. It publishes annually the list of all the courses and seminars of Catalan and Catalan Studies offered at German universities. The same year I founded the Catalan Cultural Offi ce in Frankfurt with a grant I had obtained from President Pujol. It was active until 1995 promoting an enormous number of cultural events, publications and German-Catalan international infrastructure. We also hosted in Frankfurt the X Col·loqui Internacional de Llengua i Literatura Catalanes in 1994 with a strong participation from all of the Catalan countries and 15 foreign countries.

Dictionaries and grammars

At the end of the 1970s I helped to reactivate the Diccionari alemany-català project that Lluís C. Batlle had been working on for several years, directed by Prof. Günther Haensch (who has been maintaining Catalan at the Universitat d’Augsburg for a long period). With Haensch’s and my collaboration we fi nally published the dictionary in 1981. In 1996 we were able to publish a second edition, corrected and updated, and in 2006, with the collaboration of Marta Casas and a few others, a third edition came out, which now represents a fundamental tool for the direct contact between our two cultures at an up to date lexicographic level. The corresponding other half of the dictionary, Diccionari català-alemany, had come out in 1991 with the thorough cooperation of Gabriele Woith and the second edition, slightly expanded and updated, came out in 2005.

Let us mention here four basic books introducing German users to Catalan language: the Handbuch des Katalanischen, by Artur Quintana (Barcelona, Barcino, 4th ed., 1997); Katalanisch: Eine einführende Sprachbeschreibung, by Jens Lüdtke (Munich, Hueber, 1984); Einführung in die katalanische Sprache, by Karl-Heinz Röntgen (Bonn, Romanistischer Verlag, 1987), and Praktische Grammatik der katalanischen Sprache, by Jenny Brumme (Wilhelmsfeld, Gottfried Egert, 1997). To these books we have added a small volume that invites Europeans who are already fl uent in a Romance language to start reading Catalan right away using their existing Romance competence and employing the EuroCom method: Katalanisch express: Sofort Katalanisch lesen durch Ihre Brückensprache by T. D. Stegmann and Sebastià Moranta (Aachen, Shaker, 2007).

In 1992 my wife and I published an extensive guide of the Catalan countries in German (560 pages) that presented for the fi rst time in Germany a book with correct Catalan toponymy and introduced the German public to all the artistic and natural highlights of the territories where Catalan is spoken. Another publication we made at the Catalan Cultural Offi ce in 1992 was a terminological topographic guide: Katalanische Ortsnamen: Führer des amtlichen Sprachgebrauchs auf den Balearen, in Katalonien und im Land València, which intended to contribute to correcting the Spanish falsifi cation of so many Catalan names perpetrated during the dictatorial regime. It was hard in many cases to get the well-known German encyclopaedia Brockhaus Enzyklopädie to agree to fi nally normalize the Catalan names and place names.

Catalan theses and academic works

If return to the area of academia it is interesting to see the results of the bibliography “60 years of doctoral and master theses on Catalan subjects at the German speaking universities (1945-2006)” published on the Catalan Studies website of the University of Frankfurt (www.kat.cat) and in the Zeitschrift für Katalanistik. We can deduce from the numbers that the University of Frankfurt is by far the centre where more students have fi nished their academic studies with a thesis on Catalan matters, followed by the University of Vienna and the universities of Freiburg, Tübingen, Cologne, Basel and Munich. The professors who have had the most students examined with a Catalan academic work are Georg Kremnitz, Tilbert Stegmann, Germà Colon, Brigitte Schlieben-Lange and Horst G. Klein.

Up until today there have been more than 250 theses on Catalan themes, 85 % of them from the last 30 years.

The Biblioteca Catalana of Frankfurt

The bibliography of academic theses reveals the size and continuity of Catalan Studies, especially at the University of Frankfurt. Perhaps the most prominent fact is the existence of the Biblioteca Catalana of Frankfurt, which makes available to the scientifi c community of central Europe thirty-fi ve thousand books in Catalan and on Catalan matters. It is the most important library in the world outside the Catalan countries dedicated exclusively to Catalan themes and freely accessible in a common space. It has been declared one of the seven international treasures of Catalan Cultural Heritage in the world. I was able to assemble this library mainly through donations from the last thirty years.

Starting when I was hired as a professor at Frankfurt in 1981 I was in charge of the Forschungsstelle Katalanistik, in Catalan: Estudi d’Investigació Catalanística, with its high peak of activity in 2007, when the International Frankfurt Book Fair presented the Catalan Culture as the Guest of Honour. That year we published two books intended to help the German public become more aware of Catalan facts and perspectives: Kataloniens Rückkehr nach Europa 1976-2006: Geschichte, Politik, Kultur und Wirtschaft (Berlin, LIT, 2007), with twenty-two essays from different Catalan and German scholars about the most important aspects of current Catalan life and culture and with thirteen interviews with prominent Catalan personalities.[12] The other book was Narrative Neuanfänge: Der katalanische Roman der Gegenwart: Einzelinterpretationen (Berlin, Walter Frey, 2007), with interpretations of seventeen contemporary Catalan novels by scholars from German universities.

Tübingen

Having mentioned Hamburg, Freiburg and Frankfurt as Catalan Studies focal points during certain periods, I must also mention Tübingen, where the linguist Eugenio Coseriu had institutionalized a Catalan lectorate in 1968 to offer it to the Catalan translator (from German) and poet Antoni Pous, who was originally from Manlleu (north of Barcelona near Vic). Pous had been in Tübingen since 1964, and was a person of extraordinary charisma. He stayed in Tübingen until 1971 and did a magnifi cent job interesting his students and colleagues in

the Catalan language and literature and in Catalan matters in general. Important Catalan Studies Romanists such as Johannes Hösle, Brigitte Schlieben-Lange, Jens Lüdtke or Georg Kremnitz all came from Tübingen and had been «won» for Catalan literature and linguistics and sociolinguistics by Pous. The 25th of October 1970, together with Jens Lüdke, he organized the Jocs Florals de la Llengua Catalana (a festival of the Catalan language) and published a booklet, Informationen über Katalonien, which was a fi rst survey of Catalan matters for the German public.

The fi gure of Antoni Pous shows how a single person can become a centre of Catalan projection abroad and can motivate future professors who will then continue important work in Catalan Studies at their respective universities. Ricard Torrents, a friend of Pous, and who also studied at Tübingen and later on became rector of the University of Vic, refers to all these people as the Circle of Tübingen.

Perhaps the most important of these was Brigitte Schlieben-Lange, whom I mentioned as being professor at Frankfurt from 1974 to 1991 and who then went on to Tübingen. She trains scholars like Johannes Kabatek, Christine Bierbach, Isabel Zollna, Irmela Neu, Konstanze Jungbluth, Gabriele Berkenbusch or Patrick Steinkrüger, either in Frankfurt or in Tübingen. Johannes Hösle, who occupied the chair or Romance literatures at Regensburg, published Catalan poetry and narration anthologies in the 1970s and a short history of modern Catalan literature in the eighties and was a strong promoter of the work of Miquel Martí i Pol.

Jens Lüdke published the aforementioned Sprachbeschreibung (description of the Catalan language) and was professor at the University of Bonn, Berlin and fi nally, since 1994, at Heidelberg, where Catalan was taught by quite a few professors. Georg Kremnitz had studied at Tübingen and was fi rst teaching at the University of Münster. He published the essential anthology of Catalan sociolinguistics: Sprachen im Konfl ikt: Theorie und Praxis der katalanischen Soziolinguistik. Eine Textauswahl (Languages in Confl ict; Tübingen, Narr, 1979). After he was made chair at the university of Vienna, in 1986, he encouraged a good number of students to focus on Catalan Studies. Kremnitz is also the maximum representative of the affi nity between Catalan Studies and Occitan Studies in the Germanic area (Schlieben-Lange and I also belong to the group).

After the premature death of Antoni Pous in 1976, there was an interval with little activity in Catalan Studies at Tübingen until Schlieben-Lange arrived in 1991 as a successor of Coseriu. She also died prematurely in 2000 and there was again a certain pause until Johannes Kabatek took over in 2004. In 2006 Kabatek became president of the Deutscher Katalanistenverband and in the same year he was also elected president of the International Federation of Catalan Studies Societies (FIAC).

The Deutscher Katalanistenverband (DKV)

I mentioned already that I had founded, in 1983, the Deutsch-Katalanische Gesellschaft. My model had been the Anglo-Catalan Society, which has been extremely important for Catalan Studies in Great Britain since its foundation in 1954. We followed their example by holding a yearly colloquium that, after a few years, expanded to a several day event. Each year I had no diffi culty fi nding another university where a colleague was happy to organize the program. For the university in question it was always seen as an opportunity to reactivate their Catalan commitment. After having started in Karlsruhe and Frankfurt, we had very productive colloquia in university towns like Regensburg, Bonn, Hamburg, Cologne, Heidelberg, even in the neighbouring Luxemburg, Berlin, Mainz, Mannheim, Jena, Freiburg, Bochum, Münster, Tübingen, Kiel, Vienna and Leipzig. This shows how Catalan Studies are well distributed over Germany (and Austria). In 1997 the name of the society was slightly changed and became Deutscher Katalanistenverband, thus abandoning the exact parallelism to the name of the Anglo-Catalan Society, but strengthening the aspect of being an association of people professionally dedicated to Catalan Studies. The Catalan name remains unaltered: Associació Germano-Catalana. It is logical that the main importance of the association during its thirty years of existence has been to represent, promote and give a united force to Catalan Studies in Germany. It has enhanced the possibilities of communication of all those dedicated to Catalan Studies in the German-speaking centre of Europe. It has given prizes to young investigators to help them deepen their interest in Catalan matters, has attracted the attention of the Romance colleagues normally dedicated to other Romance fi elds and has cooperated internationally with other Catalan associations.

Catalan Studies databases in Germany

I will close by mentioning some of the databases that are relevant for the Catalan presence in Germany. In 2005 we published the fi rst volume of a new series, coupled to our Zeitschrift für Katalanistik: «Biblioteca Catalànica Germànica - Beihefte zur Zeitschrift für Katalanistik». Its title is Bibliografi a de la literatura catalana en versió alemanya: Narrativa, poesia, teatre, de Ferran Robles i Sabater (Aachen, Shaker), and lists all of Catalan literature ever translated into German: about a hundred novels, six hundred narratives and tales and one thousand eight hundred Catalan poems! The whole register can also be consulted on the Catalan Studies website of the University of Frankfurt: www.kat.cat. On the same page one can fi nd a list of all the libraries in the German area that have books in Catalan and on Catalan themes, with an estimate of the respective quantities. The website offers a lot more specifi c Catalan data catalogues concerning the German area.

I have recently sent the «Who is who of Catalan Studies in the German-speaking area» to the DKV (www.katalanistik.de). The personal bibliographies of each Catalanist give us an overview of current activity in the literary and in the linguistic fi elds. Analyzing these bibliographies one can realise which are the favoured themes of investigation. It is also interesting to analyse the contributions to twenty-fi ve years of contributions to the Zeitschrift für Katalanistik (1988-2012).

A comparatively short essay on Catalan Studies in the German area, as the present one, cannot give a complete list of the prominent names and cannot take the place of an exhaustive bibliography of the German contribution to Catalan Studies (which I proposed many years ago at the VI Col·loqui Internacional de Llengua i Literatura Catalanes in Rome). It would be interesting indeed to have such a catalogue for each of the different language areas in the world.

The points that I have mentioned in this exposé can surely be completed by German scholars who have experienced their dedication to Catalan matters from another geographical and academic viewpoint. I hope, though, that the data I have been able to collect will serve for future investigations and that for the moment they can give a good idea of what has been and is the German dedication to Catalan matters.

[1] «Von den Provincial-Mundarten weicht die aragonische ein wenig, die valencische etwas mehr, die catalonische aber am meisten ab».

[2] «Bei der Darlegung der Lautverhältnisse darf man sich auf die catalanische Form beschränken, da die valencianische mit dieser fast identisch, nach Mayans II.58 nur weicher ist».

[3] «nicht nur die provenzalische, sondern auch […] die catalanisch-valencianische Mundart».

[4] Diccionari Català-Valencià-Balear, Palma de Mallorca, Moll, 1930-1962.

[5] Published fi rst from 1911 to 1920.

[6] Primer Congrés Internacional de la Llengua Catalana.

[7] Critical annual report about the progress in Romance Philology.

[8] The editor Otto Schulze had participated during a week in the philological excursion of Alcover and Schädel mentioned above.

[9] In: Bolletí del Diccionari de la Llengua Catalana 13 (1921), 77-83.

[10] Essay on the Internal History of Aragon until the End of the Royal House of Barcelona.

[11] In the Zeitschrift für Katalanistik 17 (2004, p. 155-226).

[12] The same year a similar book was published by Rafael Sevilla and Ricard Torrents: Katalonien. Kultur der Moderne (Horlemann, Bad Honnef, 2007).

Til Stegmann is a tenured Professor of Romance Philology at the University of Frankfurt.

The Arrival of Wagnerianism


In the fi eld of opera, the arrival of the 20th century caused a considerable fracture with the tradition that had put down roots in Catalonia. The Wagnerian universe went beyond and permeated all artistic expressions and the Russian opera made its way in the middle of the prevailing Italianated opera. Wagner was there to stay.

The fi rst audition of ‘The Song contest’ from ‘Tannhäuser’, interpreted by the Choirs Josep Anselm Clavé in 1862, marked the beginning of a love story between the Wagnerian work and the Catalan public, crowned with the translation, edition and singing in Catalan of the works of the brilliant German composer. None other than Isaac Albéniz showed in Barcelona for the fi rst time the fi rst selected works of Richard Wagner’s ‘Tetralogy’ in an abridged piano version. One of the composer’s fi rst biographers was another Catalan, Joaquim Marsillach, who revealed in his works a cynical criticism to the Italian genre, which he despised. The unconditional Barcelona enthusiasts of the Leipzig genios could not stand it when, by surprise, the Teatro Real of Madrid overtook them by presenting ‘Rienzi’ in 1880, to which the Catalan responded by showing ‘Lohengrin’, in Liceu, in 1882 and 1883, ‘Flying Dutchman’ in 1885 and ‘Tannhäuser’ in 1887, which were incorporated on a more or less stable program of local seasons. The Wagnerian spirit quickly spread throughout the Catalan society: articles on Wagner appeared in the papers, the concert programs included Wagner, his work raised controversy and the 19th century came to an end with the presentation of ‘The Walkyrie’ and ‘Tristan’, followed by the complete ‘Tetralogy’.

In 1901 the Wagnerian Association was created, an entity aiming to circulate and spread the composer’s work using any media available. It published the texts and scores of some Wagnerian operas translated into Catalan in various editions and formats, including detailed indications about the main ‘leitmotiv’. This admiration exceeded everything that had been seen until then when ‘Parsifal’ went on stage in Liceu at 11 at night (12 in Germany) of 31 December 1913. This year all interpretation rights expired in Bayreuth, which meant that it went ahead the European theatres that had scheduled it for 1 January 1914, including the Teatro Real of Madrid.

The Wagnerian Association was the most obvious result of this love story which Clavé had planted forty years before, amidst a culture medium that crystallized in ‘Renaixença’ and ended up being an active part of modernism. Wagner and his work became the illustrative icon of this new aesthetics and, with his wonderful imagery, had an infl uence on a whole generation of artists who captured the Wagnerian characters –and Wagner himself– in oil paintings, watercolours, engravings and drawings, as well as sculptures, jewelry and books.

For many Catalans contemporary to the early editions of the Bayreuth Festival, arriving at the holy hill became a real pilgrimage. For them, hosting the Wagnerian cause was a life-giving motive because despite these achievements being recorded in the annals of Barcelona opera like the early presentation of ‘Parsifal’, very few people know that the epic poem, in its time, was an artistic and audience failure. However, for some authors the Wagnerian work shook these Catalans immersed in a bourgeois society unaccustomed to changes that saw in Wagner the possibility of growing spiritually. This ‘Wagnermania’ quickly became the opposition of a local tradition clinging to the Italian opera school. At the time Wagner turned out to be a movement almost revolutionary, led by true fanatics convinced that the Wagnerian work had something to do with God in person. The thesis of thinkers like Josep Letamendi conceived the Wagnerian corpus as a possible way out to ‘collective ignorance’, to the point of conceiving of it as ‘the attonement and life project of humankind’. This theory was launched at delicate social and economic times, seen from the early 21st century as politically and morally decadent. For the doctor and intellectual ‘Rienzi’ it is the drama of revolution... of the battle for freedom and the law against whimsical and brutal despotisms of a fi lthy and corrupt aristocracy.’

His disciple Joaquim Marsillach continued spreading the work of the Leipzig genius by editing the above cited biography, written passionately ‘Ensayo biográfi co-crítico de R. Wagner’ [Critical and biographical essay of R. Wagner] and published in 1878. This work gave way to further controversy in several musical media, an essential boost for the intellectual class to be interested in a character that aroused contrasting feelings and embodied changes, even ministries.

The Catalanization of Wagner’s work soon arrived, even fascinated authors like Joan Maragall, who, above all, admired his librettos, the text, as he believed that music was nothing but a ‘means to intensify the expression’. He was paid homage in the centenary of his birth with the composition of a ‘Hymn to Wagner’. The Catalan intellectuals adopted him, pampered him, and invested on him. However, the climax of Wagnerian devotion did not come from the Wagnerian Association, or Letamendi, not even Marsillach; but rather Miquel Domènech Espanyol. He was the one who saw God’s hand in Wagner’s work, a concept fully developed in his book ‘Apothéose musicale de la Religion Catholique: Parsifal de Wagner’, in 1902. Wagner inspired in Catalonia books, magazines, musical societies, poems, musical scores. It adapts to the spirit of ‘Modernisme’, which fl oods artistic workshops and is compared to Antoni Gaudí.

Culturcat - Generalitat de Catalunya


FURTHER READING

The list of local musicians and interpreters who have been carried away by Wagnerian magic is gigantic, starting by his precursor, Josep Anselm Clavé, and followed by Felip Pedrell, Claudi Martínez Imbert, Isaac Albéniz, Enric Morera, Jaume Pahissa, Anselm Barba, Francesc Viñas, Antoni Nicolau, Antoni Ribera, Ramon Blanchart, Joan Raventós, Amadeu Vives, Lluís Millet, Eduard Toldrà, Josep Maria Segura, Conrad Giralt, Mercè Llopart, Joaquim Pena, Josep Palet, Emili Vendrell, Pau Civil, Mercè Capsir or Victòria dels Àngels, without forgetting about Montserrat Caballé.

‘Modernisme’ was also infl uenced by work signed by Slavic authors, especially Russian, and in the early 20th century, some of the tunes from these authors became so popular that people used to hum them in the street. This infl uence was felt strongly in some local authors: Tomás Bretón, Isaac Albéniz, Enric Granados, Manuel de Falla, Amadeu Vives or Eduard Toldrà are some of them. Previously, Artur Baratta released on 12 June 1885 the fi rst opera written in Catalan. He was followed by fi gures like Jaume Pahissa, Marià Obiols, Francisco Sánchez Gavagnach or Manuel Giró. Felip Pedrell intended to go beyond simple opera compositions and established aesthetic projects that linked music and popular mythology with opera, the great lyrical performance.

Enric Morera breathed in Modernism from the end of the century and was an active part of the activities organized by Santiago Rusiñol in Sitges around the members of this mannerist style. In Sitges he showed for the fi rst time his opera ‘La Fada’ [The fairy], in 1897; his nationalistic drive led him to found in 1901 the ‘Teatre Líric Català’ [Teatro Lírico Catalán], with the contribution of Pedrell and Granados. The null commercial success of the project forced him to migrate to Madrid, a city in which he participated actively with the composition of several zarzuelas together with Ruperto Chapí and Amadeo Vives. Joan Lamote de Grignon, founder of the Symphonic Orchestra of Barcelona, active until 1942, also was interested in musical theatre and in 1907 presented his only opera ‘Hespèria’, at the Liceu.

In 1902, Joan Manén presented in Liceu ‘Giovanna di Napoli’, and the following year ‘Acté’, for which, like with all his stage works, he wrote its libretto. Manén lived in Germany for long periods of time; a great admirer of Wagner and Richard Strauss, his infl uences can be felt in his scores, characterized by a grandiose orchestration. Prolifi c composer, all his production before 1907 is lost. He re-wrote ‘Acté’, changad its name to ‘Neró i Acté’ [Nero and Acté], and increased its complexity. Its German appearance was in 1928, in Karlsruhe. In 1933 the work was presented in Barcelona, then in Catalan. However, the only Catalan composer who managed to adapt his operas to Liceu in these years was Jaume Pahissa, but, since his exile in 1939 his music has been totally forgotten.

Musical activity in Catalonia, including Italian, Russian and German opera as well as zarzuela, also suffered from the expected avatars caused by the Civil War. Before being imposed the Franco dictatorship, the Liceu –privately owned since its foundation– was expropriated in 1936 and for a short period of time became the National Theatre of Catalonia. It went back to its legal owners once the war was fi nished. The Liceu soon offered again its former repertoire, although it evolved according to the tastes and fashions of the time, thanks to the capacity of businessmen (Joan Mestres Calvet –until 1947– and Joan Antoni Pàmias –until 1980), committed to bring forward the artistic projects. This responsibility continued until the constitution of the Consorci del Liceu [Consortium of Liceu], in 1980, when the management of this building was transferred to public hands.

The Frankfurt Book Fair (Before and After)


To defi ne the impact of the Frankfurt Book Fair of 2007 on raising awareness about Catalan literature at an international level, it might be useful to compare it to what the 1992 Olympics meant for Barcelona, despite the clear differences between both events.

Let’s not forget that all fairs, and the largest Book Fair in the world is no exception, are events that seek to globalize and are of a decidedly commercial and promotional nature –without completely excluding their political implications—and if we look at it this way, then Catalan culture had the opportunity to introduce itself to a vast number of people who knew absolutely nothing about it. Frankfurt, even if only partially, put Catalan culture on the map and also raised the self-esteem of Catalans regarding their enterprising nature and the quality of their country’s literature.

The initiative of bringing Catalonia to Frankfurt was an idea of several members of the powerful Catalan Editors’ Guild that emerged in the last decade of the 20th century, their specifi c goal being to fi nd a way to raise awareness worldwide about literature in Catalan. The project, however, did not start to take shape until 2002 with the creation of the Ramon Llull Institute (IRL) under the direction of Joan Maria Pujals (CDC), who made it one of the priorities of this Institute during his mandate. Already with the fi rst tri-party Catalan government, and with a nod of approval from the socialist government in Madrid, the Catalan candidature received approval from the German organizers of the Fair in 2005. The presentation of the program of activities took place in Frankfurt in the autumn of 2006, during the mandate of the second tri-party Catalan government, and it was accompanied by controversy as it had been announced that Catalan authors who wrote in Spanish would not be participating. Thus in Germany there was a lot of a talk –and not very positive, if we take a look at the German-speaking press from those dates— about the bitter tug-of-war regarding this [language] issue in Catalonia, one that continues today. The fi nal version of the program was met with the foreseeable incomprehension of the German press, the majority of which labeled the IRL’s policies “provincial,” and very few journalists tried to investigate how things had played out on both sides.

The Ramon Llull Institute, with Carles Torner as head coordinator, presented a rich and varied literary program that spanned a full year, especially in Germany and Austria but also in Catalonia and other areas where Catalan is spoken. The program included activities that promoted both the knowledge of Catalan culture and literature as well as the strengthening of intercultural dialogue between Catalans and Germans. Among the numerous activities that took place it is important to highlight (due to their success in numbers of participants and their excellent reception), the bilingual readings protagonized by various Catalan writers in different Literaturhäuser (houses of literature) scattered throughout Germany. These readings served to present to a large public the German translation of works of these Catalan authors, and they were often accompanied by book reviews in the press. The following two aspects are precisely what should be hailed as complete successes from the Frankfurt Book Fair: in the fi rst place and in order of importance, the IRL gave a signifi cant boost to the policy of translations of Catalan literature into other languages, beginning with the German language; secondly, the degree and seriousness of the attention the specialized German press devoted to the Catalan writers and their work.

Regarding the translations, aside from highlighting the presentation of fi fty-three new German translations (proof of the success of all the hard work of Torner’s team), it is important to recall that the Frankfurt Book Fair was what tested and clarifi ed the functions of the Ramon Llull Institute when it comes to the promotion of Catalan literature abroad, and it consolidated a universal model for translation grants that has given us very good results since then. Torner always insists about how important it is for Catalonia to be able to have an institute that is dedicated to the promotion of the local language, literature and culture that is comparable to institutes in countries and cultures of similar dimensions to Catalonia. The support for translation, following the model these institutes apply, is universal and is not interventionist, and it does not contemplate publishing or distribution expenses: thus, grants are provided to those who ask for them. Of the translations presented in Frankfurt it is important to point out that they were from a wide range of literary genres: narrative, above all, but also poetry, theater and essay; and a mix of contemporary and classic authors: and here it is especially important to highlight the carefully prepared new editions of Tirant lo Blanc or the complete poetic works of Salvador Espriu, both translated by Fritz Vogelsang, or the translation of fragments of Pla’s Quadern gris, Rodoreda’s Quanta, quanta guerra..., or of Víctor Català’s Solitud.

Jaume Cabré and Maria Barbal’s resounding success that year in Frankfurt would merit a chapter apart. Their success both consolidated and increased the international presence they already had abroad, which was unlike Quim Monzó and Albert Sánchez Piñol who had already established an international presence that was quite independent from the Book Fair. The massive and indisputable success of Cabré and Barbal, showered with praise in the German press during that period, is not so far removed from the glowing review that the former minister Joschka Fischer gave Les veus de Pamano on television and that the literature critic Elke Heidenreich gave of Pedra de tartera on the television show Lesen!, which shows just to what point the ways we spread the word about literature have been changing, relegating print literary criticism to a secondary role with regard to the infl uence on the success or the failure of works and authors. What is clear is that international publishing

Jordi Jané i Lligé - Visat núm. 14 - October 2012


FURTHER READING

phenomena like Jaume Cabré, or at least those that gained recognition in Frankfurt, should be celebrated when it comes to spreading the word about Catalan literature and culture: who could imagine a better ambassador for Catalan literature than Jaume Cabré?

With regard to the press, it is important to highlight the quantity and the quality of the articles and reviews that introduced the German public to Catalan authors and their work. The contemporary authors that received the most reviews were those mentioned previously —Quim Monzó, Maria Barbal, Albert Sánchez Piñol i Jaume Cabré—, but it was a nice surprise to also see the number of articles dedicated to the editions of Pla, Rodoreda, Espriu, Víctor Català or Tirant lo Blanc. Leaving behind the controversy of the authors that were invited and the language issue, the authors of these reviews point out the values and the signifi cance of the works and they delve into their creative worlds to offer us a strictly literary vision of them. Often, anticipating the possible reservations of the public, they would use the work they were commenting on to justify the elevated status of Catalan literature. Peter Hamm is a good example of this, which can be seen in an article he dedicated to the poetic works of Espriu that was published in the prestigious weekly publication Die Zeit, where he states:

«Das erste Missverständnis, das es auszuräumen gilt, ist die Vorstellung, es handle sich bei der katalanischen Literatur um eine Regionalliteratur.» [«The fi rst misunderstanding that it is important to clear up is the idea that Catalan literature is a regional literature.»]

It is important to keep his comment in mind as it helps us understand how the Catalan case (for many different reasons) is truly perceived by a majority abroad, and why it is so essential that our institutions continue their work abroad. If we look at the media coverage, the truth is that aside from talking about –in an extremely biased manner—the controversy surrounding the authors that were invited, serious publications such as Die Zeit, the Neue Zürcher Zeitung or the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung dedicated supplements and quality full page spreads to extensive commentaries of Catalan literature, both the historical and current situation. We should not underestimate the effect that these kinds of prestigious critiques had on a certain public that was more specialized and more intellectual, as well as more interested in deeply understanding the Catalan reality that was being presented to it.

A fi nal and extremely important legacy of Frankfurt 2007 that it is important to mention is the publication of the two volumes of Carrers de frontera [“Border Streets”] in Catalan and German, edited by Arnau Pons and Simona Škrabec, in which close to one hundred specialists reviewed the history of the exchanges between the Catalan and German cultures over the past fi fty years. This excellent work, of an encyclopedic nature, should perfectly complement similar works dedicated to dialogical relations between the Catalan culture and other cultures. The work is based on the principle that the spaces where exchanges take place are extremely important for the enrichment of cultures: it is just as important to project oneself abroad as it is to know how to accommodate what comes to us from abroad. This is an extremely useful instrument for getting to know ones own cultural history and to encourage future research.

As the parameters have shifted –in terms of global cultural exchanges and contacts or with regard to production and sales in the publishing world—it is important to think about where the internationalization of Catalan literature is headed and how this ties into Frankfurt’s legacy. First of all and quite obviously, we need quality Catalan literature with writers of great talent that are capable of attracting the attention of readers from around the world. Secondly, it will be up to the hard work, involvement and actions on behalf of the Catalan publishing houses and literary agents when it comes to promoting their products abroad, adapting themselves to the laws and strategies that are being imposed globally in the international market. In this regard, the Frankfurt Book Fair acted as a magnifi cent loudspeaker, but that particular model of dissemination, with involved an enormous injection of public resources, is a one-time affair, having completed its function of an initial promotional “push.” With regard to institutional support, it is necessary for a public institution like the Ramon Llull Institute, together with an organization like the Catalan PEN, to help make up for the added diffi culties that come with being a Catalan writer in the world by offering grants and other forms of promotional activities as much as possible; at the same time, it is of primordial importance that the IRL maintains a network of professionals abroad who guarantee the training of translators in other languages and of specialists in Catalan language and culture who are capable of advising foreign publishers, and to act judiciously and critically in public opinion spaces around the world.

The Frankfurt Book Fair demonstrated that it is possible to capture the attention of the world if you have something to say, and Catalan writers always have had —and continue to have— many things to say. As they are the best representatives of their culture it is worth it to continue working so that their voices reach beyond our borders.

Jordi Jané i Lligé (Terrassa, 1968) is an associate professor in the Department of English and German Philology at the Autonomous University of Barcelona.

Photo courtesy of Visat : La coca de Mataró de 1450, Prins Hendrik Museum, Rotterdam. Replica of J. Prim (private collection)

German Views on Catalonia*An additional challenge to the European crisis


Several German think-tanks and analysts are starting to draw their attention to Catalonia. In their opinion, the question of Catalan independence adds more complexity to day-to-day European crisis management, opening at the same time new opportunities and potential risks on the way back to recovery.

Europe is standing at a crossroads, thus facing some of the most critical challenges in its recent history. Gideon Rachman, FT chief foreign affairs, defi ned in a few words the current situation at a recent CIDOB/CCME event in Barcelona: “Germany is running the show”. Interestingly enough, the mainstream German public debate does not focus on the crisis as being a part of its own problem and looks instead with increasing disregard to the so-called Südländer-countries; an everything-but-nice word that has come back to the political agenda. Catalan citizens and their corporate organizations generally fall into the category Spaniards, therefore Südländer. The “brand Spain” is well-known these days in Germany, mainly because of the several corruption scandals affecting the country, which the German press has explained to its public with all kinds of details. Recent polls show how Germans feel, as if they had been paying the bill for nothing for the past decades. An example of German austerity values is embodied in the Bund der Steuerzahler, the powerful taxpayers’ lobby association, which is not only systematically against European bailout policies, but promotes initiatives like the launching of a campaign to punish those who waste German tax payers’ money by putting them in jail.

Even the Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung, the foundation linked to the Social Democrats, recently published a study in March 2013 called “Future Scenarios for the Eurozone 2020: Perspectives on the Euro Crisis”, which after a series of workshops in 14 European cities, including Berlin, Brussels and Barcelona, describes what most of the consulted analysts perceived as “the, not exactly desirable, but probably second best outcome of the current crisis” before the ideally “completion of the Eurozone by a fi scal and political Union”. This scenario being an intermediate stage, featuring a two-speed Europe where a core group of vanguard states “might serve in the long run as a locomotive, pulling the crisis-ridden nations out of the mess”. Indeed, the study mentions Catalonia while foreseeing “some wealthy regions within (southern European) states that would join a core integration zone”, thus becoming independent within the core of the European Union. Nevertheless, the authors take into consideration the power of massive citizenship movements, acting as a “trigger” in order to move decision-makers in one direction or the other.

A different article, called “The return of movable boundaries? Secession and independence movements in the European Union”, part of a larger study called “Unplanned is the normal case: situations that deserve attention”, was published in 2011 by SWP, the biggest Federal Chancellery sponsored think-tank in Berlin. The study addresses the situation in Scotland, Flanders and Catalonia, issuing some recommendations under the perspective of German interests. Thus should Germany “react in a fl exible way to separatist movements. (…) If everything indicates that an EU-country is threatened by paralysis, then it makes sense to accept the secession”. Germany should not encourage the separation, but insist in the fact that “this shall happen in agreement and cooperation between the motherland and the new state, or between the new states”. Additionally, “the begining or the end of statehood within the EU does not necessarily mean destabilization, as it can actually create a new balance”. Nevertheless, uncontrolled or hostile divorce must be avoided, as it puts European integration in jeopardy.

The study also warns of undesired secondary effects of breaking the taboos of moving borders, i.e. regarding the relationship between Hungary and some of its neighbors, the problems of Wallonia not fulfi lling the required criteria to enter the Eurozone or the diffi culties that might arise if the consequent EU-membership renegotiation with a UK without Scotland would end up within British insistence to become additional opt-outs. Finally, the authors reveal what could seem to be one of the biggest German concerns: the image damage towards other European countries, suspicious about the fact that the “bigger and united Germany” would have unilaterally chosen to promote separation again, as it did once in the case of Yugoslavia. To avoid this, it strongly recommends the coordination between EU-member states, regarding the recognition of a new state and the establishment of diplomatic relations.

Finally, a recent article called “Wings – and then” from Prof. Dr. Bardo Fassbender, published at the F.A.Z.-paper edition from April 5th, 2013, describes the rights of the Catalan and Scottish People with regard to EU-citizenship and EU-membership. Catalonia and Scotland are closely economically intertwined with the EU. The recent sovereignty declaration of the Catalan Parliament is explicitly committed to the EU and its founding principles. Although it seems that, after becoming a new state they should apply for new EU-membership, Prof. James Crawford and Prof. Alan Boyle assume that the EU would adapt the candidacy-process to that of a country whose legal system already belonged to the Union. Additionally, the European Court in Luxembourg could stop an automatic, initial expulsion from Scotland from the EU if that expulsion would mean the Scottish citizens would lose their former rights as EU-citizens.

Adam Casals


OPINION

Barroso’s affi rmations concerning Catalonia and Scotland having to apply for EU-membership “as any other state” are wrong, as art. 49 of the EU-treaties did not consider the eventuality of the candidacy of a third state arising from another member state. Concerning a hypothetical veto by Spain or the UK, this would be a clear case of abuse of rights, if the reason for this attitude was the “punishment” of the concerning population due to their decision to secede from the former state entity. There is no legal base to this situation, as secession is not forbidden by EU-treaties. Art. 4 and Art. 21 guarantee the external integrity of EU-boundaries and the integrity of each state, but only regarding other states or foreign threads; in any case towards their own People and citizens, those who live inside the Union and its borders.

Prof. Fassbender quotes the EU-court case van Geld & Loos from 1963, which establishes jurisprudence in terms of the Union rights and law being aligned in order to protect the legal status and rights of all those who once were EU-citizens, as “the subjects of EU-law are not only its member states, but also its individuals”.

All member states have specifi cally showed their commitment to the EU-treaty, including its preamble, when it asserts “the process of the creation of an ever closer Union among the peoples of Europe”. This preamble is clearly incompatible with the punishment through exclusion of the People of Catalonia or Scotland, just because of their democratic will to decide in a legal process about their independence from their former states. The preamble also proclaims the “calling upon the other peoples of Europe” to join the Union. This fi nal sentence is especially addressed to those People like Scots or Catalans.

Adam Casals is a Senior Corporate Advisor with 20 years experience in German-speaking markets.

(*) An extended version of this article will appear on the next issue of Catalan International View.

Image courtesy of criminalatt / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

Calls for independence in CataloniaA new European state?


Catalonia is calling for independence. It does not want to continue to be Spain’s paymaster. Regional confl icts like this cast shadows over Europe, because they reveal possible cracks in the EU system of transfers.

Spain is nervous. While the country fi nds itself teetering on the edge of a fi nancial cliff, in the northeast corner of the country a deepening regional confl ict is threatening the country’s unity. In Catalonia, one of the richest regions, the cry for independence is ringing out louder than ever. The debt crisis has given additional momentum to the separatist movement. On September 11th 1.5 million people fl ooded the streets of Barcelona to wave their senyeres, the golden yellow fl ag with four red stripes. And many fl ags sported the fi ve-pointed star, the symbol of independence. “It was incredible. No one expected it,” said the Catalan Minister of the Economy, Andreu Mas-Colell. The mobilization of the masses through local groups also caught the regional Government by surprise.

Every September the nationalists get together to commemorate the defeat of the Catalan troops in the Spanish War of Succession of 1714; but never before had they demonstrated in such numbers. “Catalonia, New European State” was the slogan of the demonstration, which was attended by nearly one out of every fi ve Catalans, out of a total of 7.5 million. The politicians in Madrid were horrifi ed. King Joan Carles warned that the independence aspirations were a “chimera,” but in Barcelona things were seen differently. “A true chimera would be to think that everything can stay the same in Catalonia,” said the Catalan president, Artur Mas. Mas has called early elections for November 25th and his liberal conservative coalition, Convergència i Unió, will surely stand to gain. If they emerge reinforced, they want to –apparently two years from now, like the Scots— hold a referendum on having their “own state in Europe.” Between 12,000 and 16,000 million euros in net transfers a year

“The economic crisis is not the right time? I think it is,” Mas tells the journalists who are visiting at the invitation of the Catalan Ministry of the Economy. “The process towards a referendum is unstoppable.” The son of an industrialist, who has persistently worked his way to the top of Catalan politics, seems quite sure of this as he shows the journalists around the Gothic palace that is the seat of the Catalan Government. This is his kingdom, his stage. In the interior patio, grotesque stone fi gures and gargoyles protrude from the walls. Mas points out a small garden with orange trees. In the Middle Ages their fragrance was intended to combat the stench of the street. Today, despite the austerity due to the crisis, Barcelona is an extremely clean city.

But for the Catalans there is something else that “fa pudor,” that rankles. On the one hand, they feel culturally despised and see their hard-won rights, which they gained after Franco’s dictatorship, in danger. A permanent confl ict exists about whether all children should have to learn Catalan in school or about whether Catalans are a “nation” of their own. At the same time, the Catalans feel fi nancially “squeezed.” More than anything else it has been money that has soured the relations with the government in Madrid.

“The main problem is the transfers to the Spanish Government,” explains Mas-Colell, the Catalan Minister of Economy and Finances. Now 68 years old, he has worked for nearly four decades as a professor of Economics at universities such as Harvard, among others. But what he is experiencing today in practice shatters the equilibrium models taught in the classroom. He takes out a list with offi cial fi gures from the Ministry of Finance in Madrid, which shows that each year Catalonia pays between 12,000 and 16,000 million euros —calculations vary— in net transfers to the rest of the Spanish state. This is the equivalent of 6% or 8% of Catalan gross domestic product (GDP).

Catalonia is highly indebted

This is a lot when compared, for example, to what is transferred in the German Inter-territorial Compensation Fund (Länderfi nanzausgleich). The principal contributors in Germany, Hessen and Bavaria, pay around 0.8% and 0.9% of their GDP. In exchange, Catalans are burdened with net payments some six to eight times higher. “This is no longer sustainable,” protests Mas-Colell. He shows himself to be in favor of solidarity between the richest and poorest regions, but he declares that this volume of transfers turns the proportions on their head. Catalonia also has other big problems, such as the high cost of a 22% rate of unemployment.

But in addition, Catalonia itself is highly indebted ever since the politics of spending of the previous Socialist government generated extremely high defi cits in the period between the onset of the economic crisis and 2010. At the end of this summer [2012], Catalonia had to request a bailout of some 5,000 million euros from the Spanish state’s liquidity fund. Payers and receivers simultaneously: this has been a tough blow to Catalan pride. And there is still an added diffi culty: to fund these transfers Catalonia has had to impose high taxes. The maximum income tax rate is between 56% and 60%. “That is the same level as in Sweden,” laments the Catalan president, who would like to lower taxes.

Philip Plickert Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (FAZ)4.11.2012


OPINION

To lighten this heavy burden, Mas has gone to Madrid and requested a fi scal pact: he wants, like the rich Basque Country –that for historical reasons directly manages its taxes—fi scal autonomy and smaller transfers; but he has received a brusque no from the president of the Spanish government, Mariano Rajoy. Madrid would prefer to use the economic crisis to fi scally reign in the regions. The autonomous separatists sense that a “recentralization” is in the works.

The separatist movement is not the only one in Europe

Until the outbreak of the fi nancial crisis, Catalonia was a prosperous economic space, an economic motor for Spain. About 16% of the country’s population lives in Catalonia, but this region produces 20% of Spain’s GDP. 27% of Spanish exports come from Catalonia; in the case of technology products this fi gure jumps up to 40%. The region has traditionally been an industrial center. There are metal and automobile industries such as Seat, in addition to important pharmaceutical companies or fashion companies such as Mango. Tourism is an important revenue source; the city of Barcelona alone attracts 7 million tourists each year. Foreign investors are also happy to come to Catalonia: some 4,000 multinational companies have settled here.

When it comes to German companies, BASF, Bayer and Siemens have manufacturing plants here. Approximately 50% of all the German companies in Spain produce in Catalonia. “An extremely diversifi ed structure, mid-sized companies, diligence and innovation,” according to Mas-Colell these are the defi ning characteristics of his country. “We aspire to become something akin to the Germans of the south,” explains the Secretary of Economy and Finances, Albert Carreras, also a former professor of Economics. “Madrid is a society based on the State, while Catalonia is market-oriented,” he adds. Without a doubt it would be a great loss for Spain to separate itself from this rich region. If the principal payer were to leave, the State “wouldn’t be able to survive,” warned the Spanish Minister of Justice.

What’s more, the Catalan separatist movement is not the only one in Europe. The Scots, the Flemish and the Northern Italians also want to break away from their states. The regional Scottish government calculates that with the revenue from the North Sea oil reserves, they would be better off on their own than a part of the British Crown. Two years from now they are planning on holding a referendum on this matter. For decades there has been extreme tension in Belgium, where many citizens from Flanders, in the north, want to separate from the Francophone Wallonia. Recently in Antwerp, the country’s largest city, the Flemish separatist politician Bart de Wever won the elections for mayor. “Belgium is a union of transfers, in which the Flemish contribute excessively within the federation,” criticizes de Wever. They have had enough of “being treated like a cash cow,” he adds. According to some calculations, each year 6,000 million euros fl ow from Flanders to Wallonia: other calculations even put the amount at 16,000 million euros.

The number of people in favor of statehood is increasing

Also in Italy there are strong north-south tensions, which over decades has fed separatist sentiments. In the Po Valley the Northern League (Lega Nord) has been a decisive factor. This past spring [2012] in the Alto Adige thousands of people marched under the slogan “Away from Rome” (Los von Rom). At the beginning of October in Venice there was a large demonstration in favor of an independent republic.

In essence, it is always about economic confl icts: the richest regions don’t want to continue propping up the poorest parts of the country. The regional tensions reveal the problems that the Eurozone in general is facing, warns the analyst Jennifer McKeown: “The growing aversion of the citizens to these transfers within the states gives an idea of the diffi culties there would be if European politics headed in the direction of a greater fi scal union or more transfers.” Many consider that transfers are necessary to balance the competitive differences, stresses McKeown, of the Capital Economics consultancy. But this supposed remedy could become explosive.

In Catalonia, the number of those in favor of statehood has risen considerably. If a couple of years ago a maximum of 30% were in favor of a Catalan state, today more than half are. Within the business world there is also growing support for this particular course. Recently a survey of the association of small and mid-sized companies reveals that around 67% of Catalan companies want an independent state. Even big industrial fi rms are not against it. “The central government’s strategy does not meet the needs of Catalonia,” states Carles Sumarroca, the leader of the multinational group of the construction fi rm Comsa Emte and president of an infl uential business association. The government is not investing enough in Catalonia, he says, and he cites infrastructure as an example. Almost all of the high-speed rail lines pass through Madrid, in a radial structure. Sumarroca believes that a Catalan state would be an “interesting alternative.” The pharmaceutical businessman Andreu Esteve says it even more clearly: “We would be better off in an independent state.”

The Catalans emphasize their pro-European nature

Regardless, it would be a journey into the unknown, and with many risks. Madrid considers a referendum to be impossible, for constitutional reasons to start with. “It would certainly be a painful divorce,” admits President Mas. And it would provoke a reaction from Madrid. Some politicians and columnists have already threatened to bring in the army, even though no one wants a military escalation. In any case there will, however, be the threat of an economic war. Seven years ago, when tensions related to the autonomous communities were running high, many Spaniards boycotted Catalan cava, although the losses were only temporary. “This at the most will just be fl eeting,” assures the fi nancial investor Carlo Bonomi, of Italian origin. “In a market-based economy, the consumers decide based on quality and price, and not so much based on where the product comes from.”

No matter how “nationalistic” Catalans may be, at the same time they emphasize their pro-European nature. Their new state can only function within the European Union. “What is most important is that we remain within the EU and the single market,” says President Mas. As in all the offi cial buildings, in his Gothic palau the Catalan fl ag hangs next to the Spanish and the EU fl ags. This Catalan “nationalist” is willing to cede powers to Brussels if freed from Madrid. “We don’t know how they will treat us in Brussels, but we know how Madrid treats us,” he says. It sounds irreconcilable.

Philip Plickert is a journalist for FAZ.

Translated by Margaret LuppinoImage courtesy of FAZ

A new Catalonia in a new Europe


Imagining the European Union without Catalonia is like looking at the current map of Europe and seeing how Switzerland breaks up the homogeneity. Everyone knows that Switzerland is at the heart of Europe and the fact that it does not form part of the European Union is because it does not wish to, that it is the democratic will of the Swiss. It would be inconceivable for any European state to oppose Switzerland’s desire to join the EU. Catalonia, which also formed part of the Roman Empire and the Carolingian Empire, nowadays fi nds itself in this very situation. What is more, Catalonia has been a member of the EU since 1986 (some 27 years) and has been a net contributor to the EU’s coffers from the outset. The Catalans are therefore entitled to the fundamental rights common to all EU citizens. It is hard to believe that the European Union could ever make the fundamental mistake of expelling seven and a half million citizens, net contributors and European to the core, thanks to an inability to overcome Spain’s veto of Catalonia’s membership of the EU.

To overcome a veto, indeed to avoid one in the fi rst place, the EU has at its disposal a considerable ability to infl uence its member states. This is particularly true at present when certain member states in the Eurozone are suffering from a public debt crisis, most notably Spain. Therefore, the fi rst solution we can imagine to Catalonia’s call for an independent state within the European Union is indeed the creation of a new state within the EU (a mechanism known as internal enlargement): such a move would increase the number of member countries from 28 following Croatia’s entry next July, to 29 (or 30 if Scotland also wins the referendum agreed upon by Edinburgh and London in autumn 2014). This option does not require changing EU treaties, but it does mean further increasing the number of European Commissioners (one per state) from the existing 27.

However, from a historical perspective the main problem with increasing the number of EU members states without simultaneously extending the EU’s geographical area and total population is that it risks making the European Union an increasingly complex and diffi cult entity to control, particularly if it holds onto the original notion of an association of states which only share some of their powers. A federal perspective, on the other hand, which is already being promoted in the economic (budgetary and banking) sphere, may well be able to guide the European Union towards innovative, more integrated membership formulas which are different from those that currently exist. A federal perspective should not only lead European states towards a single banking supervisor and collective budgetary control, but also towards the creation of an embryonic, more federal means of belonging to the EU. If the new states which emerge as the result of internal expansion, Catalonia in particular, were to have a direct link of a federal nature with European institutions in Brussels (sharing foreign policy and defence, for example), we would fi nd the beginnings of a more integrated Europe which would coexist with the traditional Europe, a direct descendant of the Treaty of Rome. The implementation of new legal formulas which lead towards a transition to a federal Europe would also make it easier to accommodate some of the EU’s current states, especially the smaller ones, which might feel more at ease than at present (and have lower budgetary costs).

It is true that some European states are running out of steam, with the exception of Germany and France, along with other medium-sized and smaller states which are managing to weather the storm. Nevertheless, the economic situation has been a blow to nation-states and has coincided with a resurgence in the national aspirations of Catalonia, Scotland and Flanders. From the perspective of the birth of federalism, a transition towards the sovereignty of these old European nations appears not so much to be an example of European fragmentation. Instead, it is a step towards the integration of the continent and the shaping of a European Union that would have the same global infl uence on foreign policy and economics that it currently possesses in the commercial fi eld. In Catalonia this ambition not only has its origins in the Tarraconensis province of the Roman Empire and the Carolingian Hispanic March, it also arises in Germany, which is currently the EU’s leading nation. Burkhardt Müller recently summed up the situation in the Süddeutsche Zeitung as such, ‘The aspirations of separatist regions are part of the progress of European integration’. In other words, from a federal perspective of European integration, if Scotland or Catalonia were to have their own states, it would not mean European disintegration, but rather integration.The project is related Barcelona’s role as Mobile World Capital up until 2018, and it [was] presented during the MWC (Mobile World Congress), which [was recently] held in Barcelona.

What legal framework would encompass Catalonia and Scotland? They would clearly exist in the context of reformed European treaties which take advantage of the current reform process, initiated by Germany, in order to proceed with banking union, tighter budgetary control and possibly a gradual approach to the sharing of debt. An attempt would be made to take advantage of the opening of the ‘reform chest’ in order to include, alongside economic integration, mechanisms which facilitate greater integration in Brussels of the territories such as Catalonia that are ‘left hanging’ from their current states. Although it makes no direct reference to this matter, the document issued in Warsaw by the so-called ‘Berlin Club’ on 17th September this year includes certain provisions which, while presumably not being the intention of some of the participating countries (which included Spain), leave the door open to welcoming territories which have been ‘released’ into the European Union.

Martí Anglada - Catalan International ViewSpecial Issue 14 - Winter 2012-13


OPINION

The Berlin Club, at Germany’s bidding, was ultimately formed by eleven European countries (Germany, France, Italy and the three Benelux states, the original founders of the EU, alongside Spain, Portugal, Austria, Poland and Denmark). The bond that unites them is a federal vision of the future of the European Union, a vision of a United States of Europe. This would serve to explain certain absences: the two states which inhabit the British Isles (UK and Ireland) are not members, nor are Scandinavian Finland and Sweden or Balkan Greece. It is easy to see that all 11 signatories to the declaration of the Berlin Club have a close and somewhat compact territorial continuity. All but two are also members of the Eurozone (with the exception of Poland and Denmark). In fact the only member of the club which belongs to the latest EU expansion towards the East is Poland. It is understood that other, mostly smaller Eastern European countries are absent since one of the decisions that led the Berlin Club’s key document is a progression towards a greater future role for federal government thereby replacing the current model which allocates a European Commissioner to each member state. The ‘Club of Eleven’ wants the European Commission to progressively act as the government of a federation of states and, consequently, the number of ministers or commissioners would be subject to requirements. The Club also see an urgent need to inject democratic legitimacy into the Commission or federal government, electing the president via universal suffrage, and providing the European Parliament with more legislative powers and control.

The most interesting aspect, from the viewpoint of future released regions like Catalonia, is the Berlin Club’s proposal to take a signifi cant step towards a common foreign and defence policy for the European states concerned. This step would be a major one if the Club’s proposal that decisions in foreign policy and defence are to be taken by a qualifi ed majority rather than unanimously (as has hitherto been the general rule) was to be introduced to the Treaties. The eleven want to prevent a single state from vetoing or blocking decisions, since it would require at least a minority of several countries, rather than just one, in order to block a qualifi ed majority. For years now, those working in the fi eld of European institutions have known that the removal of the rule of unanimity is the fi rst step on the path towards a common foreign and defence policy. The possibility that the EU territories released from their states could share their foreign and defence policy directly with Brussels, as part of a United States of Europe, would therefore, become a reality.

Some German commentators, toying with similar ideas to those outlined above, lengthen the list of European territories in search of sovereignty (which they refer to as regions), to include Flanders and South Tyrol (the German-speaking Alpine region which passed from Austrian to Italian hands at the end of World War I. Known as Alto Adige in Italian). This would include post-WWI borders (including the Hungarian minorities of Romania and Slovakia), as long as proposals for possible released territories are not limited to the eleven member-states of the Berlin Club. It is clear that these ideas are still very much in their infancy and could ultimately result in varying degrees of sovereignty and federal integration between Brussels and each territory.

For any democratically-minded European it is obvious that the EU will eventually fi nd a formula which allows it to welcome Catalonia and Scotland, two democratic, peaceful nations with a long history as old European nations. Europe will not eject its citizens and is even less likely to in the case of Catalonia, home to one of the fi rst parliaments on the continent. Such a move would represent a self-multilation of Europe’s own democratic DNA.

Martí Anglada is a former foreign new editor at TV3 (Catalonia Television). He has been a foreign correspondent in the Middle East, Italy and Great Britain (1977-1984) for the Barcelona newspaper La Vanguardia and correspondent for TV3 in the United States (1987-1990), Brussels and Berlin (2009-2011). He has also been an international political commentator. His latest book is Afers no tan estrangers (Not So Foreign Affairs) published by Editorial Mina (part of Grup 62).

Víctor Terradellas: “The whole world, and Catalonia in particular, has to learn to accept the dynamics of transformation and evolution as a natural part of human society.”


For its review of 2012 The Economist featured on its front cover the million and a half-strong demonstration that took place in Barcelona on 11th September, calling for a new Catalan state. The ‘Catalan question’, clearly remains high on the international agenda. Whatever one’s political leanings, it is a fact that following last November’s elections the new Parliament of Catalonia emerged with a renewed cross-party commitment to holding a referendum on self-determination, thanks to the support of 65% of the seats in favour and an ideological spectrum that includes four of the seven political groups. The process is led by Convergència i Unió, a federation holding 50 seats (making it the leading political force, with twice as many seats as the number two party). In order to analyse the new political map and the future prospects for Catalan national and international policies, we decided to talk to Víctor Terradellas, Convergència Democràtica de Catalunya’s Secretary for International Relations.

Europe is closely following the political process underway in Catalonia. Do you think the new parliament of Catalonia is any closer to calling for a referendum on independence for Catalonia?

As President Mas made clear when he was re-elected to the position of president of Catalonia on 24th of December, the elections weren’t strictly about political parties, to some extent they were a vote in favour of a referendum on a new political status for Catalonia. The forces in favour of this consultation hold 87 of the 135 seats, some two thirds. As a result, they will go ahead with the process announced and led by president Mas.

Furthermore, the results also give an idea of how mainstream and diverse are the political options in favour of the right to decide in Catalonia. As can be seen from the recent election results and the political makeup of the new parliament, the democratic consultation proposed by President Mas is not only a given in the party itself and for its supporters, it’s also shared by an overwhelming majority of Catalan society. It is also worth remembering that there was a very high voter-turnout of 69.56% of the electorate.

The two most-voted political forces in Catalonia in the last elections, Esquerra and Convergència, are committed to a referendum on independence by the end of 2014 at the latest. Do you think the 71 seats held by the two parties are suffi cient?

We must understand that this is the fi rst time in a Catalan election that the voters have been directly offered a referendum on independence. One could make all kinds of guesses as to the possible outcome of the referendum, but it’s clear that as it stands a majority of the Catalan parliament are in favour of the consultation taking place. And we also know that the forces that defend it, mostly Convergència and Esquerra (the fi rst and second biggest political parties in Catalonia) won’t let the voters down and they will continue on this peaceful and profoundly democratic path.

These and other political forces stood at the elections with a common election pledge: the holding of a referendum. Is it possible for parties with such different foundations to be in agreement?

As you suggest, it’s a matter of fi nding common ground among the different political parties that defend the right of Catalan men and women to decide their own future. Obviously, there are differences in terms of social models and the economic reforms which need to be undertaken, but we need to focus on the fact that only through having control over our own policies and resources can we enter into debate and offer society the chance to decide between one side or another. Clearly there’s a long way to go to make the freedom and independence of Catalonia a reality. Once we have completed the process, as a free and independent state, we can reposition ourselves on the traditional political map just like any sovereign European nation.

Does this mean it’s the end of the road for a Catalonia that forms a part of Spain?

We need to understand that Catalonia has to manage its own political tools, its own fi nancial resources and establish its own social policies. For many years Catalonia has led Spain politically and economically, but the state’s centralized nature, the reluctance to introduce a new agricultural, industrial culture and its corresponding failure to create a productive economy through an over-reliance on the promotion of a subsidy-culture has not only made the modernisation of Spain impossible, it has ended up impoverishing and weakening Catalonia itself.

The current situation is, therefore, the realisation that Catalonia’s survival as a nation and as a society is only possible through political independence. An independence that I am quite sure will generate wonderful relationships with our Spanish, French and Andorran neighbours.

Francesc de Dalmases - Catalan International View


IN DEPTH

It seems that Spanish politicians and institutions are closing ranks and are not only opposing a referendum, they are threatening to stop it taking place. They even go as far as mentioning the Spanish army or suggesting the dissolution of the Catalan parliament.

From a historical perspective, Catalonia became the southern border of the Carolingian Empire, while much of the rest of the Iberian Peninsula became occupied by the Muslim empire. This fact had an impact on the future. Catalonia also has one of the oldest democratic traditions in Europe. It even had a parliament before England did. Currently, Catalonia is a European nation which is taking part in a peaceful, democratic process to equip itself with its own state. It’s a commitment to improving Europe with the majority backing of society and the desire to rebuild and regenerate politically. With such a foundation it’s hard to believe that any European state, including Spain in spite of the views you mention, could oppose such a fundamentally democratic process.

How important will European reactions to the independence process be?

The whole world, and Europe in particular, has to learn to accept the dynamics of transformation and evolution as a natural part of human society. Twenty-four new states have joined the United Nations in the last twenty years. As for Europe, and the European Union in particular, there’s a growing understanding that the cores of political, economic and social stability correspond to medium-sized states with a long, peaceful, democratic history: Catalonia will undoubtedly become one of them. That said, our personality and political project is hardly comparable to any other on our continent and we need to persevere and ensure our uniqueness is known and recognized.

Is Europe capable of understanding and integrating a new state into the community, given the current political and economic climate?

As I was saying, we need a dynamic, unrestricted view of history. Catalonia is an ancient nation that was forcibly subjugated three hundred years ago, but which has nevertheless held onto its language, culture and the other signs of identity that shape the contemporary Catalan nation. We obviously have deep bonds of friendship and good relations with our European neighbours and understand that the new political status we wish to obtain will mean the consolidation of these ties and relations on a more level, more frank and more egalitarian basis.

Francesc de Dalmases (Barcelona 1970) is a journalist and consultant in humanitarian aid and cooperation and development. He is the director of Catalan International View.

Raising Awareness of Catalan Culture, Raising Awareness of Catalonia: Catalan Cultural Projection Strategies


In the coming years, Catalonia’s institutional and political future will mainly be played out abroad. International public opinion may be able to protect a Catalan-led process towards a democratic decision as to the country’s own future as well as to what Catalonia really means, proudly, yet modestly, as one of the realities of which Europe is composed. In this international context, Catalonia’s calling card is its culture. Catalonia’s international strategy (whatever institutional support it may receive) is inevitably, and I would say all importantly, to give its culture and language a higher profi le, associating it with certain positive values: creativity, diversity, participation and freedom. It is for this reason that policies aimed at cultural awareness ought to form a central part of Catalan foreign policy. And so too should the visibility of Catalonia’s culture, which is the best, most effective and most positive means of raising a country’s profi le.

For Catalonia, there is a signifi cant point to be made. Catalan culture can be legitimately defi ned geographically or in terms of language. The two do not entirely overlap, but they are complimentary. Catalan culture extends beyond the borders of Catalonia: Catalan is spoken and is culturally alive and well in other geographical areas. However, there are many more languages besides Catalan in Catalonia, with Spanish in particular displaying cultural vitality. Nowadays, promoting Catalan culture abroad means two things. First: promoting all Catalan culture wherever it takes place in the world and therefore outside what can strictly be called Catalonia’s administrative limits. Second: promoting cultural content as a whole in Catalonia, whichever language it may be in, even if it is without linguistic support. From this we can infer a guiding principle: promote the cultural output made in Catalonia in Catalan more intensively, without ignoring the promotion of the remaining cultural output. We at the Institut Ramon Llull, which I have the honour to serve as director, are charged with the explicit task of carrying out said promotion and developing the most effective strategies for raising awareness of Catalan culture and, therefore, Catalonia as a whole.

Twelve years ago, while I was the Director of Cultural Promotion of the Catalan Government, I had the pleasure of inaugurating an art exhibition in Prague and Warsaw entitled ‘Catalan Masters of the Twentieth Century’. The exhibition featured works by Picasso, Miró, Dalí, Tàpies, Gaudí, Barceló and Clavé among many others. When I spoke to an enthusiastic, well-informed visitor to the exhibition in Prague they asked me two key questions. The fi rst was how come the exhibition featured works by Picasso, who was born outside of Catalonia. I replied that without wishing to lay exclusive claim to the artist, Picasso had a long relationship with Catalan culture thanks to his formative years, place of residence, acquaintances and interests, making it perfectly natural to include his work in the exhibition. In other words, the adoption of a Catalan identity is largely an act of will that occurs in the cultural fi eld. It has more to do with cultural reference than one’s place of birth or where one’s parents were born. The second question was more of a declaration: my Czech interlocutor asked me if I was aware that for a country of six million people we had an almost disproportionate number of great artists, bordering on the excessive. A lot of big names for a small, virtually unknown culture.

There is not much I could have said in reply to this second comment, aside from a polite ‘thank you’. Nevertheless, perhaps I was a little discourteous. I told my interlocutor that Picasso, Miró, Gaudí, Dalí, Tàpies, the big names which he knew and in many cases admired, belonged to broad cultural movements which also included poets, novelists and essayists. The names of these writers would probably mean nothing to him: Riba, Espriu, Maragall, Carner, Alcover, Foix, Pla, Rodoreda and so on. Nevertheless, it is highly unlikely that in a multidisciplinary cultural movement the painters alone would have universal appeal, while the writers did not. Therefore, it is more than likely that the writers, the friends of the great painters, were at least as signifi cant and meaningful as the latter. So, how come some were well-known while others were not? The reason is because visual artists, musicians and architects do not need to be translated, whereas writers do. There is a physical barrier between the members of the same cultural generation, who in all probability are of equal worth. Some received global recognition, while others, especially at that time, were unknown, even among well-educated Europeans.

In a sense, the conversation I had some twelve years ago holds the key to how the Institut Ramon Llull should and indeed does project Catalan culture to the world. It even suggests some strategies to follow. A fact to begin with: Catalan culture has an extraordinary calling card, it includes world famous, household names: Miró, Dalí, Gaudí and so on. However, these big names are only known as individuals, their place within a particular culture that they help to construct and which to a large extent can explain them is often not very obvious (as was demonstrated by the recent Miró exhibition at the Tate Modern). In short, my brief conversation in Prague and the above thoughts suggest three strategic approaches for raising the profi le of Catalan culture abroad.First, we should begin with the big names, strengthening the image of Catalan culture as an organic whole, as diverse and pluralistic in the choices made by its aesthetic, ideological and cultural sectors, while having a shared tradition and participating in a dialogue with other cultures. Miró is a creator with universal appeal who needs no introduction, but it is indeed possible to explain him, and expand on the explanation, placing it in the context of a culture, of a time and a space. Miró is Miró, but he is also explicable in terms of his time and the universal movements related to the time in which he lived, which permeate different cultures. Miró is also the

Vicenç Villatoro - Catalan International View


OUR CULTURE OUR HISTORY

son of a history, of a landscape and a tradition, in other words, of a culture. Miró is Catalan culture in the same way that Catalan culture is Miró. Therefore, the visibility of Catalan culture as a generic label must stem from its visible connection with the big names and consolidate itself, without distorting reality, as a prestigious brand associated with concepts such as vitality, a rich heritage, internal diversity, contemporaneity and creative energy.

The second strategic approach is to use the big names and the image they create of ‘Catalan Culture’, to provide added value to Catalan creativity and its cultural industry as a whole, creating a kind of umbrella that attracts attention to them all and connects them with international movements. When the Institut Ramon Llull strongly committed itself to the Miró exhibition in London and Washington, we were (rightly) asked why we had made such an effort, when it is clear that Miró does not need the Institut Ramon Llull to achieve international recognition. Our reply was that while Miró does not need the Institut Llull, the Institut Llull needs Miró to internationalize Catalan culture. While Miró’s image opens the door to the world, we can let other, less visible artists pass through. These may be newer, often fi ercely contemporary, who thanks to this idea (that if someone is interested in Miró and Miró belongs to Catalan culture, so they may also be interested in the culture he belongs to as a whole) can receive a burst of attention and receptivity. From this starting point, every creator and every creative action will have greater or lesser success in the international arena, depending on their particular merits, their characteristics and depending on how they adapt to the central debates in world culture. Nevertheless, the door will be open.

The third approach can also be inferred from the conversation I once had in Prague: all those areas of culture which have language as an essential component (literature of course, but also lyrical music, fi lm, drama and so on), need a specifi c, added impulse to achieve internationalization: translation. In other words, without leaving Miró behind, we can bring young, Catalan visual artists to the world by saying that they belong to Miró’s cultural tradition. If we wish to encourage new poets and novelists, however, they need to be translated. The promotion of translation is a key element to fully exploiting this culture internationally. In other words, publishers all over the world need to be aware of Catalan cultural output. In order for this to happen they should have certain incentives to include Catalan writers in their catalogues, which would also mean having suitably trained translators able to undertake this work in every language.

The task of training translators (and also academics, cultural ambassadors and respected individuals who are knowledgeable of Catalan culture) forms the basis of another of the Institut Ramon Llull’s strategic objectives: helping universities around the world which are interested in organizing Catalan studies, which in most cases go far beyond mere language skills. The Institut coordinates a network of Catalan study programmes in foreign countries involving one hundred and fi fty universities, mainly located in Europe and North America. The list includes some of the most prestigious academic institutions. It is an exceptional network when compared with other languages with a similar number of speakers. It also serves as a calling card for the Catalan language and the culture which it expresses: a language spoken by ten million people in four European countries, which publishes some seven thousand new titles each year, of which around one hundred twenty works are translated each year, and which is the fi fteenth most used language on the Internet. The last and most relevant observation that can be made following my conversation in Prague: in order for a culture to be globally visible and appreciated it must have strategies and tools at its disposal such as the Institut Ramon Llull. Nevertheless, for it to work one needs a culture which is especially deep, signifi cant, rich and active. Catalan culture is all of these things. Any tools or strategies which can improve its position are more than welcome.

Vicenç Villatoro is a writer and a journalist. Currently he is the director of the Institut Ramon Llull.

ISSN: 2014-9093 | Legal deposit: B. 2198-2013

A Matter of Translation (IT In Transit #15)

Art & Photos

Transcript of A Matter of Translation (IT In Transit #15)