“Books are important, not knives”

"I had the feeling I was going to die. Fortunately, I was wrong," recalls Salman Rushdie in an interview with the BBC on the darkest day of his life. This12. August 2022, when hewas attacked on stage with a knife and seriously injured. More than30 years after the Iranian regime had declared him outlawed in a fatwa, aIslamic legal opinion, because of his novel "The Satanic Verses", this disaster caught up with him.

The then 24-year-old Hadi Matar "stormed up the stairs", as Rushdie recounts - and immediately stabbed him, twelve times in total. "I couldn't have fought him, I couldn't have escaped." There was this "spectacular amount of blood" everywhere and his eye felt "like a soft-boiled egg", says Rushdie. He sees this loss as a daily burden.

In his acceptance speech for the 2023 Peace Prize of the German Book Trade, he emphasized: "It's the books that are important, not the knives." And now he holds this much more powerful sword of words against his attacker. "It was necessary for me to write this book: It's my way of coming to grips with what happened and responding to violence with art," explains Rushdie.

In "Knife. Thoughts after an Attempted Murder", which is published worldwide today, he has an imaginary conversation with the assassin.And yetthis story of horror has also become a "story of love". "Two forces have collided here. The power of violence and fanaticism - and the power of love. The second is embodied by my wife Eliza, of course," he reveals. "And in the end, the power of love turned out to be stronger for me than the power of hate."