The author is German film-maker Soenke Wortmann (it's his debut novel); it was published in 2021; my audio-version was splendidly narrated by Torben Kessler; and to my knowledge there hasn't been an English translation yet.

The original title is literally equivalent to "the spoken word is valid" (es gilt das gesprochene Wort). It's the note you find on texts of speeches that are made available before the speech is actually delivered, and it reminds whoever is citing it that if the speaker, come the glorious day, deviates from this version, and omits or adds things, then it is the spoken version that is authoritative: The spoken word prevails.

This is a book that is all about words. We have Franz-Josef Klenke, who writes speeches for German Foreign Minister Hans Behring. His are carefully chosen words, honed to emphasize certain points over others, to reach certain objectives, and to let those pursuing other objectives down as gently as possible. Wortmann also talks about the choice of words in the crafting of agreements, showing how ambivalence is not necessarily a bad thing.

Klenke's Polish girlfriend, Maria, on the other hand, suffers from selective mutism. Her ability to produce words -- dependent as it is on her emotional state and her perception of security -- is anything but predictable. Yet it is her wordless utterance -- her primal scream -- that saves Klenke's boss, Behring, from the worst effects of an attack.

In the shape of Cornelius von Schroeder, a rapidly right-radicalizing German diplomat unwillingly stationed in Morocco, we see words constantly being twisted to reinforce a pre-existing cognitive bias. He is a disappointed man, who feels his career ambitions are not being fulfilled in accordance with his merit, who resents that his wife (a Chilean) is on the point of leaving him, taking the children with her, and who is desperate for someone -- or some faceless "thing" -- to blame. He is ripe, therefore, for falling into the black hole of conspiracy theory.


The photos are from Morocco, 1994. Early in the story, Schroeder (or von Schroeder, as he prefers to be known) goes on an expedition to the Moroccan desert with some colleagues and a group of Berber guides. This is when we start to see that there really is something strange about Schroeder...

Wortmann fears that children now grow up more with pictures than with words. Less time spent reading, he feels, means less immersion in foreign worlds and blunted language skills; yet "language is extremely important, especially in diplomacy".

The theme that undergirds all these approaches to words is migration, and the challenge of reconciling the inevitable fluidity of human populations with a Westphalian state system that backs the artificial but still useful concept of sovereignty (indeed, in quite a bold narrative move, the introduction is a retrospective of the Thirty Years' War and the Peace of Westphalia).

In an early scene in Prague, the foreign minister and his team are trying to persuade the countries of the Visegrad Group to soften their stance on migration. They meet former refugees from East Germany, who in the closing moments of the Cold War turned up at the German Embassy in Czechoslovakia. They describe their terrible experiences, but are completely unable to relate them to the migrant crisis happening now. As far as they are concerned, the German government ought to be much stricter about border control...

The goal of the foreign minister's delegation in Morocco is likewise an agreement on migration (to be precise, the repatriation of illegal migrants). Schroeder, meanwhile, sucking up every wild theory he finds on the internet, sees only the downsides of migration. The precise and sophisticated vocabulary of the world of diplomacy is contrasted with the "brutalization of language on an uncontrolled internet".



It's an interesting read. You don't get that many International Relations [IR] novels, so I appreciated the effort. I could imagine getting students to discuss it.

The author's immediate inspiration came from a conversation with a Tunisian hairdresser in Prague, just like the one Klenke has in the book. Both author and character wonder at the migrant's position, given the tough stance of the eastern EU countries. Given his position within the arts scene, however, Wortmann had also accompanied German delegations abroad, and he was fascinated by the glimpses he was able to gain of the world of diplomats and diplomacy.

Certainly, the moderate line he presents is grounded in real-world dilemmas and compromises, and this makes a refreshing change from the idealistic stances adopted in many movies that deal with IR themes. Klenke and the Foreign Ministry are sympathetic to migrants, but also aware that countries can go only so far in rolling out the welcome mat if they want to keep their societies and neighbours on side...



I have a couple of caveats, however.

Wortmann has obviously researched the psychological factors that feed into the radicalization of people like Schroeder. But -- like this commentator -- I wonder whether the diplomat's trajectory hasn't been over-simplified.

And sometimes the communication of key background comes across as a tad didactic and artificial, with information dumped on the reader/listener in a somewhat indigestible and unrealistic way. The material that is needed to convey the issues and the nitty-gritty of the world of diplomacy could have been more gracefully integrated, I think.

Enjoyable, though. Well observed, engaging, and worthwhile.