Amid thunderous applause Salman Rushdie took the stage to a standing ovation. The author, who narrowly survived a 2022 assassination attempt and remains under heavy police protection, spoke at the LIT:potsdam literary festival just outside Berlin, then at lit.Cologne, charming the audience with wit and an undimmed optimism. “It’s a kind of stupidity,” he joked of his persistence in hoping, “My friends make fun of me… that there’s very little in the world to be hopeful about right now. But I persist.”
Rushdie was promoting his new collection, The Eleventh Hour, five stories that balance humor and despair at life’s end. The central tale opens in Kafkaesque fashion: when the Honorary Fellow S. M. Arthur wakes in his darkened college room he is dead, yet at first nothing seems to have changed. As a ghost, lost and bemused, the character embodies Rushdie’s sense of exile and disorientation. “If you’ve had the experience of coming from one world to another and you don’t know the rules of the new world, you’re lost. Being dead is just one version of that,” Rushdie said.
The book probes how people confront death — whether in peaceful resignation or by raging against the dying of the light — and mixes gentle scenes of listening to birds with fierce confrontations with despair. Rushdie, who has lived in New York since 2000, also uses the stories to skewer politics. In “Oklahoma” he evokes Fernando VII as a “totalitarian bastard” whose lawyers let laws crumble beneath a king who places himself above them, cheered by “reality twisters” who applaud “barefaced lies.” “The political untruth… it’s a way of saying the opposite of the truth and masking the truth by the lie,” he told the Potsdam audience.
For Rushdie, literature is inherently adversarial to authoritarian power. He noted that rulers have always feared artists, even though writers lack tanks or guns. “We don’t have any tanks… We don’t even have that big a following. […] And yet they fear us.” The Eleventh Hour contains a fable in which an Indian girl with magical musical gifts dismantles a billionaire’s empire — a tale where art defeats power, though Rushdie admits it may be a fairy tale. He summed up the uneasy balance plainly: “In the long term, the tyrant dies and the art survives. In the short term, the artist dies and the tyrant survives.”
Distinguished guests attended the Potsdam event, underscoring the significance of Rushdie’s return to public literary life after his attack. This article was originally written in German.