Salman Rushdie walked onstage to a standing ovation at LIT:potsdam, still under heavy police protection after the 2022 assassination attempt that nearly killed him. Speaking afterward at lit.Cologne, he charmed audiences with sharp wit and an intact, if stubborn, optimism. “It’s a kind of stupidity,” he quipped of his hopefulness. “My friends make fun of me… that there’s very little in the world to be hopeful about right now. But I persist.”
He was promoting The Eleventh Hour, a new collection of five stories that balance humor and despair as they explore the end of life. The central tale begins in Kafkaesque fashion: Honorary Fellow S. M. Arthur wakes in a dark college room to find he is dead, yet at first nothing seems altered. As a bemused ghost, the character captures Rushdie’s recurring 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,” he said.
The stories examine how people face mortality — from quiet resignation to furious resistance — mixing small, tender moments, like listening to birds, with bitter confrontations with despair. Rushdie, who has lived in New York since 2000, also uses the collection 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 on by those who twist reality and celebrate “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. Rulers have long feared artists, he noted, even though writers lack tanks and guns. “We don’t have any tanks… We don’t even have that big a following. […] And yet they fear us.” One story imagines an Indian girl whose magical music dismantles a billionaire’s empire — a fable in which art defeats power, though Rushdie allows it may be a fairy tale. He summed the uneasy reality 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, highlighting the importance of Rushdie’s return to public literary life after the attack. This article was originally written in German.