As the renowned novelist tours Germany to discuss his latest book, "The Eleventh Hour," he explains why he chooses to remain optimistic, despite all of the world's reasons to despair.Amid thunderous applause, Salman Rushdie takes the stage. There's a standing ovation for the author who narrowly survived an assassination attempt in 2022 and has been under heavy police protection ever since.

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But as he gives a talk at the LIT:potsdam literary festival, just outside of Berlin, he plays the entertainer, dazzles with witty anecdotes and admits he hasn't lost his optimism. "It's a kind of stupidity," he admits. "My friends make fun of me for the reason […] that there's very little in the world to be hopeful about right now. But I persist."

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At the event on March 19, Rushdie discussed his latest book, a collection of short stories: In "The Eleventh Hour," he walks a fine line between humor and despair in five stories set at the end of life.

The event is followed by a second stop in Germany a day later, at the lit.Cologne.

Haunted by existential questions

The assassination attempt gave Rushdie a very real taste of death's proximity. In his 2024 autobiographical book "Knife," he candidly recounts the attempted murder. Now, he is back as a fantastically exuberant storyteller who sends all manner of undead creatures onto unsteady ground.

"When the Honorary Fellow S. M. Arthur woke up in his darkened college bedroom he was dead, but at first that didn't seem to change anything." The central story in the collection begins with Kafkaesque humor, and from then on, the honorary fellow haunts the scene as a ghost, completely lost. The author feels a strong connection to his character: "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."

This highly entertaining read thus tackles profound questions about the end of life. "How do you spend that time? Do you spend it in peacefulness and acceptance and resignation," he asks. "Or do you, like Dylan Thomas, you rage against the dying of the light?" Rushdie's literary characters try both approaches, sometimes gently listening to the birds in the garden, sometimes confronting despair head-on.

Literature as an antidote to political lies

Salman Rushdie, who has been living in New York since 2000, also uses his book to take a few jabs at politics. The story "Oklahoma" features a reference to Fernando VII (1784–1833), King of Spain, portrayed as a "totalitarian bastard." The monarch's lawyers ensure "that the laws of the land would crumble and fail beneath the stamping foot of the king who had placed himself above the law," cheered on by "reality twisters" who applaud the king's "barefaced lies."

It's not hard to guess who he might be metaphorically referring to here. "The political untruth […], it's a way of saying the opposite of the truth and masking the truth by the lie," said the author in Potsdam.

Of course, he sees literature as adversarial. Authoritarian rulers have always feared art, he says, before listing authors whose works have survived — despite the banishment, imprisonment or murder of their creators. "We don't have any tanks. You know we don't have AK-47s. We don't even have that big a following. […] And yet they fear us."

In "The Eleventh Hour," there is a wonderful tale in which art triumphs over the powerful: An Indian girl with magical gifts uses the power of her music to bring down the machinery of a billionaire's empire.

Unfortunately, it's just a fairy tale. At LIT:potsdam, Rushdie summed it up sarcastically: "In the long term, the tyrant dies and the art survives. In the short term, the artist dies and the tyrant survives."

This article was originally written in German.

(The above story first appeared on LatestLY on Mar 20, 2026 08:30 PM IST. For more news and updates on politics, world, sports, entertainment and lifestyle, log on to our website latestly.com).