Thirty years of Crossing Border: from smoking weed in the bookstore to a successful festival

In the Crossing Border office in The Hague, where the pallets of books are piled high, employees are hard at work making the final preparations for the festival that starts on Wednesday. In the front, in the spacious and bright BorderKitchen, where people eat during the festival, are founder Louis Behre (75) and his son and successor Michel Behre (48). They look back on thirty years of Crossing Border. But actually they don’t want that, says Louis Behre. “We are working on what is happening now and what we still want, I always find it a bit difficult to look back. I could start talking about Lou Reed or Madeleine Albright being, but I’m not nostalgic.”

When they start talking, it turns out that there is indeed enough to say about how the festival is going now, which started in 1993 on the Zuiderstrand in a squat, with illegally tapped electricity – but already opened by the then culture minister Hedy d’Ancona.

More tickets have been sold this year than in the past four years, says current festival director Michel Behre. “This is the best running edition in years, while you hear everywhere that things have to be canceled because too few people come. The individual programs throughout the year are also going well, we recently had writer Orhan Pamuk, which was sold out.” There are now also editions of Crossing Border in London and in Antwerp, and next year they will go to Germany.

Whatever he notices; there is a lot of young crowd. „They say that you spoken word must do to attract young people, but we just have literature programs and many young people come to that.”

Two years ago, Crossing Border’s survival was suddenly threatened when the municipality of The Hague decided to grant only the Winternachten literary festival – which is more emphatically diverse and inclusive. One of the problems with Crossing Border, said the responsible councilor, was that it has no external program committee.

That’s right: Louis and Michel Behre make the program themselves. “But you only have to walk in one evening to see how diverse it is,” says Louis. “That goes without saying, we are not concerned with that at all.”

Leading up to this edition, Louis had posted on Facebook that poet Mustafa Stitou is coming, to which Abdelkader Benali noted that they had both been to Crossing Border nine times. “I went to see when that was, and saw that poets such as Hafid Bouazza (1970-2021) and Naima El Bezaz (1974-2020) were performing here as early as 1994. Of course it wasn’t because I thought; ‘oh guys I’m going to program Moroccan authors’. A diverse program has always been normal for us.”

Cup of tea with a joint

How do they come to the selection? Then it is good to go back to the beginning. Louis Behre had a bookshop in Amsterdam, specializing in the beat generation. It was also a writers’ hangout, Louis says, and featured artists like poet Allen Ginsberg and singer Nick Cave. “They would come to drink a cup of tea, smoke weed, whatever. Many books were also borrowed, which unfortunately were rarely returned.”

When the owner of the largest coffee shop chain in Amsterdam opened a shop in the Spuistraat opposite the Faculty of Arts, he asked Louis to organize literary events there. “Those scribes said; we’ve already borrowed so much from you, drank all your tea and coffee, we’re joining for nothing. So once a month there were writers there on Sundays, and it was always packed.”

Louis Behre liked it so much that he closed his bookshop and started the Zuiderstrand festival in The Hague, where he lived – which later became Crossing Border. He thus created what he himself calls a “democratic space” for music and literature. “That one is not in the service of the other.” This equal mix of music and literature still determines the atmosphere of the festival.

When he started, literary festivals were “sacred,” says Louis. “When someone coughed, everyone looked back. While I think it’s important that everyone feels comfortable. It’s not that I necessarily wanted to do something else; I didn’t know otherwise. That’s how informal I did it in Amsterdam.”

Also characteristic of Crossing Borders is that the majority of the artists mix with the audience; they also go to other performances in the festival themselves. That, according to the Behres, is one of the reasons that many artists like to come. Writer Dave Eggers once called the atmosphere at the festival „eclectic, electric and fun-loving”.

Programming by feel

Michel and Louis choose people by feel. Michel: “There can be many reasons. The work, the appearance, someone who is special in his time span.” No program committee is needed for this, says Michel, he and his father have an enormous network. “You never know when a poet who is special suddenly arises in Australia, but I get a tip; you should take a look at that.” And it is also a lot of research, says Louis, they are constantly working on it: reading, watching videos on the internet, talking to people. So it is possible that Mumford & Sons were at the festival for their big break, and Ed Sheeran.

Well, one anecdote from the early years anyway. The festival was so big in the late 1990s that it was for a number of years in the Dutch Congress Center, where people always tried to sneak in. The then 18-year-old Michel was guarding an artist entrance with his cousin and had already accidentally let in a smart guy with tools who ‘came to solve a problem at stage 3’. So when a man and a woman cycled through the entrance, they picked up the man and threw him outside – while the man exclaimed; “I’m Lou Reeeeeeed.”

Louis: “That’s right, he was there for his book launch. The woman was Laurie Anderson. Luckily he took it sportingly – he hadn’t broken anything.”

Crossing Border: 2 to 5 November at various locations in The Hague