Literaturpreis

* 16 April 1935 in Limlingerode

† 5 May 2013 in Heide

"Sad day" - Obituary

Sarah Kirsch was the first recipient of the Konrad Adenauer Foundation Literature Prize in May 1993. The location of the award was in accordance with her wish that it should be as close as possible to her birthplace, Limlingerode in the southern Harz region. At the ceremony in the Goethe House in Weimar, she replaced the ritual speech of thanks with the poetic word. Reading poetry was, in Sarah Kirsch's own words, what she did "best". The poet passed away on 5 May 2013.

Sarah Kirsch's literary work, which is available in complete editions from the Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt and in a recently still growing series of fascinating short prose volumes, was appreciated by critics and laudators, by fellow authors and by Germanists - and above all by enthusiastic readers. The poet has received numerous awards, and a little too late the Büchner Prize in 1996. Her first book, the poetry collection "Landaufenthalt" from 1967, set the theme that has guided her ever since: man's relationship to nature in disrepair.

Man and Nature in the Anthropocene

"Anyone who writes poems that assume that the world is whole is throwing sand in the eyes of themselves and others". True to this self-statement, Sarah Kirsch's poetry is anti-idyllic, it requires "thoughtfulness and patience", as her laudator Wolfgang Frühwald emphasised in Weimar. What Sarah Kirsch wrote in the 1980s about the "dying trees, holes in the firmament, the air becoming hopeless and the poisoned waters of the earth" sounds like an anticipated chronicle of today's climate catastrophe reports. No one has been so clear-sighted - and at the same time aware of the beauty of suffering nature - in naming the "gentle horror" (Adalbert Stifter) and the often invisible risks of the Anthropocene.

At the heart of her work is the human being, who is just as responsible for the state as for his environment. There is no separation between man and citizen, public and private. "If I had no political interests, I could not write verse," she once confessed. But these interests are not political plain language, but poetic statements, formulated pictorially and designed to be thought about, not prayed after.

That is why Kirsch's language is brittle and concise. She reduces poetry to the bare minimum. This language is wonderful - and that is certainly in the sense of magical verses and "Zaubersprüche" (which is the name of her perhaps most beautiful volume of poetry, along with "Erlkönig's Daughter", published in 1973) - because it knows how to unite the incompatible with a light hand. From North German dialect, archaic expression, historical or fairy-tale sprinklings, brash idioms, intelligent language games and delicate images, the much-praised "Sarah sound" emerges.

Biography

Sarah Kirsch was born under the name Ingrid Bernstein on 16 April 1935 in the Limlingerode vicarage, her grandfather's "last official residence" before retirement, as she writes in her autobiographical childhood story "Kuckucksnelken" (2006). With the elective name "Sarah" she protests against the great injustice done to the Jews in Germany. Her studies in biology, which she began after working for a year in a sugar factory in Halle and graduated with a diploma in 1959, sharpened her eye for nature. She learned the literary craft from 1963 to 1965 in Leipzig, at the then Institute for Literature "Johannes R. Becher". Far from any literary school, she wrote non-conformist poems and cheeky gender-swap stories ("Die Pantherfrau", 1974). Living in East Berlin since 1968, she organised East-West writers' meetings with colleagues across the inner-German border in the 1970s, where manuscripts were read and discussed; also in her own flat, a high-rise on Berlin's Fischerinsel. Friend and colleague Hans Joachim Schädlich reports that the preparations for the meetings were bugged by the Stasi.

But not what the authors read. "The content of the consultations could not be clarified," it says helplessly in the Stasi files. How could they! In the poem "Sad Day" from 1967, which is still in school reading books, the poet prances through the walled city, literally "like a tiger in the rain", she roars "at the Alex the rain sharp" and joins the "honest" seagulls on the Spree, her gaze turned to the left, i.e. west. "And when I howl like a mighty tiger / You understand: I think there should be / Other tigers here".

But they didn't exist back then. The state security, as omnipresent and terrible as it was, did not understand this in a frightening way. When in 1976 there was finally a howl of protest from the powerful of the word, when Reiner Kunze's "Wunderbare Jahre" (Wonderful Years) was published in the West, when Wolf Biermann was expatriated and the authors, first and foremost Sarah Kirsch, protested against this to the GDR's state leadership, the state in turn responded with enormous harassment.

At the time, Sarah Kirsch saw no other way out than to move away "from the house of the city to the country / And maybe even further for ever". In 1977, on 28 August, Goethe's birthday, she left the GDR with her son, carrying the application for emigration that had just been approved. She does not shed a tear for what she sees as a "thank goodness! sunken German democratic GDR". She was one of the most implacable critics of the "Ostalgics", who continued to rave about a GDR that could have been, but in reality never was.

After an intermezzo in West Berlin (1977 to 1983), Sarah Kirsch settled in Tielenhemme in Schleswig-Holstein, where she lived until her death. There she lived in a schoolhouse with many cats, wrote with "sepia ink from the inkwell for old-fashioned fountain pens" (but also with her laptop), painted watercolours, wandered through the moorland meadows and fields and travelled, as long as she could, preferably northwards, from which emerged such beautiful journals as the diary fragments from "Islandhoch" (2002) or from "Regenkatze" (2007).

In the journal "Märzveilchen" (March Violets) (2012) there is an entry in January 2002: "Mrs Lindgren has died, at 94. She gets a wonderful star where she can settle down, who else". What remains of Sarah Kirsch, who died at 78, are her poems, her prose, her watercolours.

Author: Michael Braun

State: 2013

* 29. April 1929 in Rostock

† 5. October 2007 in Rotenburg an der Wümme

Literature as Memory - Obituary

Haus Kreienhoop is a large estate in a small village in Nartum, Lower Saxony. Here, in his 700 square metre book ark, Walter Kempowski lived and wrote his collective chronicle "Das Echolot". For the first four volumes of the nine-volume work, which is unparalleled in contemporary German literature, Walter Kempowski received the Literature Prize of the Konrad Adenauer Foundation on 3 May 1994, just "at the right time", as the author said in his acceptance speech. On 5 October 2007, the great German and European chronicler succumbed to cancer in Rotenburg hospital.

Biography

"Das Echolot" has made Kempowski a respected author. He had been known for a long time, as documented in the recent exhibition "Kempowski's Curriculum Vitae" at the Berlin Academy of the Arts. Born in 1929 as the son of a Rostock shipowner, he was arrested three years after the end of the war for alleged espionage and sentenced to 25 years in Bautzen. He spent eight years behind the bars of the "Yellow Misery". In the prison yard, he listened to the diverse buzzing in the cells. The many unknown voices: Who listens to them, who collects them, who passes them on? This is the starting point of "Echolot": "We have to pick up what must not be forgotten ... It is our history that is being negotiated there".

After eight years, Kempowski was released, went to Göttingen to study literature and then worked as a village teacher in Nartum for 20 years. He must have been a quirky and whimsical teacher, as if sprung from the novels of Jean Paul, instructive without being lecturing, witty but often far removed from the fashions of the zeitgeist. In 1975, his best-known novel, "Tadellöser und Wolff", was published and later successfully filmed, a history of the fate of the German bourgeoisie in the 20th century. The theme of the German chronicle never left him. The moral contortions with which everyday life in the "Third Reich" was survived, he knew how to describe just as vividly as one of the Germans' main blights, the flight from their historical responsibility, their inability to remember accurately, their problems in dealing with freedom.

Remembrance literature avant la lettre

Kempowski spent almost a quarter of a century on "Echolot", the longest and best writing time of his life. The work is a collage of documents, letters, biographies, diary excerpts from the National Socialist era, intra et extra muros. Diary notes by Goebbels stand next to autobiographical notes by Thomas Mann, Allied orders by Churchill next to letters by unknown soldiers. The focus of memory is on Stalingrad and Auschwitz, the epicentres of perpetrator memory and victim memory on the European continent of memory. The voices of war participants, refugees, emigrants, Jews and Allies form a heterogeneous compendium of their time and make a better and more exciting history book than any historiographical monograph. Kempowski allows the contemporary witnesses their original voice, their suffering of Germany in the war, their hope for a more peaceful Europe.

The author's retreat from the collage of quotations has occasionally been interpreted as a loss of originality. The opposite is true. Walter Kempowski does nothing other than what Walter Benjamin had in mind in his "Passagenwerk": to record a great human tragedy in original tones. The author's art as a director lies in selecting the collected voices and bringing them into a choreography in which they speak for themselves, with the other contemporary witnesses and at the same time to us, those born later. He pulls away, as Martin Mosebach clairvoyantly observed, the "moral curtain that withdrew the sublime senselessness of history from our eyes. He taught the Germans a historical view without a philosophy of history".

In this, the "Echolot" is highly topical. Kempowski counts on memory - and on the fact that someone hears it. This also applies to the sequel, which deals with the last weeks of the war in January and February 1945, including the Allied bombing of Dresden, and the volume "Abgesang, 1945", which concludes the gigantic project: it begins on the day of Hitler's birthday and ends with the total surrender of Nazi Germany. Kempowski's nine-volume work is memory literature in the best sense of the word; after the contemporary witnesses have died, it endows the future of memory from which we can learn: not how things actually were, but how people recorded and interpreted their time linguistically. Kempowski is the archivist, chronicler and narrator of European memory.

Latest works

"Letzte Grüße" (2003) and "Alles umsonst" (2006) are the names of the novels Kempowski wrote in the last years of his life. The titles are signals: not of a melancholy work of old age, but of a life under the sign of memory, which is so realistic that it always knows how to take into account its own failure, i.e. forgetting. The fact that it often deals with the tragedy of refugees and the misery of expulsion is rooted in Kempowski's own biography. With the honorary citizenship of his hometown Rostock, which according to the publisher also wants to hold an official memorial service for him, he has received a belated satisfaction.

In spite of his serious illness, Kempowski repeatedly held literary seminars and readings at Haus Kreienhoop - when he was no longer able, his wife continued to read - and received visitors, including the author of these lines in the summer of 2014: There he sat by the television, swatting at flies while listening to the critics at the Bachmann Competition in Klagenfurt. His "Echolot" plumbed the depths and shallows of 20th century German history. The 21st century can only learn from this literary historiography from below.

Author: Michael Braun

State: 2007

* 27 July 1909 in Köln

† 22 February 2006 in Heidelberg

Poet of the Nevertheless

She always read her poems twice, even in Weimar, when she received the Literature Prize of the Konrad Adenauer Foundation in 1995: once for her fellow world, once for posterity. They are lyrical legacies worth keeping and learning by heart. What Hilde Domin had to say to her contemporaries still applies today: It is not in vain to rebel undauntedly, to interfere confidently, even with humour, to write against pre-conformism ("if you want to be bedded down today as you would like to lie down tomorrow") and to put your foot down for more brotherhood - despite, or precisely because of, the unsolidarities all over the world.

Being uncomfortable was never Hilde Domin's problem. She liked to sit between the chairs. That was the place for her "courage for nevertheless" (Ulla Hahn). "Der Baum blüht trotzdem" (The Tree Blossoms Nevertheless) was the title of her last volume of poetry (1999). On 22 February 2006, the great Cologne poet died at the age of 96. Today, a plaque on the house where she was born in Riehler Straße commemorates Hilde Domin. Heinrich Böll lived around the corner. Her Cologne flat was so big that the children could run in the hallway on roller skates. Already at school, the early talent stood out. She wrote essays in rhyme and gave such a critical graduation speech in her father's lawyer's gown that the school administration considered revoking her diploma. When she took her oral examination at the Merlo-Mevissen grammar school in March 1929 under the chairmanship of the then Lord Mayor Konrad Adenauer and was downgraded one grade by the school board for her Pan-European commitment, she tore her dove-blue velvet dress at home in anger. She praised the first German Chancellor as a reconciler of peoples and a thinker on freedom in her Weimar acceptance speech in 1995, when she was awarded the Literature Prize of the Adenauer Foundation.

Hilde Domin's life story is inseparable from her exile. In 1932, she left Nazi Germany with her future husband, the Hispanic Erwin Walter Palm. Her father, a Jewish lawyer, had been publicly ridiculed by the Nazis. Via Italy and England, the student arrived in the Dominican Republic, a shady paradise. The dictator Trujillo hoped to "whiten" his country with the emigrants from Europe, but persecuted all dissenters.

In exile, Hilde Domin became a poet. In the posthumously edited letters with her husband, one can read how difficult this poetic self-birth was. Hilde Domin asserted herself not only in foreign linguistic milieus, but also against the ignorance of her husband, who would have liked to become a world-famous poet himself.

Hilde Domin returned to Germany in 1961. It was no coincidence that her first poetry reading took place in Cologne. The ballroom of the Cologne City Museum in Zeughausstraße was well filled. As Hilde Domin gazed at Appellhofplatz and the "court with the big new glass doors", she had the idea for the poem "Cologne". She dedicated it to Böll. It is a poetic document of flight and expulsion, a migration poem. "I swim in these streets," it says of what she sees as a "sunken city": "Others leave."

Hilde Domin's "Nevertheless" poems set signs of hope against all hope. For example, in the three songs of encouragement (1961). The first begins with the sad image of tear-soaked pillows with disturbed dreams. Then follows the "Nevertheless": "But again / from our empty / helpless hands / the dove rises". The hands are helpless, they are even empty. But the soaring dove is not a poet's magic trick, but a symbol of poetic trust. The bird is the sign of a miracle, of a very earthly grace that can befall man just as much as the greatest misfortune. That is why Domin's poetics of hope is not to be confused with faith. She is not a confessional poet. She is concerned with articulating fashionable experiences also from the Jewish and Christian exile tradition, examples with which the poet endeavours to address the politically alert, fraternally thinking person in the reader. This does not require many words or complicated language. Hilde Domin's "simple words" "smell of man". The core of this dialogical poetics is the trust that there is a You that allows itself to be called upon by an I.

The poem Sisyphus from 1967 is also revealing: an appeal beyond the philosophy of the absurd to roll the stone uphill even though it seems pointless; an encouragement to start anew. In this way, Hilde Domin's poems are "dispatches from the agency of practical reason", as Iso Camartin said on the occasion of the award of the Heidelberg Prize for Exile Literature to Hilde Domin (1992).

Hilde Domin's exile poems recall flight and expulsion, without melancholy, with the courage for nevertheless and for a second chance. Even the most critical of her colleagues have attested to what this chance consists of. It is Hilde Domin's "gentle courage" for a nonetheless that comes along on pigeon-toed feet, but leaves deep traces and confronts everything that prevents people from being human. "Gentle Courage" is the title of the nonetheless conversation that Erich Fried dedicated to her colleague in the 1980s: "You would even face death quietly!" - "Quietly? Perhaps. But face it." That is said "on the tipping point between fear and confidence. Balancing rod the ratio".

Author: Michael Braun

State: 2016

* 1 November 1926 in Berlin

† 4 October 2020 in Bad Saarow

Writer of Unity - Obituary

Günter de Bruyn is the fourth recipient of the Konrad Adenauer Foundation Literature Prize. In 1996, Wolfgang Schäuble, at that time leader of the parliamentary group of the CDU/CSU, gave him the laudation in the Weimar National Theatre. Günter de Bruyn passed away on 4 October 2020.

"Good as poetry" is how the Prussian King Frederick William III is said to have justified his rejection of a military memorandum. Günter de Bruyn loved and collected episodes like these. Why? Because they provide a wonderful, lightly ironic and at the same time instructive account of the relationship between literature and politics, from the heyday of Prussia to the reunified Germany. On 4 October, one day after the 30th anniversary of German unification, Günter de Bruyn died at the age of 93.

Günter de Bruyn was born in Berlin on 1 November 1926. He worked as a school teacher and as an academic librarian before he came to writing in the 1960s. De Bruyn critically examined his own beginnings. He later called his first novel "Der Hohlweg" a "wooden path". He was not afraid to put his own courage into perspective and to address the difficulties of writing the truth. This is vividly demonstrated in his novels. They are a distorting mirror of the socialist educational dictatorship and at the same time a lesson in free thinking. The scholarly satires "Buridans Esel" (1968), "Preisverleihung" (1972), "Märkische Forschungen" (1978) and the dementia novel "Neue Herrlichkeit" (1984) tell of how the GDR wanted to be and how it really was: realistic social novels by an author who was called the Fontane of the GDR.

When the Wall fell, Günter de Bruyn was on the side of the friendly admonishers. Between "cries of jubilation, songs of mourning" (this is the title of his 1991 volume of essays), he professed a position of German cultural nationhood, which, he argued, should rejoice with good reasons of freedom and peace, through which the unification of the long-divided country had come about. A "writer of German unity" is what Wolfgang Schäuble, then chairman of the CDU/CSU parliamentary group, called the author in 1996 during his laudation at the Weimar National Theatre when he received the Literature Prize of the Konrad Adenauer Foundation there: for his autobiographical, essayistic and narrative works, which - according to the justification for the prize - "give the floor to freedom with quiet clarity, philanthropy and humour".

Günter de Bruyn has authenticated his cultural-political stance by presenting his autobiography about his youth in Berlin ("Zwischenbilanz", 1992) and his time in the GDR ("Vierzig Jahre", 1996). He writes circumspectly and with clear-sightedness about his life in two dictatorships, deals with false memories and, with Jean Paul, about whom he has written a biography that has been reprinted several times, chides the "strongmen" for "lacking the power of truth, i.e. resembling the buttercup which, because the cows don't eat it, 'never becomes butter'".

The autobiography is the joint that connects the novels of Phase I with the Prussian books of Phase II. Since the 1990s, Günter de Bruyn has distinguished himself as a researcher of Prussian history; he tells what the historian Christopher Clark describes: how Prussia, thanks to its culture, was a European state before it became a German one. De Bruyn's books deal with fates, books and people from Berlin's artistic epoch around 1800. They are about the magnificent avenue Unter den Linden, about the aristocratic Finckenstein family, about the charismatic Prussian Queen Luise. And, again and again, about Mark Brandenburg landscapes. "Abseits", the eloquent title of his 2005 book, from the culture industry, the author researched and wrote in a Brandenburg village where he had lived since 1967, true to the maxim of Chamisso, whom he admired: "in these frenzied times I withdraw in humility".

Security, freedom and peace in the state are based on literature. Günter de Bruyn has intensively reassured us of this in his novels and historical narratives. With his latest book, Günter de Bruyn has returned to the novel. "Ninety Years" (2018) is set in August 2015, in the middle of the year of the welcome culture. The novel tells of a long life in the short 20th century and the lessons from history for the present; it is about Catholic faith and the need for conscience, fear of progress and courage for the tried and tested, about the limits of gendering and the beauty of the German language: "As poetry good".

Author: Michael Braun

State: 2020

* 21 December 1950 in Zug

Domestic correspondent, doomsday researcher and "world theatre" author

A fifteen-year-old monastery student climbs into the roof truss of the monastery church during Sunday mass. There he folds a paper aeroplane and lets it sail through the small opening in the dome into the crowded nave. On the paper is written: "Religion is the will to hibernate".

Biography

The boy who takes his test of courage for the "Club of Atheists" in this way is Thomas Hürlimann. Born in Zug, Switzerland, in 1951, he spent his school years (1963-1971) at the Einsiedeln Stiftsgymnasium, where he found "heaven a lid, religion a terror". One can imagine how the flying Nietzsche quote hit the church community at the time. "Two years later, Anno 1968," Hürlimann writes, "we occupied the rector's office and burned our frocks. We demanded free exit, we wanted to eat French fries and drink Coke and listen to the Stones."

At the end of the seventies, Thomas Hürlimann witnessed the death of his 20-year-old brother Matthias, which lasted for weeks. He got this existential horror of death off his chest in his first novella, Die Tessinerin. The novella tells a story about the limits of life, hauntingly, with high precision and cinematically precise editing ("the cut determines the style", Hürlimann once wrote). With The Ticino Girl, Egon Amman opened his Zurich publishing house, to which Hürlimann remained loyal until its dissolution in 2010.

Family and Doom Research

The key experience of dying is at the centre of Thomas Hürlimann's works. It is inextricably linked to the theme of the family whose story is always told - his family. Thomas Hürlimann is one of those authors who do not invent their material, but find it: in family stories that are transformed into literature. The brother, the father, the mother, the uncle (the monastery librarian of St. Gallen): They have died, most recently the prelate. But they live on - in the stories told by the writer's son. The parents play roles under their real names in the first play Grandfather and Half-Brother (1980). The novels Der große Kater (The Big Cat, 1998) and Vierzig Rosen (Forty Roses, 2006), together with the novella Fräulein Stark (Miss Stark, 2001), form an autobiographically based Swiss family genealogy, with glamour and misery, as it has been similarly told in other contemporary European novels, for example by Peter Esterhazy, but perhaps nowhere as intrinsically Swiss as here. That is why anyone who only deciphers the real references of the novels and disregards their symbolic added value is on the wrong track. Thomas Hürlimann, the "domestic correspondent", is a master of leitmotif chains of reference and multi-coded images.

The death of the family, death in the family: the binding agent that holds this theme together is doom. The "doom researcher" Thomas Hürlimann, who not only takes words seriously but literally, has explained this word thus: the "doom" comes "from the coachman's fear of the carriage running away. If it chases towards the abyss, it drags the carriage along - it is hung up with the horses". And the main fate of our globally networked age is time, the immense acceleration of which is no longer even perceived when zapping through more than a hundred television channels and real-time communication on the internet. Time, writes Hürlimann, "is only rarely struck by bells", it no longer flows, but stands still in the digit, the smallest electronic unit of information, point by point.

Many of Hürlimann's stories and plays begin with death entering a community, in the truest sense - as the doctor says, "Death has entered", an uninvited, secretive, family façade-breaking guest, perhaps The Last Guest, as in the 1990 play of the same name. Death does not let anyone rest in peace in Hürlimann's works, certainly not the one who looks the other way and leaves him to the hospital rooms and palliative high-performance medicine. There are several references to the eyes of the deceased being glued shut with a sticking plaster: "If a person dies, the world dies", it says. The eye gaze of death is the blind spot of our perception of the world.

Comedies in Weh-Dur

Hürlimann is concerned with saving human dignity in the face of death. His dances of death are symbols of the fragile institution of the family, whose structure has been described with terms like "patchwork", "exceptional phenomenon", "residual family in the welfare state". This family has not been holy for a long time. The primordial situation of this deified late modernity is found in the 1996 play Carleton. The agronomist Carleton has returned to his hometown of Kansas City, to whom America owes the weather-resistant Russian wheat, but instead of a triumphant welcome, the backyard milieu of a city without a church and with a God who now only hides in grain and money awaits the homecomer. Thus the metaphysical antennae of many of Hürlimann's characters fidget into nothingness. "Heaven was closed, God was declared dead, and that was possible because people no longer needed him as a giver of being," sums up the little poetology Das Holztheater (1997). But the author is not an adept of a Propositional tradition or one trimmed to Christian reconciliation; he stands between Rolf Hochhuth and Thomas Bernhard, between Christian modernised tragedy and grotesque "comedy tragedy". His plays, a theatre critic has said, are "comedies in the major of woe".

Hürlimann's favourite means of making the serious bearable is situational comedy. His humour is sometimes abysmal, especially when it concerns political or religious issues. For example, in the short story "The Tunnel" (dedicated to Dürrenmatt), when the celebrating and poker-playing politicians in the federal jubilee year of 1991 make grandiose appearances in their special train, but have no possibility of leaving, i.e.: a toilet - their audience is schoolchildren who, when the train has put on the emergency brakes and every man has come out, belt out the national anthem, "but with closed eyes". Or when (in The Big Hangover) the apostolic nuncio turns religious questions into culinary ones underhandedly at the Swiss president's gala dinner, illustrating divine providence with the dessert - all the invited guests are sure - undoubtedly served at the end. The figures of Thomas Hürlimann's "Catholic atheist", who in the famous questionnaire of the F.A.Z. cites the "transition from corset to lingerie" as the most admired reform, these figures of Hürlimann are not despisers of sensual knowledge. (By the way, a Zurich brewery is named after the author, as proof I can show you the matching beer mat later).

Even in Satellite Town, the story collection published in 1992, there is no room for religious feelings, Christian miracles or biblical transformations. The humoresque "Onkel Egon und der Papst" (Uncle Egon and the Pope) demonstrates how television conquers living rooms at the end of the 1950s as an epiphany of media modernity. It is revered there like a supreme being. The viewers' prostration is not to the Pope, who gives the urbi et orbi blessing on the screen; no, they fall down before the medium, the "miracle of television". This is a significant and basically tragicomic situation. The "miracle of transformation" has shifted from the Mass to the media. On this secular stage of transformation, Hürlimann discovers the comedy in traditional tragedies, especially in those of the Bible.

Thomas Hürlimann went to school with authors of the absurd theatre. In this he is closer to Beckett than to Brecht. Dissonance and dialectics are the structural laws of his plays. They do not want to improve through laughter, only to give insight. That is why the early didactic plays, Grandfather and Half-Brother or The Envoy, are devoid of any kind of sophisticated doctrine. These plays aim at the fatal double life, at the historical life lies of Switzerland and its neutrality policy, which came under fire in the public discussion in the nineties of the 20th century. Hürlimann settles accounts with the "second-hand agony of conscience" that Max Frisch attested to Switzerland as early as 1965, without any moral obligation to judge. Why the grandfather who protected the refugee posing as Hitler's half-brother during the war is insulted as a Nazi friend after the war, why the Swiss envoy who protected Switzerland with questionable moves in Berlin during the war (true to the motto that one does not rob one's own bank) is simply forgotten (and goes mad over it) after returning home from the war, the story finds no explanation for this. The opportunistic person likes to change his masks, not only in the theatre. Literature, at any rate, is there to unmask such lies. Its compulsory part is to "find again" such stories that have been lied away.

Political novels

Forty Roses is the name of Thomas Hürlimann's most recent novel to date. After the novella Fräulein Stark, it is his most successful. Around 100,000 copies have been sold, and there are already translations in two languages. At the same time, the novel is heading towards a major thematic mass of Hürlimann's prose already mentioned: time. If death is the narrator's birth, then the scarce time in which he is narrated is rich time, won lifetime.

Forty roses are delivered to Marie on every birthday, punctually at nine in the morning. They are a gift from her husband Max, who is aiming high in politics. His strange gift serves as a ritual to stop the ageing of love, to "play transience against the wall". Marie plays the role of the safe politician's wife too perfectly to let this charming deception burst. The rose queen in a Pucci dress, her cavalier in a dinner jacket, this is how the couple steers purposefully to the table of the political "Group One" in the Grand Hotel of the government capital. Here the man has finally made it - with and thanks to his clever, beautiful wife.

But again at the price of a family disaster. On his mother's birthday, the terminally ill son stays at home; the parents know he is going to die. The next stop of the flower messenger who delivers the magnificent bouquet in the morning is the cemetery. Time cannot be stopped or controlled, neither with punctuality nor with perfection - it trickles away inexorably because there is no one to ask for it. There is actually no such thing as the pure present, writes Augustine (in the tenth book of the Confessiones), only past and future, and in the mode of memory or expectation.

The present, which Hürlimann describes in his family trilogy, is one with the fashion of the social parquet and modern Swiss federal politics; and Marie and Max dance in unerring lockstep on both. Here, time lifts its mask. "Modérn", Karl Kraus knew, can also be read as "módern" by a slight shift in accent. "What is en mode today will be passé tomorrow," Hürlimann writes.

There is an important sign of the times in the novel. It is the Katz family coat of arms, which hangs over the house in the shape of open scissors. As Jewish emigrants, Marie's ancestors immigrated to Switzerland from Galicia. There, the "Seidenkatz" made it to fame and fortune in the ready-made clothing business. But the crossed blades that fit so well with Max, who owes his rise to cutting off old habits, also stand for the cancer that kills the son.

Where is the positive, one may ask here too? In the novel, it lies in music and love. They provide the connection with heaven that cannot be had on earth. The stories told by literature are also a remedy against transience. Even if they do not necessarily reconcile, they connect a narrative community that provides for the future of memory: the memory of family history, especially its Jewish branch, the history of Switzerland, the history of Europe and the Occident.

Author: Michael Braun

State: 2011

* 31 March 1937 in Berlin

The Art of the Novellist

If there is one author who has rehabilitated the genre of the novella, long declared dead in the post-war period, and breathed new life into it, it is Hartmut Lange. Away from fashionable trends, he has been writing - since 1980 - an impeccably clear, detailed prose schooled in Kleist. In this, his many years of experience as a playwright stand him in good stead. Born in Berlin in 1937, Lange began his literary career as a student of Hacks and a hopeful of the politically committed GDR theatre. But the lateral thinker, who resisted all ideological appropriation, had no luck either on the stages of the GDR, which he turned his back on in 1965, or in West German theatres. Now a handsome edition of Lange's Collected Novellas has been published. It presents the prose work, which has so far been available in twelve individual editions, in all its "story diversity", as the Giessen philosopher Odo Marquard unfolded it in 1998 in his laudatory speech at the Konrad Adenauer Foundation's literature award ceremony. Of particular note are the critically acclaimed novella Das Konzert (1986), a requiem for the Berlin victims of the extermination of the Jews, the Italian novellas (1998) and the most recent artists' novellas Die Bildungsreise (2000) and Das Streichquartett (2001).

Lange's heroes have everything they need: Money, education, a life - with or without a partner - according to their most beautiful ideas. But existential angst, the question of meaning, the insight into "being to death" (Marquard) always breaks into this pre-stabilised harmony. This realisation throws Lange's border crossers, who conspicuously often suffer from diseases of the walking apparatus, off their course and leads the novellas to a trenchant, surprising ending that, despite its modern content, cannot be called anything other than classical. The "unheard-of event" in Lange's novellas is always the intrusion of the mysterious into the world of the ordinary. They are abysmal and enigmatic stories of uncertainty and point out of our world "in which things only ever mean what they are".

The edition [Hartmut Lange, Gesammelte Novellen. In 2 volumes, Zurich: Diogenes, 2002 - editor's note] illuminates Hartmut Lange's major themes: the role of music, the disappearance of the subject, the rehabilitation of the metaphysical. And it fulfils all the prerequisites for making a recognised author into a well-known author at last.

Author: Michael Braun

State: 2002

* 28 December 1956 in Mönchengladbach

Hiob in Berlin - The novel Rückwind

How much fate can a person take? And how does one cope with bad news in times that swear by resilience, by resistance instead of religious instances? Burkhard Spinnen has constructed a remarkable epic experimental set-up. It is subtle in structure, intricate but not convoluted, highly suspenseful and with characters who act like clockwork: as "hand puppets from the material of the present", as Spinnen said during a talk about the novel in the Catholic University Community in Cologne.

Hartmut Trössner, the main character of Spinnen's novel, was born with a golden spoon in his mouth, so to speak. He has entrepreneurial spirit, perseverance, situational skills and luck. He becomes a manufacturer of wind turbines with a turnover of millions. And a successful television producer. His wife is a popular actress, his son well-bred in every way.

And then fate strikes. On a single day in April 2018, Trössner's company goes bankrupt, his son drowns in the swimming pool, his wife is killed in an accident, his house burns to the ground.Trössner, thoroughly suicidal, goes to a clinic and then takes the train to Berlin. This is where the actual narrative begins. And a first striking reading of the novel. Trössner is without doubt a modern Job, whom a lottery win hits "from behind". As improbable as this sounds in the concatenation of several misfortunes, such a thing is possible in principle.

Burkhard Spinnen places his character in the environment of modern media. And here begins a second reading. Trössner's wife has played the main role in a political television series that revolves around an extreme right-wing populist party, the "Party of Political Christians", or "PPC" for short: "Xenophobic, nationalistic, pithy slogans, achieves a double-digit election result", they say. Of course, this party is fictitious, but there are parallels to the fringes of the real existing political party landscape. Here lies the real trick of Spinnen's invention game. In the medium of the television series, which has the highest ratings and installs a novel within a novel, so to speak, there is a political occupation of religion - of a Christianity without a church, even without God.

In the name of the party programme of the "PPC", not only the occidental traditions of enlightenment and nationalism are cannibalised. The democratic rules of the game are also reversed in order to use them unconscionably against pluralism, tolerance thinking and cosmopolitanism. But Spinnen is not concerned with a political parable, but with politics in the medium. Does television make better politics? And possibly a more effective Christianity? What happens when the actors of political figures are not only mistaken for their models, but slip into the roles of those they portray themselves? It is the Job-like hero himself who confronts these questions by going to the filming location of the series, Berlin. The ending is too furious to be given away here. It takes place in the Ministry of Finance and fulfils all the criteria of a good "Tatort" thriller.

All this is unobtrusively and artfully composed. A brilliant novel, frighteningly realistic, told with discreet irony and astute diagnosis of the times, a book precisely for and about our times.

Author: Michael Braun

State: 2019

* 6 October 1933 in Stryj

On the search for a good life

Literature has inherited the idea of a happy life from philosophy. But only a few authors today dare to seriously tackle the Atlas-heavy task of telling stories about it. Louis Begley, too, distrusts big feelings and happy endings. His novels deal with the catastrophes of happiness, with family disasters, illness, death, betrayal of love, loss of memory and hope.

Biography and work

Louis Begley has written nine novels, the first in 1991, at the age of 68, the autobiographical novel Wartime lies (1991; Lügen in Zeiten des Krieges, 1994). The tenth novel will be published in German translation by Suhrkamp in autumn, just in time for the author's 80th birthday: "Erinnerungen an eine Ehe". Here, too, Louis Begley expands his range of themes with aplomb. It is about obstacles to marriage and matters of honour, about morality and professional success, about the wishful unhappiness of better society - quite in the style of Ingmar Bergmann's film "Scenes from a Marriage". The narrator is not a writer by chance. Not without a highly likeable self-irony, he describes his hardships in getting from facts to fictions. He wants to research for a novel without distorting the truth, but has to add a lot to what he knows and remembers in order to create an exciting story.

Louis Begley's own life story provides the material from which his novels spring, but it is also fiction in the sense of the title of his life-smart Kafka book The Monstrous World I Have in My Head (2008). Louis Begley was born under the name Ludwik Begleiter as the only child of Polish-Jewish parents on 6 October 1933 in the East Galician provincial town of Stryj, which was Polish between the world wars and today belongs to Ukraine. In the summer of 1941, German troops occupied the country, which had been evacuated by the Red Army. In the shadow of the Wehrmacht, the extermination troops of the security police moved in. Louis Begley fled with his mother, disguised as Polish Catholics.

When the war ended, Louis Begley emigrated to the United States with his parents in early March 1947. In New York, he anglicised his name, began studying law at Harvard and became a successful lawyer at the law firm "Debevoise & Plimpton" on Wall Street.

Begley became a writer in 1989 when he retired from the firm for four months to write his first book. Wartime lies is not a life confession, but a novel of recollection that condenses and transforms his own experiences. The lies in times of war, which the young novel hero Maciek uses together with his aunt Tania, ensure their survival in hostile surroundings and at the same time show the power of memory fiction. "I tried, in the voice of the observant Maciek, to translate layer by layer total inhumanity, horror, horror into language with a constant narrative tone," Begley said in an interview with the Jüdische Allgemeine Wochenzeitung in 1994.

After his novel debut, he wrote a series of philosophical novels, about which Christoph Stölzl said on the occasion of the awarding of the Konrad Adenauer Foundation Literature Prize to Louis Begley: "Begley's suite of transatlantic social novels, written in a short decade, will probably one day be read as detached from their time of origin as Fontane's Berlin cycles or Thomas Mann's modern Odyssey of the bourgeoisie."

Begley's characters are middling heroes, uncomplaining Job figures, Kafkaesque bankers and brokers, lawyers and authors; these characters are not unsympathetic, whose track records regularly fail when it comes to their own affairs of the heart. "Shipwreck", Begley's 2003 novel title, is their fate, remembering an amour fou their programme, stoic renunciation their conclusion.

Ben is perhaps the most representative of these heroes - alongside the philosophising pensioner Schmidt, who was also filmed with Jack Nicholsen and to whom two wonderful novels (published in 1996 and 2001 in German translation) are dedicated. Ben plays the main role in Begley's second novel, The Man Who Was Late (1992). He is a "Jewish refugee" who wants to learn the good life in America, but gets tangled up in the contradictions between self-hatred and the desire for happiness. He is certainly happy in the world of "cashless well-being", especially with women. But he cannot be happy with it.

At the centre of Begley's literary work is the question of the future of humanistic values. What happens when personal "notions of the good and the humane" are thwarted by intrigue, manipulation and prejudice is what he explored in a book about the "Dreyfus case" (2009). Tellingly and warningly enough, it bears the subtitle "Devil's Island, Guantanamo, History's Nightmare". The good life is not a gift, after all. It has to be told, through the catastrophe, which literally means a change of luck. The new novel gives us hope that the author will not stop telling stories about the search for happiness even in his ninth decade of life.

Author: Michael Braun

State: 2013

* 3 June 1961 in Mils near Imst

Aeronauts, aeronauts, high-flyers

Airmen in literature are traditionally sad or comic heroes. Threatened by a crash, at the mercy of the elements, they hang between heaven and earth, and only rarely manage to escape the fate of Icarus, on whom the myth inflicts divine punishment for hubris and megalomania. The fall of Icarus or Euphorion also symbolises the failure of the artist who aims too high with his work. In addition to this tragic history of motifs, there is an initially narrow, but with the triumph of the natural sciences visibly stronger tradition in which aeronautical projects function as material for adventure stories and provide important motifs above all for the utopian novel literature of the 19th century. After a technophile phase of literary history at the beginning of the 20th century, inspired by popular air shows and culminating in Gabriele d'Annunzio's aeronautical novel Forse che sí forse che no (1910), a "transformation" of the utopian novel occurs. In science fiction literature, space travellers have taken the place of airmen, the stratosphere is terra cognita, and what were once challenges for aviation pioneers have become routines for low-cost and frequent flyers in the 70 or so years between the Wright brothers' stuttering attempts at flight in Kitty Hawk (1903) and the first commercial Concorde flight (1976). 

It is all the more surprising that Norbert Gstrein revived the balloonist material in 1993 with his novella O2 and was successful with both the public and critics. The theme returns to a post-Utopian media world that makes everything seem feasible. The historical event, the 1931 balloon ascent into the stratosphere, is mirrored in the diverse - fictitiously embellished - reactions of those involved in the air and on earth. In this way, the novella is an epic lesson on the relationship between fact and fiction. It demonstrates the question of who owns a story - the media, the historians, the poets - and what they make of it.

Stories and counter-stories

Distortion and falsification of a story through the perspectives of counter-stories has been a theme of Gstrein's narrative works from the very beginning. The motto of Thomas Bernhard, which stands above Gstrein's first novel Das Register (1992), points to the origin of this theme: "How many of our talents could we have developed to astonishing greatness within us if we had not been born and grown up in Tyrol". Tyrol and the Alps, village narrowness and the destructive effect of mass tourism are the coordinates of Gstrein's first books. But there is more to discover than the negative Heimat novel and the anti-idyll. Gstrein's debut novel Einer (One, 1988), about the life of an innkeeper's son on the fringes of village society, develops the pathography of a personality destruction. Jakob is "Einer", who is always the whipping boy, unloved child, abused boarding school pupil, inhibited lover, mocked ski instructor and finally apathetic drunkard, a stranger even in his own parental home, where his story is reconstructed from the perspectives of changing characters. The mystery remains: Jakob is picked up by an inspector, "after a misdeed or mishap committed" (E 113).

Loss of identity due to social constraints, however, is only one level of the narrative. The true misery of the soul, of which Gstrein's narratives are saturated as if by a hospital smell, is reflected in the language distress of his characters. "Language lacked words" (A 32) is the programmatic title of the story Anderntags (1989), which is about unhappy self-discovery and gradual silencing. The thirty-year-old first-person narrator Georg tries to come to terms with the love affair with his girlfriend who died in an accident. But the "misunderstandings in speech" inevitably lead to a "growing brutality [...] - also in language" (A 96ff.). Jorge Semprún, Norbert Gstrein's laudator at the award ceremony of the Konrad Adenauer Foundation in Weimar, has precisely described how this language of Gstrein's

"destroys the conventional idioms and routines of language in order to present everything that seemed doomed to silence - that is, to loss and disappearance - in the fabulous light of the uttered, even if it remains, possibly, an ambiguous, even ambivalent light".

Stories from the Austrian 'Province'

The novel Das Register marks a decisive step towards the theme of O2. Once again, the leitmotifs of the previous stories appear: the failure to be Austrian, disgust with the world and oneself, loss of identity and linguistic distress; once again, the plot takes us to the valley worlds of South Tyrol, where "generations lived on the same spot, never leaving the village" (A 13), where on Sundays "the clatter of the tourist fakers hurt deep in the stomach" (A 52). But Gstrein distances himself - more clearly than before - from clichéd tourism criticism and larmoyant Austria-bashing. In keeping with the poetics of the novel, he presents a larger section of the world, expanded historical contexts and psychologically differentiated characters. The story is told in the style of a Tyrolean family chronicle about a pair of unequal brothers who set out into the world to seek "success at any or almost any price" (R 125) in skiing or to bury themselves in the biographies of famous mathematicians. It is not difficult to discern data from Gstrein's own family history behind this. His brother is a successful skier, he himself studied mathematics at Stanford, Erlangen and Innsbruck.

The Register is undoubtedly Gstrein's most autobiographical book, "a kind of fictional autobiography", as the author himself says. The title alludes to the father's habit of keeping meticulous records of all expenses "since birth", to which the self-tormenting question is attached: "Were we worth so much?" (R 83) By coming to terms with a father complex, the novel advances to a "sociology of provincial life" and to a "determination of the essence of the Austrian mentality", the core of which is a patriarchal pattern that manifests itself in the country's political history. Compared to the grandfather, one of those nouveau riche "tourism pioneers", the father, a disgraced teacher, is only a "domesticated, degenerate offspring" (R 62).

"Prehistories": Balloon Rides in Literature

There is definitely method in the way O2 literally rises from the familiar ambience of contemporary Austrian literature and gives shape in the form of the balloon to the hope mentioned in Gstrein's previous works, "to go on, beyond all borders" (R 17). The balloon in which Piccard set off on 27 May 1931 on his "legendary stratospheric flight", later recounted in the "report" Der Kommerzialrat (1995) in the style of "peasant kitsch and lie literature" (O 74f.), is a symbol of the distancing from the "classical" theme of Austria.

Piccard's balloon trip has a prehistory that plays along as a recursive, intertextual element "because every story had a prehistory, and every prehistory had a prehistory again, again and again" (O 22). On the one hand, it is presented as a "chronique scandaleuse surrounding the legendary stratospheric flight of the Swiss physicist Auguste Piccard [...]" (K 53) in Gstrein's Kommerzialrat, where it is faked as the boastful autobiography of the elementary school teacher Schatz, who in turn has appeared as a perspective figure in O2 - a significant catching-up intertextual self-reference.

On the other hand, this prehistory - if one disregards the experiments of Leonardo da Vinci, who in 1513 in Rome made hot-air-filled figures of saints rise into the sky, and Francesco Count Lana di Terzis, who invented a vacuum airship in 1670 - already begins on 5 June 1783 in Annonay with the first public (still unmanned) balloon ascent by the brothers Jacques-Etienne and Joseph-Michel Montgolfier, followed only a few months later by Jacques Alexandre César Charles' hydrogen balloon in Paris. The reactions to the world sensation ranged "from the deepest reverence for the achievements of the discoverers to dripping mockery of the after-effects, from religious doubts to euphoric expectations of the future" and also took hold of Goethe, who was not only interested in the scientific-technical aspects of the balloon flights in France and in German cities and took part in experiments himself, but also gained an aesthetic side from them: as a parable for the greatness and limit of artistry:

"Whoever witnessed the discovery of the air balloons will bear witness to the world movement that arose from it, the share that accompanied the airmen, the longing that arose in so many thousands of minds to take part in such long foreseen, predicted, always believed and always incredible, perilous wanderings [...]."

Ballooning as fiction

The flight, the preparations, the preliminary tests and the evaluation of the results, which Piccard described in his memoirs Between Earth and Sky (1946) and Above the Clouds, Beneath the Waves (1954) in the dry jargon of the specialist scientist, provide the framework of Gstrein's novella. He is not concerned with documentary reproduction of assured data and facts, but with "how a new kind of reality is constructed in the telling" (W 10). An indication of the fictionalisation of the material is the omission of Piccard's name, who is usually titled "Professor" (15, 18, passim). A curriculum vitae multiplied by the press introduces him:

"Born in Basel, he studied at the ETH Zurich and was a private lecturer and professor there, before his appointment to Brussels. The deciding factor in accepting it was not only that he became director of the Institute of Physics, but above all the assurance of an unrestricted budget. [...]. Before that, he had himself undertaken the first balloon flights, as a member of the Swiss Aeroclub, and was in the process of making a name for himself in aviation circles, not least with his much acclaimed lectures 'The Stability of Aircraft' and 'Theory of High Altitude Flights and Maximum Speeds'" (O 22f.).

The flight, which began early in the morning in Augsburg, lasted 17 hours and ended around 9 p.m. on a "rounded glacier" on the Gurglferner in Tyrol, is described in Gstrein's novella as a chain of mishaps, as a "'story of many misunderstandings'" (O 19f. ), from the "leak" (O 14) in the cabin wall, to the blocked valve line (O 33), the shortage of oxygen (O 59) and the constant checking of the pressure balance, to the near-accidental landing. In addition to the technical details, the descriptions of nature are particularly striking, such as the flight over an Alpine relief:

"chains of peaks spread out below us in all directions, it was a real sea, snow-covered or without snow, in the most rugged, forbidding places, a sight indeed to hold one's breath, and there were no words that could do it justice" (O 114f.).

The perception of the world from the unusual perspective of 16 kilometres above the ground alternates between admiration and curiosity, "strenuous looking" (O 17) and shivering (O 143) in the face of the mountain ranges, cloud formations and sections of sky seen from above. This change of perception, however, is usually experienced as threatening, as a loss of the familiar standpoint, as leaving the space and time continuum, to which returning seems like landing on a "different planet" (O 146). It is difficult to find a language for the "description of the transparent" beyond deficient observations and experiences of lack (such as the lack of oxygen). Influenced by the euphoria of altitude, the balloon's crew loses itself in reading serial stories from the newspaper and in the triviality of self-pitying or boastful love stories, "amorous anecdotes" (O 62) and "cheapest cliché images" (O 132), about which the professor orders silence shortly before landing.

Aviation as Ascension

Right at the beginning, the balloon is described as a "surprising moon" (O 8). This metaphor, shimmering between romanticism and astronomy and reminiscent of Robert Walser's visionary-postromantic balloon story, is an expression of a borderline experience. In Gstrein's work, too, the balloon flight leads to "a magical, dizzying height", to a "world without people" (O 149), but religious images are strictly rejected in the transcendentally homeless world of the aerial conquerors. Nevertheless, they have a subliminal effect precisely in this negation, for example when Piccard is described as "godlike in [his] incapacity" (O 39) or the new perception is reason to believe "if not in God, then at least in the four-dimensionality of space" (O 72f.).

Piccard's balloon journey is an ascension without God and without religion (cf. O 120f.). It reflects the expulsion of fantasy from aviation, which since 1900 in the "hands of thinkers and assassins" has been made increasingly serviceable for economic and military purposes, as Karl Kraus notes: "But I date the end of the world from the opening of airship travel". In the sixth chapter of the novella, Gstrein depicts this disenchantment of the air in a grandiose image, again inspired by Robert Walser's language. The thunderstorm that takes place over Augsburg in the evening intensifies into an apocalyptic judgment of heaven, the Augsburg Cathedral appears like "a huge ship, keel up, a Noah's Ark, capsized" (O 152). Only at this point does an authorial narrator intervene in the action, who from a meta-linguistic perspective compares this "quite ordinary storm" (O 149) with the Apocalypse. (O 149) with the Apocalypse. What is at stake is the principle of 'correct' narration, which is concerned with truth, not fidelity to fact, with the representation of the "constructedness of reality" (W 10). That is why "fantasies of salvation and rescue" (O 152) are alien to the story. Piccard remains at the mercy of the elements - and his own elementary needs - which he tries in vain to measure and calculate. In the skies, a "different world", other laws prevail.

Disenchantment of the air

Peter Sloterdijk - under the impression of the air attacks on the World Trade Center on 11 September 2001 - demonstrated in his essay Luftbeben (2002) how the practice of terror is related to the attacks on the breathing spaces in which modern man lives. In the age of atmospheric poisons, microbes discovered by Pasteur and Koch, and ABC weapons first used in the form of chlorine gases in World War I (1915), "the air has lost its innocence". In literature, Sloterdijk finds a key text that describes this loss of the notion of 'free air': Elias Canetti's Vienna speech on the occasion of Hermann Broch's 50th birthday (1936). Canetti saw in Broch the prophetic warner against the destruction of the life-sustaining atmosphere:

"But the greatest of all dangers that has ever arisen in the history of mankind has chosen our generation as its victim. It is the defencelessness of breath [...]. It is difficult to get too much of an idea about it. Man is as open to nothing as he is to air. In it he still moves like Adam in paradise [...]. Air is the last common good. It is shared by all. It is not pre-divided, even the poorest may take from it [...]. And this last, which was common to us all, is to poison us all together".

What is revealing here is not so much the criticism of the utopia of equality, but the principle of atmospheric multiplicities in Broch's novel poetics derived from these considerations. Broch legitimised his multi-perspectival writing with a new interpretation of the "alienation-critical motif of modernity": the "atmospheric separateness of people from one another".

In Gstrein's novella, too, this atmospheric constellation is staged from the beginning as fundamentally prone to disruption. It is not in the balloon, which stands "free in the air" like a "fantastically large drop", and its "gondola" that the first glimpses are given. This happening above the heads of the spectators is lifted from the "babble of voices" that takes place on the ground among the representatives of various social groups:

"Factory board and management - director and deputy director -, scientists, first and foremost meteorologists and physicists, aviation experts, aeronauts, pilots or whatever they call themselves, military men are among them, in uniform and in civilian clothes, secret service, representatives of the authorities, dignitaries, and only the chic is still too early" (O 8).

The account of the events inside the aluminium capsule that follows later is alienated from the narrative perspective by the change from the personal point of view of a "we", as whose speaker one can easily identify the professor's assistant due to the partly submissive, partly critical remarks, to an authorial narrative style. This change is sudden and frequent in order to break the "habits of vision and perception" (W 65) of the reader, who is intent on identifying with the gondola occupants. The reception-controlling strategy aims at language criticism. The aim is to make people aware of how the occupants of the airtight aluminium capsule, only 2.10 metres in diameter, threaten to suffocate on their word bubbles.

The novel is structured like "a molecular fabric". In seven chapters, the explorers of the stratosphere alternate with the admirers and envious who accompany and comment on their flight. These parallel plots are united by the balloon flight, but also by the attempts to find a language for the unusual perceptions in the stratosphere. Whether it is the amorous adventures that the aeronauts rave about as much as their supposed saviour Schatz, or whether it is the envy of the employees with which both the professor's assistant and the chauffeur of the dignitaries follow the goings-on of their superiors: the differences between the perspectives in the "balloon story" (O 72) are always blurred in such a way that it is not the narrator's location that is important, but his status. Gstrein's characters are unreliable chroniclers, authors of conjectural stories that have no alternative because there is no such thing as the one and right story.

That is why all those involved remain extras in a grotesque event. They want to say something: the prestige-addicted director of the Augsburg company from whose soil the balloon takes off, the sensation-hungry journalists, the gentleman's row of dignitaries who follow the balloon with the chauffeur Zeeh, the tipsy pedagogue who, accompanied by two village beauties, becomes the involuntary discoverer of the emergency-landed aeronauts. All the characters want to be more than they are: the director tries his hand at writing a jubilant brochure, the chauffeur plays at being a racing driver, the teacher a lifesaver and womaniser. Even Piccard's image as a "skyjacker, impostor or hero" (O 21) remains diffuse. It is not the courage of an expedition, but a questionable, even suspicious heroism of research that appears behind it, revealing the fatal aspects of utopian thinking: "the projective megalomania, the claim to totality, finality and novelty".

"Life Representative"

In a conversation with the Austrian Broadcasting Corporation on 17.11.1993, Gstrein described his heroes as "Lebensstellvertreter". Unlike most people, to whom this seems impossible to live, they represent a utopia that promises heaven on earth. One does not necessarily believe in these heroes, but "one needs them". Significantly, however, the explorers' flight of fancy ends with a rough landing, "without fantasies of salvation and rescue" (O 152). They find nothing in the sky that is not already to be found in themselves. Thus the balloon is an 'empty' metaphor in the truest sense of the word, empty and at first glance meaningless like the title of the novella.

O2 is the chemical formula for (molecular) oxygen, a "colourless, tasteless and odourless" gas (O 14). (O 14), which, as the largest component of air, makes earthly life possible and safe. In balloon flight, above a certain altitude, the oxygen supply for the passengers is just as essential for survival as the pressure equalisation in the cabin. But this is only the external reason for the title of the novel, which is alluded to in recurring references to meteorology, temperature, air pressure.

The formulaic disguise of oxygen also serves to disenchant the air, which takes place as a creeping process in the multiple happenings on the ground and in the sky. In the literally breath-taking activities in the balloon and the no less breathless 'earthly' chases for success, fame and love, the air becomes a space filled with thoughtless "conversations about banalities" (O 118), suspicions, exaggerations and conjectures and can only be perceived in sudden silence.

Balloon and media

That is why the novella also talks about air as a medium. Media are instances of conveying messages and have always played a quasi-military role in the transmission of auditory, visual and then also audiovisual signals. With the balloon, the air in Gstrein's novella has the primary task of transporting messages. The landing of the stratospheric conquerors is therefore described on the last pages of the novella as a grandiose media event. A (presumably historical) report from the Augsburger Zeitung is reproduced, which is primarily not about the balloon flight, but about the reporting that takes place in the frenzy of accelerated modernity:

"Ufa's film reporting did extraordinary things. With the first reporters, one of their cameramen was also on the spot the day after the landing, and he didn't hesitate, it went in no time, up to the glacier, shot, and in the evening he raced back to Munich. The airmail plane had already left. Special flight the next morning, take-off at 10, landing in Berlin at 2. Develop film, copy film, cut and assemble film. Speak text on tape, develop sound, copy sound. Original sound recordings were not possible for technical reasons. When the lights came on in the capital and people flocked to the film palaces, not even forty-eight hours after landing in a world-forgotten alpine valley, in fact, the first pictures were in the sound week, blurred, blurred, admittedly, of balloon and gondola, of the tiredly smiling aviators in front of a crowd of curious people, and it was a triumph of technology, it was more, it was something American, it was Hollywood with its glamour" (O 170f.).

The punchline of this epilogue is not only that the cameraman succeeds in bringing the news from the Alpine valley to the metropolis within 48 hours thanks to the most modern means of transport and presents it to a curious audience; in the process, the performance of the plane seems to trump that of the balloon. The highlighting of Universum-Film-Aktiengesellschaft, founded in 1917 as a joint venture of the German military, is also noteworthy. It was the Ufa's nationalist-influenced newsreel that, from January 1932, provided "the first pictures in the sound week" with a sound system that was considered the best at the time. In an artful refraction, Norbert Gstrein makes the new medium his subject: if there is a truth, then it is only "in the inconspicuousness of the marginal zones and the coincidences of the staffage", in the diversity of rumours and conjectures, newspaper reports and film footage. Thus, O2 is not only a historical novella and a fantastic tale, but also a lesson from the early history of modern media about the interplay of fact and fiction, original, fake and copy.

Author: Michael Braun

State: 2006

Comments:

(For better readability, footnotes have not been listed here on the website. However, they are included in the original essay).

* 21 June 1945 in Lemberg

† 21 March 2021 in Krakau

Poems like prayers - Obituary

Adam Zagajewski once describes how he came to write poetry in his memoirs "Ich schwebe über Krakau" (I am floating over Krakow) (2000): he had realised then that one can "shape prayer oneself". Writing is like praying, only without folded hands. And so he dared to give his poetry, essay writing and autobiographical writings a metaphysical shelter. And a cosmopolitan passport. The articulate cosmopolitan, the convinced European, the, so to speak, cosmo-Polish poet passed away in Poland on 21 March 2021.

Adam Zagajewski was born in Lviv in 1945 and returned to his homeland after two decades in Paris (1982-2002). In the USA, he taught for many years at the English Department of Houston University and at the University of Chicago. Zagajewski's poetry was religiously musical, but always politically engaged, never on the battlements of a party: "I want to deepen political impressions in my poetry, but not take sides in current events," he said in the KAS interview . He fought for the freedom of the word. In January 2016, he published a poem critical of the government in the Polish daily newspaper Gazeta Wyborcka. A few days after "9/11" he published his poem "Attempting to Sing of the Mutilated World" (English, in "The New Yorker", 17.09.2001). He was a spokesman for "Generation 68", whose programme he formulated in the manifesto "The Unrepresented World" (1974). Four years later, he participated in the work of the "Flying University", a semi-legal university institution independent of the state.

Adam Zagajewski's work belongs to Poland's literary canon and has found its way into encyclopaedias and school textbooks. Spiritually close to the Nobel Prize winners Czesław Miłosz and Wisława Szymborska, Zagajewski's work is inspired by religion, philosophy and politics. His poetry is historically deeply rooted in the history of Europe and at the same time of great modernity. Ironic and melancholic, with the "quiet music of the last questions", as the then head of the NZZ feuilleton Martin Meyer said in his laudation of the literature prize winner of the Konrad Adenauer Foundation on 2 June 2002 in Weimar. June 2002 in Weimar, Zagajewski continues to write the modern history of international poetry: in the poetry volumes "Mystik für Anfänger" (1997) and "Die Wiesen von Burgund" (2003), in the novel "Der dünne Strich" (1983), which goes back to a stay the author made in Berlin, in the political essays "Solidarität und Einsamkeit" (1986) and in numerous essays in the literary magazine "Sinn und Form".

Adam Zagajewski has received, after the Foundation's Literature Prize, other important prizes, the Eichendorff Literature Prize (2014), the Heinrich Mann Prize (2015) and the Order Pour le Mérite for Sciences and Arts (2019). When he was admitted to the German Academy for Language and Poetry in 2015, a knighthood for writers, he expressed his gratitude with a poetic "self-portrait". In it, translated from the Polish by Karl Dedecius, it says with the self-scepticism characteristic of Adam Zagajewski: "not all paths of the high world / cross with the paths of the life that, for the time being, / belongs to me".

Author: Michael Braun

State: 2021

* 25 June 1953 in Freiburg im Breisgau

"Writing is raising the dead"

In his fourth Frankfurt Poetics Lecture, Patrick Roth reports on Alfred Hitchcock's frustrating attempts to remember in the morning the mind-blowing and sensational things he had dreamed at night but always forgot after waking up. To avoid this in future, he put a pad and pencil on his bedside table. In the morning, while shaving, he remembered that he had once again dreamed a tremendous dream and had written it down on the paper in the middle of the night, and rushed to the pad and found the following words written on it: "boy meets girl".

This anecdote about the creation of one of the most famous success formulas from the Hollywood dream factory not only provides information about the sources from which Patrick Roth draws his material: besides film and literature, it is the Bible and depth psychology. With almost somnambulistic certainty, the author also formulates a basic principle of his storytelling: to let the reader sense something of the "fascination of the material" whose traces he follows in "dream, daydream, in imagination, fantasy" (FP 12) and which he sets out to recover, evaluate and narrate. It goes without saying that for a writer who has learned his cinematic craft from important American directors and has written numerous screenplays and radio plays, this does not work without a certain amount of suspense.

Biography

Patrick Roth moved to Los Angeles in 1975 as a DAAD scholarship holder - after studying languages and film in Paris and beginning his studies in English, Romance and German at the University of Freiburg - where he continued his English and film studies at the University of Southern California and worked as a director and screenwriter on various film projects. Today he lives in the north of the city, in Sherman Oaks, not far from Hollywood, the "Valley of Shadows" that much of his storytelling is about. The Valley of Shadows: This is also the title of his poetics lectures, which he gave in Frankfurt in spring 2002. As a work journal and workshop log, in which one can look over the author's shoulder as he searches for and finds material, and as a self-portrait describing the poet's search, this book has an almost revealing function for Patrick Roth's soul dramas.

Patrick Roth became known in the nineties for his Christ trilogy with its "effective staging of human and divine enigmas". These three prose works do not belong in the context of traditional Christian poetry. Aesthetic confessions and rhetorical declamations on matters of faith, as in the works of Stefan Andres, Werner Bergengruen, Rudolf Alexander Schröder or Reinhold Schneider, are alien to Roth's Christus novels. He is not concerned with a restoration of traditional Christian humanist values, not with an evocation of Christian hope for a different, 'holier' world. No antiquarian interest in the stories of the Bible is the guiding principle here, no self-proclaimed fifth evangelist leads the pen. When Patrick Roth ventures into the great biblical themes of death and resurrection, faith and fear, guilt and forgiveness, cruelty and love of God, he is, in Brecht's words, "correcting old myths". He deliberately deviates from the biblical tradition, he tells of mysteries and miracles that are not in the Bible. His new versions and variants of old stories are in the tradition of those fabulously apocryphal testament narratives that were deleted from the church canon in early Christianity for fear of heretical interpretations. And even where Roth sticks closely to the canon, he discovers unexplored side paths through the logic and combinatorics peculiar to his storytelling, such as a counterfactual to the legend of the Magi or a forgotten Bible verse in the story of Magdalene at the tomb. Patrick Roth transforms the history of the transmission of the biblical stories into a history of events of great contemporary diagnostic value.

Christ Trilogy

The central theme of the Christus trilogy, with which Roth continues the efforts of aesthetic modernism to explore the mystery of man and God, is the mystery of healing, raising the dead and resurrection. The first volume, the Christ novella Riverside (1991), reconstructs a healing story set in the time after Jesus' death. The leprous Diastasimos becomes pure by learning to transcend the limits of his ego in an encounter with the "Servant God" (R 85). He observes Jesus being arrested with his disciples John and Judas on the way from Jericho to Jerusalem and being cross-examined by a Roman centurion. When denial does not help, the disciples, in order to save their Lord, resort to the extreme means of "god-awful" love: they "whip their holiest [...] like a dog". Diastasimos marvels at how "insanely and desperately great" this "love of God" must be (R 82), and even more at the fact that Jesus literally takes his leprosy upon himself. With set pieces from the biblical Passion, the triple denial, the mockery and the interrogation, Roth transforms this miracle story into a "parable" of the saving power of faith, which must be experienced, experienced in one's own body and "gets lost in writing and noting down" (R 87).

In the novel Johnny Shines or The Raising of the Dead (1993), there is a leap in time to the American present. The title character, who moves from one Californian desert town to the next to call the dead back to life at open graves, is more than a self-proclaimed follower of Christ, more than just a crazy faith healer. The punchline of Johnny Shines' story lies in the fact that, through gruelling dialogue and torturous self-questioning, he must bring back to life the dead sister he shot in an act of tragic oversight. Only when Johnny Shines had "confessed all, understood all, and made day" (JS 162), is he able to free himself from this Atlas burden of memory. But the mystery of the raising of the dead remains shrouded - just as legends surround the sister's empty grave: "Some in Blade suspect that someone stole the dead woman's remains after the earthquake exposed the coffin. Others: the girl's body had neither been stolen nor ever dug up. [...] Some spoke of a miracle. They attributed it to my brother" (JS 163). At least this last sentence reveals the secret of the narrative perspective: Johnny's sister, who had been believed dead and was reawakened, turns out to be the narrator and interlocutor.

The final piece of the trilogy, the novel Corpus Christi (1996), again takes us back to the beginning of the Christian calendar, to the first Easter Sunday - and thus underlines the closed composition of the entire Christ trilogy. With Tirza, who allows herself to be locked in the rock tomb with the dead Jesus in order to experience the mystery of death and resurrection in a grandiose dream vision, Patrick Roth has once again drawn a fictional female figure from the biblical context with fine strokes. With her interlocutor, the doubter Thomas, who, unlike her, who "remembers completely, undamaged" (CC 179), asks for tangible "proof" (CC 102) of his Lord's resurrection, a prototype of modern man is moreover put to the test. Thomas wants to see so that he can believe. This credo is spoken into our visual age, in which the boundaries between fiction and reality have become so blurred that it is difficult to distinguish between faith and knowledge.

The Bible is undoubtedly a central key to Patrick Roth's work. He does not share the biblical scepticism of literary modernism, which considers God a "bad stylistic principle". When he places biblical figures with their strife and with their hope in the world of today, he does not have a message in mind to preach or moralise. Rather, the narrative itself, in which archaic images intersect with elements of contemporary pop culture and film, is crucial to the credibility of his concept. In Johnny Shines, for example, an apocryphal version of the legend of Daniel in the lion's den mixes with reminiscences of John Ford's classic western The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance. In this densely woven system of analogies and oppositions, space is created for new narratives that demand symbolic interpretation. In the midst of a world that has become transcendentally homeless, in which there seems to be no more room for gods and miracles, the narrator literally wants to mislead the secularised awareness of the feasibility of things, he wants to break through the superficial appearance of human self-importance. His "mythographic writing" (Hans-Rüdiger Schwab), which goes in search of the narrative origins of Christianity, broadens the horizon of the modern concept of reality and sharpens the senses for the existential questions of man buried under the achievements of the technologised and globalised modern age.

There are three key concepts for this mythographic writing in Roth's private mythology, which are described in detail in his Frankfurt lectures and vividly staged in one work each of the Christus trilogy. They are moments of dissociation that form a fundamental experience of disenchanted modernity as a disunion with the world and oneself, moments whose models are again highly significant figures from the Bible and myth. The "Magdalene second" is the moment of recognition in which man and God become "aware of each other again" after a painful separation (FP 111). Magdalene at the tomb, who searches for the dead Jesus and finds the Risen One, and the hermit Diastasimos, whose leprosy Jesus takes upon himself, carry out this "drama of transformation" by turning towards each other. The "Orpheus second" is the negative equivalent of the "Magdalene second": a "second of failure". Johnny Shines succumbs to it, and for a long time he is unable to bring his own guilt to consciousness and thus bring his sister, who was thought dead, back to life. Orpheus also succumbs to her, who turns against the gods' prohibition and "out of immaturity, out of lack of insight" (FP 43) loses the lover he thought he had saved from the underworld. She is resisted by Lou Sedermann, the "happier Orpheus" in Roth's first poetry lecture, who takes a fig tree branch from the house where his wife died 25 years ago, after fifty years of marriage. In the Bible, the fig tree testifies to a secure life (1 Kings 5:5) and to the nearness of God (Matthew 24:32f.). With this sign, without knowing of its meaning, the old man "saves memory from nostalgia" (FP 44). Finally, the "Thomas-second" is the moment when Thomas puts his finger into the wound of the Risen One (Jn 20) and thus feels in his own body the miracle of the Corpus Christi that he refused to believe. In this second of Thomas, if we follow Roth, writing and experience coincide, writing becomes "raising the dead" (FP 14).

"The living stands in the dead, the dead in the living, in each other and next to each other": Hardly any contemporary narrator has described the memento mori of our time - and the call to individuation it contains - so impressively and so lastingly. The German-American stories in the collection The Night of the Timeless, published in 2001, also describe revival experiences of a special kind. The time and place of the five stories is the night of the Los Angeles earthquake on 17 January 1994. Between "sundown" and "sunrise" is the "night" of the three middle stories, which are linked to the frame stories by a catastrophic experience in which existence is torn out of time and can be experienced in a vertical orientation, so to speak. Beneath the superficial shocks caused by the earthquake, the personal crises and the historical afflictions of the 20th century become visible. The "Night of the Timeless" in the title story, which revolves around the Dallas crime scene and the assassination of John F. Kennedy, is also a walk into the "Valley of Shadows", to the myths and archetypes of our existence, which remain a main task of the narrator to bring to light.

The synthesis succeeds in the language, which is schooled in the Bible and yet very modern, which uses the Socratic dialogue technique just as confidently as the psychoanalytical conversation and which is able to gain new attractions from the genre of the apocryphal Bible legend by means of cinematic suspense techniques. Patrick Roth is an author who narrates with a detective's delight in detail, whose arcs of suspense virtually drive the narrative forward. No less admirable is the way he knows how to write with the 'eye of the camera'.

This is also true of Patrick Roth's autobiographically based narrative My Journey to Chaplin (1997), a cinematic revival story. On New Year's Day in 1976, the narrator sets off for Vevey, Switzerland, to make the impossible possible: a visit to the great filmmaker and actor Chaplin. This time it is about an abruptly exposed moment of recognition - borrowed from Chaplin's film City Lights (1930) - the "most sacred moment in film history" (MR 71), in which Patrick Roth knows how to describe the visible in the invisible, an hour of true sensation.

Poetry as an expedition into the dark continent of our soul, as an archaeology of the mystery of the human being: this is how the author's poetics can be described, which at its core aims at a paradoxical but always possible re-encounter of the human being with that Other which he perceives as alien, as mysterious, as uncanny. Patrick Roth's stories literally put these primal scenes of re-encounter and recognition to the test. They search for image bridges from the unconscious to the conscious, from fragmentation to wholeness, from the aloofness of people to their closeness. They lead us out of the habit of our four walls and open up a quintessence, a qualitatively new level of experience beyond familiar perceptions - in the sense of the ethical and poetic maxim in the fifth lecture on poetics: "Live with the knowledge of evil, be humble in the good: No fiction" (FP 170).

Author: Michael Braun

State: 2003

Comment:

(For better readability, footnotes have not been listed here on the website. However, they are included in the original essay).

* 17 August 1953 in Nițchidorf

"Freedom of the word"

Good literature requires the freedom of the word. Herta Müller's work bears witness to this in a unique way. It survived the Ceauşescu dictatorship, from which the author, born in 1953 in the Banat German town of Nitzkydorf, fled to the Federal Republic of Germany in 1987 after long harassment, and also overcame it in the true sense of the word. Herta Müller described the everyday life of the dictatorship with courage, perspicacity and that confidence in the free artistic word that does not allow itself to be taken in by any power, let alone suppressed.

Work and biography

Herta Müller's work is one of the most important oeuvres of contemporary German-language literature. It consists of three novels, seven volumes of short prose and stories, and four volumes of essays and speeches, all published over a period of 20 years.

Herta Müller's central theme is the history of first the national, then the real socialist dictatorship. She recorded her experiences with her parents' generation of perpetrators, the German minority in Romania and the functionaries, informers and fellow travellers of the Ceausescu dictatorship with unrelenting consistency before and after her emigration to the Federal Republic of Germany (1987). For example, her dismissal as a translator because of her refusal to cooperate with the Securitate; the harassment she had to endure in her jobs as a kindergarten teacher and teacher; the spying on her by her best friend; the censorship and prevention of her literary works.

She herself writes: "Books about bad times are often read as testimonies. My books are also necessarily about bad times, about the amputated life in the dictatorship, about the outwardly ducked, inwardly self-important everyday life of a German minority and its later disappearance through emigration to Germany."

The theme of the Banat Swabian village world dominates the first works from the short stories of the debut volume Niederungen (1982) to the prose volume Der Mensch ist ein großer Fasan auf der Welt (1986). This prose is about the exemplary suffering experienced through the repressive normality of the village, which is characterised by collective pressure to conform, hardening of thought, superstition, nationalism and blindness to history. The formal consequences are literary anti-idylls, critical and satirical village chronicles.

The second phase of the work, actually a transitional phase, is marked by emigration to Germany, the experience of home in a foreign land and the foreignness of home. The historical horizon is broadened: In the prose sketches Barfüßiger Februar (Barefoot February, 1987) and in the volume Reisende auf einem Bein (Travellers on One Leg, 1989), not only the political situation in Romania is more strongly included (personality cult, corruption, psychological terror), but also the memory of the Holocaust - which many Romanian Germans keep silent about. Poetologically, too, Herta Müller expanded the spectrum of her production in this phase with essays and political speeches.

After the fall and death of the Romanian dictator Ceausescu in December 1989, Herta Müller returned to her original theme in epic poetry: "the past, right-wing dictatorship that sits in the biography of the father, and the existing left-wing dictatorship in which one's own life runs". But in the process she finds new forms of representation: literary reportage (at the end of 1989 she was travelling in Romania for German-language newspapers) and above all the novel. The first novel, Der Fuchs war damals schon der Jäger (1992), deals with the final days of a totalitarian dictatorship; with its fast-paced scene changes, the novel is committed to cinematic narrative techniques and was written on the basis of the screenplay for the feature film Der Fuchs der Jäger (Herta Müller and Harry Merkle). The second novel Herztier (1994), which takes us back to the 1970s and 1980s and describes childhood, studies and the first professional years in a village in Banat Swabia, is a book about fear and betrayal. The third novel Heute wär ich lieber mir nicht begegnet (1997) also revolves around the traumatisation of the dictatorship experience.

In the last decade, Herta Müller has also distinguished herself as an author of lyrical image-text collages and poetological essays. If in the collages she experiments with the formal inventory of postmodernism, her essays (Hunger und Seide, 1995; Der König verneigt sich und tötet, 2003) document the political and historical conditions of writing. They are critical reflections on the spoken word: "Language was and is nowhere and at no time an apolitical enclosure, for it cannot be separated from what one does with the other".

Political significance

Literary critics and scholars have highlighted the political relevance and the great contemporary diagnostic content of Herta Müller's work:

1. As a chronicler of everyday life in the dictatorship, she contributes to the chronicle of exodus and expulsion. Her contemporary novels document Eastern European historical memory. They describe the problems of national minorities and dissidents under the dictatorship. In this they are "political didactic pieces" (Verena Auffermann in her laudation on the occasion of the award of the Zuckmayer Medal, 2002).
2. Her protest is directed against prescribed thinking and incapacitated speech in dictatorship as well as against any dogmatic determination. She is a relentless advocate of the basic personal value of freedom. She calls for freedom to be perceived as a task for the future - not just as a gift - and to draw the right lessons from the history of dictatorship: "Every society must learn from the extreme situation for normality, from dictatorship for democracy".
3. For Michael Naumann, Herta Müller continues in poetry what 20th century historiography was not able to do: to present the "techniques of survival in a reign of terror that lies between silent conformity, ducking away, silence or flight into shared psychological self-assurance among dissidents". According to Naumann, her latest collection of essays is an exemplary "poetics of poetry in dictatorships" (Die Zeit, 5.2.2004).

Poetological-aesthetic meaning

The poetological-aesthetic status of Herta Müller's works has been highlighted in literary anthologies, encyclopaedia articles, dissertations and laudations.

1. She writes in a materially compact, figuratively concrete style and a crystal-clear, persistent language that is made up of memories that have come alive and whose poetic truth bursts forth from the fear of death and the rage to survive.
2. Her books reveal autobiographical material. However, this autobiographical material is alienated. This makes it clear that the decay of a state and the corruptibility of human beings is preceded by the decay of language. Herta Müller's novels and essays are "documents of a rigorous scepticism of language" (Friedmar Apel 2002). Even the portrayal of the Banat village milieu, distorted into the satirical and grotesque, is initially motivated by language criticism. Banat Swabia is for Herta Müller what Austria was for Thomas Bernhard. A reservoir of material and motifs, but also a source of friction.
3. Herta Müller cultivates the ethnographic-intercultural view of the foreign. Her poetics of the "foreign gaze" documents the damage done by dictatorship, especially to members of ethnic minorities: "For me, foreign is not the opposite of known, but of familiar. The unfamiliar does not have to be foreign, but the familiar can become foreign".
4. Among the Romanian authors who emigrated in the 20th century (Canetti, Cioran), Herta Müller is one of the most important. Among the group of authors who left Romania in the 1980s, she is the only one to have retained a lasting position in literary life.

National and international awards

Herta Müller has received great critical acclaim nationwide and internationally. Peter von Matt praises the laconic nature of her language: "The drier these reports from ordinary life come across, the more haunting, poignant the storytelling becomes" (FAZ, 29.9.1992). For Frank Schirrmacher, she is "one of the most credible writers of our time". Walter Hinck points out in his laudatory speech at the Kleist Prize award ceremony (1994): "Herta Müller does not preach retribution, and she abhors false suspicion, but as an advocate of the victims she does not allow herself to be bribed by false reconciliation either. She does her part to keep our historical memory clear-headed."

Müller's work has been honoured with numerous prestigious literary awards: the aspekte Literature Prize (1984), the Ricarda Huch Prize of the city of Bernstadt (1987), the Marieluise Fleißer Prize (1989), the Roswitha Memorial Medal of the city of Gandersheim (1990), the Critics' Prize, Literature Division (1992), the Kleist Prize (1994), the Ida Dehmel Literature Prize (1998), the Franz Kafka Prize (1999), the Cicero Speaker Prize (2001), the Zuckmayer Medal (2002), the Josef Breitbach Prize (2003); She will soon be awarded the Literature Prize of the Konrad Adenauer Foundation (2004). The announcement of the award ceremony at the end of 2003/beginning of 2004 received an extraordinarily large response in the press.

Among her international awards, the Rauriser Literature Prize (1985), the Kranichstein Literature Prize (1991), the European Literature Prize "Aristeion" (1995), the Literature Prize of the City of Graz (1997) and the IMPAC Dublin Literary Award (1998) are worthy of mention. Herta Müller is a member of the Darmstadt Academy for Language and Poetry.

Her great international recognition in academia is documented by a series of guest professorships: at the universities of Hamburg and Bochum (1995), at the Technical University of Zurich (2001) and at the German Literature Institute in Leipzig (2002). In 1998, she held the Brothers Grimm Professorship at the GH University Kassel. Herta Müller was writer in residence at the University of Warwick (1992), at Dickinson College Carlisle (1996), at the University of Florida in Gainsville (1998) and at the Literaturhaus Basel (2000). He has also lectured on poetics at the universities of Paderborn (1989), Bonn (1996) and Tübingen (2001).

Author: Michael Braun

State: 2004

* 21 June 1934 in Klipphausen near Meißen

† 14 December 2022 in Bad Berka

Word keepers and word renewers

Biography

Born on 21.6.1934 as the son of a stonemason in Klipphausen near Meißen, Wulf Kirsten began studying German and Russian at the University of Leipzig (1960-1964) after completing a commercial apprenticeship. After working briefly as a teacher and consultant in the building industry, he worked as an editor at the Aufbau publishing house in Weimar from 1965 to 1987.

Kirsten demonstrated backbone under the SED dictatorship, which led to his being "studiously omitted" from the literary scene as a merely tolerated author, in his own words. "I never relied on a doctrine and believed that utopias are utopias," Kirsten says.

Shortly after Wolf Biermann's expatriation, Kirsten had to cancel readings in the Federal Republic without giving any reasons. Until January 1977, Kirsten was responsible for young writers' work in the Erfurt district association of the GDR Writers' Association. After his resignation from this position, an Operativer Vorgang (operational case) was initiated against him by the GDR's state security (significantly named OV "Lektor"). Kirsten's letter of protest (dated 14 June 1979) to the president of the GDR Writers' Association, Hermann Kant, against the expulsion of nine Berlin authors from the association left nothing to be desired in terms of clarity and determination.

Kirsten was politically active during the years of German unification. After the collapse of the GDR, he became active in the citizens' movement "New Forum" at the end of 1989, participated in the dissolution of the Weimar State Security and served as a member of the committee investigating corruption and abuse of office. For the "New Forum" he entered the Weimar city parliament in the first free municipal elections in the GDR (18.3.90) and was parliamentary group leader here until October 1990.

Works

Wulf Kirsten has produced an extensive literary oeuvre consisting of a large number of volumes of poetry, narrative prose, essays, speeches and editions. His poetic existence is fulfilled above all in his poetry, which is collected in the volume "Erdlebenbilder" (2004), published on the occasion of his 70th birthday. After his successful poetry debut ("Satzanfang", 1970), Wulf Kirsten, hailed by Reiner Kunze as "the greatest hope of GDR poetry", also became known in the Federal Republic from the mid-1970s. With the poetry collection "Die Erde bei Meißen" (1986) and the Peter Huchel Prize awarded the following year, the author found great public resonance in Western media as well.

The essays ("Textur", 1998) and editions document the life of an homme de lettres, an excellent connoisseur, promoter and mediator of German-language literature. Essays on fellow poets (e.g. Sarah Kirsch), anthologies on the German ballad, for example, and books with precise documentary research such as "Die Schlacht von Kesselsdorf" (1984) bear witness to this. Kirsten's autobiography "Die Prinzessinnen im Krautgarten" (2000) tells of her village childhood between the war and its end.

Political and literary significance

Kirsten has made a name for himself above all as a poet of nature poetry rooted in Upper Saxony. "The earth near Meissen" is the root and main material of his work. Kirsten is the poetic historian of this region on the heights of the Elbe between Dresden and Meißen, a "lyrical surveyor" (Jochen Hieber). His poetry underlines the importance of a Europe of regions. His affinity with village home and everyday working life is free of provincial self-sufficiency and the Germanophilia of traditional homeland poetry. The landscapes in the poems are always historical and cultural landscapes as well. Thus he succeeds in integrating social and historical references, for example in the poem "september am ettersberg". The Weimar volume "Der Berg über der Stadt" (2003) is a document of the eventful history of an exemplary German place and the tensions between Goethe and Buchenwald.

At the same time, the poet Kirsten was and is - even when environmental protection was not yet an issue - a preserver of a landscape threatened by civilisation and ecology, destroyed by collectivisation, planned economy, urbanisation and modernisation. This soullessly trained landscape appears to be the work of man. Kirsten's view of nature is therefore always based on the preservation of a humane existence. Walter Hinck emphasises Kirsten's "ecological consciousness without the tendency towards ecological correctness". Thus Kirsten can certainly be called an innovator of nature poetry in terms of its political potency.

Kirsten's poems make critical comments on the state of language in the present. His concern for German language culture is evident in the resistance of his poetic language as well as in his co-founding of the "Council for German Orthography" (2004, with Reiner Kunze and Thomas Hürlimann, among others). As a language archaeologist - who has been working on the "Dictionary for Upper Saxon Dialects" since 1962 - Kirsten sharpens the view of our times and appeals for responsible language use.

This makes it clear: language criticism is a contribution to shaping a humane future. The poems focus on the sustainability of language as a humane value. Kirsten himself speaks of "word consciousness as life consciousness, [the] unity of language and thought as moral word structure". By collecting and preserving dialectal idiosyncrasies of his homeland and the "voice gravel" of a modernity that has forgotten history, and placing them in the midst of our time, Kirsten is able to bring the past into the present and highlight the power of resistance of individual life stories against collectivisation and ideological doctrination: "im handgepäck die kleinen wortrechte / ausgesiedelte lebensgeschichten". Martin Walser writes: "The Kirsten language is a language in which one can provision oneself against speed, adaptation, loss".

Kirsten's poetology is characterised by precision, conscientiousness and a poetic sense of responsibility. His verse is programmatic: "on word roots i take root". His poems, which avoid all pathos, weight of meaning and emotionality, are grainy, rough, expressive and lively. Kirsten distrusts anything that rolls off the tongue and practices a verse method of sharp outlining, laconic abbreviation, the constriction of the old and the current. He picks up hot irons, but prefers quiet, deliberative tones. His preferred lyrical form is the narrative poem, not the slogan or the thought poem.

Wulf Kirsten's works are a decisive vote for "art as a daughter of freedom" (Schiller) and for the humane potential of poetic language. As a preserver and innovator of words, chronicler and contemporary, he is one of the most important German poets of the present day.

Author: Michael Braun

State: 2005

* 13 January 1975 in Munich

The world surveyor

Biography and work

Kehlmann was born in Munich in 1975, the son of the Austrian theatre and television director Michael Kehlmann and an actress, and has lived in Vienna since 1981. There he studied philosophy and German language and literature, wrote a dissertation on the sublime in Kant and worked at the Austrian Academy of Sciences. He has two passports.

The debut novel Beerholms Vorstellung (1997), written by a 21-year-old, was well received by Austrian and German critics, but did not make it into the major feuilletons. The same is true of the short stories Under the Sun (1998). Both books were published by the Austrian Deuticke Verlag. The second novel Mahlers Zeit (1999), which Kehlmann published with Suhrkamp, received high praise in the Neue Zürcher Zeitung as "the work of a finished writer" (12.10.1999). The next novel Ich und Kaminski (2003), a satire on the contemporary culture industry, and the novella Der fernste Ort (2001), whose charm lies in the fact that it can be read as a criminalistic story of a disappearance without a trace or as a philosophical etude on being and time, were also published by Suhrkamp.

In 2004/05, the author moved to Rowohlt Verlag. There he published the essay collection Wo ist Carlos Montúfar? (2005). It contains essays on Kehlmann's literary 'guiding lights': Stendhal, Tolkien, Salinger, Updike and Carver, among others, which provide the author with a small poetics of his writing. The core statement in the title essay of the volume is that "truth, if truth at all, becomes visible only in retrospect and from a distance, and that narrative, unlike historiography, demands something other than fidelity to the facts" (p. 18): namely, fidelity to the truth, even if it has to be 'invented', and to the freedom of the word, even if it stands in contrast to reality.

Die Vermessung der Welt (Rowohlt Verlag 2005) is Kehlmann's most successful book, indeed probably the most successful novel in German literature of the last 60 years, which has since achieved European, even world renown, "an exquisite reading pleasure" (NZZ, 18.10.05). The novel was nominated for the German Book Prize even before it was published, was a top title on the bestseller lists (over 400,000 copies sold in February 2006, but strangely only 14,700 in Austria), had translation and licensing rights in 20 countries; and in America, where contemporary German literature has a hard time, a translation was published by Pantheon Books in summer 2006. Commercial and artistic success are not mutually exclusive!

Meanwhile, the 30-year-old Kehlmann has been celebrated as the "greatest talent of younger German literature" (SZ, 24.9.05). Not since Enzensberger, Handke and Grünbein has there been such a successful young author in German literature. What is new, however, is that Kehlmann, unlike these authors who celebrated debut successes, only went from insider tip to star author with his seventh book.

Awards

Kehlmann's novels and short stories, which have been translated into more than a dozen languages, have (as of 2006) received a number of awards: in 1998 the Förderpreis des Bundesverbandes der Deutschen Industrie, in 2003 the Förderpreis des Österreichischen Bundeskanzleramtes, in 2005 the Candide Prize of the city of Minden. In 2000 he received a scholarship from the Literary Colloquium Berlin, and in 2001 he held the Mainz Poetry Lectureship. The Literature Prize of the Konrad Adenauer Foundation was Daniel Kehlmann's first award in 2006!

Literary and political significance

• Kehlmann's themes are the adventure of science, the danger of untimely discoveries, the relationships between art, philosophy, physics/mathematics. In his novel Die Vermessung der Welt (2005), he links natural science and poetry in the historically unique [in Berlin in 1828], fictitiously richly embellished encounter of the natural scientist Alexander von Humboldt with the "prince of mathematics" Carl Friedrich Gauss. Both measure what holds the world together at its innermost and outermost: Humboldt maps Central America, collects plants, explores volcanoes, climbs Chimborazo and finds the Orinoco Canal, Gauss stays in the Kingdom of Hanover, maps the mind (an early version of mental mapping) and develops the doctrine of the curvature of space, the integral theorem and other groundbreaking formulae, but the art of living remains foreign to both.

• Kehlmann's Die Vermessung der Welt reflects the great tradition of Weimar Classicism: the values of philanthropy, friendship, tolerance and humanity are shown in their greatness, but also in their limitations for the intercultural dialogue of modernity. Humboldt and Gauss are among the "greatest ambassadors of the humanistic principle of cosmopolitanism", but they have also "blotted out a lot of chaos" (Spiegel interview with Kehlmann, 5.12.2005). The KAS scholarship holder and writer Andreas Maier has therefore spoken in the audio book of the "unsuitability for life" of these "classics out of sheer effort of will".

• "What is science doing to the world?" (Kehlmann in Hamburger Morgenpost, 29.9.2005). Kehlmann shows that quantifying, calculating and measuring the world does not mean understanding it. Ambivalence of knowledge: It can liberate through knowledge of the world, but it can also enslave through rigorous submission to the power of the factual.

• Question of intellectual freedom and social responsibility: What obligation to society do top researchers have, do artistic geniuses have? Kehlmann's anti-heroes are all endangered by misanthropy or delusions of grandeur.

• Kehlmann's interest in the phenomenon of giftedness is striking. Again and again geniuses play the leading roles, in the first novel a "sorcerer's apprentice" at an elite boarding school, in Mahler's time a mathematician going mad over his discovery of the secret of time. In the latest novel, he shows that misguided high talent (Humboldt's compulsion to control and emotional poverty, Gauss's hostility to people and family) leads to world confusion. In this way, Kehlmann's work is an important contribution to the elite discussion.

• Literary characteristics: Kehlmann's stories and novels artfully unite two strands of German literature: the realist tradition (open ending, understatement, laconism, unspectacular themes) and that of fantasy and the experimental novel (philosophical and scientific themes, embellished episodics, anecdotal storytelling). Added to this is the virtue of humour, praised by critics everywhere.

• One feature of Kehlmann's success is the combination of non-fiction and light novel: his books are not novels about events "of TV series-like notoriety", but journeys of discovery into worlds of knowledge from which "one can take something that one did not yet know" (H.M. Enzensberger in FAZ, 26.1.06).

• Kehlmann's works translate the question of what man is into the language of our time: it is about the relationship between vita activa and vita contemplativa, between empiricism and abstraction, about the relation of mind and body, about the necessity of remembering and the risk of forgetting, about surveying the world and human presumption, about the problem of the limit of knowledge and progress.

• Kehlmann is a bridge-builder between cultures who moves playfully and unstrainedly in scientific and philosophical fields of knowledge and makes plausible the limits of today's cosmos of knowledge, which is measured in the smallest as well as the largest. "The most exciting adventures of the human spirit today take place in the natural sciences," he says in Der Spiegel (5.12.2005). Kehlmann writes on the front lines of the problems of our time, observing the spectacle of the world with gentle irony. He marks the historical point at which the project of enlightenment is endangered by attacks on human dignity and freedom. In this way, his works exert a liberating effect on the reader.

• At the same time, Kehlmann poses the crucial question of the source and legitimacy of contemporary values: If the gap between the scientifically trained and the philosophically-historically educated elite continues to widen, from which culture can people today still derive ethical standards? "I find it impressive to read in Dostoevsky that without God there is no morality. But in practice that doesn't help us, because the strangest moral concepts refer to God. I think Kant is right when he justifies God from ethics - and not ethics from God" (Spiegel interview, 5.12.2005).

Author: Michael Braun

State: 2006

* 1 June 1956 in Zürich

"Servant of the ameliorating truth"

In the summer of 2006, when Günter Grass reminded himself and the whole world of the SS chapter of his biography that had been kept secret until then, a small book by Petra Morsbach entitled Über die Wahrheit des Erzählens (On the Truth of Narrative) also appeared on the market, unnoticed by most. Almost prophetically, this volume of essays, which after four novels by the author draws the poetological subtotal of an astonishingly continuous and multifaceted oeuvre, anticipated essential themes of the Grass debate at the time: the question of the author's intellectual freedom, his relationship to truth and religion, the relation of literature and criticism, the special nature of literary memory.

Russian beginnings

Who is Petra Morsbach, with whom the Handbuch Christliche Literatur für unsere Zeit (Handbook of Christian Literature for Our Time), published in 2007, concludes a handsome series of canon-capable authors? Born in Zurich in 1956 as the daughter of an engineer, Petra Morsbach studied theatre studies, psychology and Slavic studies in Munich from 1975 onwards and has frequently spent time in Russia since 1978. She learned the Russian language, studied at the Leningrad Theatre Academy as an exchange student in 1981/82 and did her doctorate on the playwright and storyteller Isaak Babel in 1983. Out of love for opera - even before completing her master's degree, she produced her first production with Handel's "Belshazzar" (in German translation) - she worked as an assistant and dramaturge at various music theatres, then as a freelance director for three and a half years. At the end of 1990, she quit directing because she wanted to direct her own stories. And her wealth of experience is full to the brim, especially since her time in Russia.

Naturally, her first book Und plötzlich ist es Abend (1995) is a Russia novel. But the location of her literary debut did not initially bring her luck. A chapter from the novel manuscript she read aloud at the Klagenfurt Literature Festival was slated. Petra Morsbach was not deterred by the rejections from renowned publishers and won over Hans Magnus Enzensberger, who was eager to discover her novel. Enzensberger, enchanted by the epic qualities and the film-cut-like scene technique of the novel, to which he attributed "Döblinsches format", arranged for her to be published by Eichborn Verlag. The book became a success, a longseller, a critically acclaimed work of recent German Russian literature.

Petra Morsbach finds the title of the novel in the Sicilian Nobel Prize winner Salvatore Quasimodo: "Ognuno sta solo sul cuor della terra / trafitto da un raggio di sole / ed è sùbito sera." - "Everyone stands alone on the heart of the earth / penetrated by a ray of sun / and suddenly it is evening". From this nucleus grows the epic large-scale narrative, which is divided into chapters in a small way and thus also told in a clear way. At the centre of the novel is Lyusya, a popentocher, factory worker and canteen hostess, a Russian Mother Courage who fights her way through the thicket of Soviet cities with varying degrees of skill.

"A tremendous amount happens in this novel, and a lot of monstrous things happen," one reviewer pointed out. "After all," Ljusja sums up in one of the book's many short chapters, which read like a "string of pearls of short novels", she has had "intelligent, important men so far: the literary man Boyarov, the academic Tretyakov, the successful speculator Pasha. They were all idiots, but they had above-average talent and were definitely interesting. And after this Ivan Sergeyich, the Russian Vanya, the former Chekist and Stalin's henchman, the corrupt apparatchik devoted to vodka? Would that be a step down, quite apart from the unresolved moral question?"

Question of meaning and faith

No omnipotent narrator's voice helps Ljusja out of her distress. Petra Morsbach lets her characters speak entirely for themselves and from themselves, without isolating them naturalistically in their milieu. At the same time, Lyusya's life with its changing partnerships is exemplary for modern Russian history, which is told from the founding phase of the Soviet Union through the Stalin era to its decline. The question of meaning and faith is always at stake. Thus, in the 400th chapter, a former political prisoner and emigrant blames God for humanity's misery because "he accepted Abel's sacrifice, but spurned Cain's. [...] Dissonance and torment have been on the earth ever since, and the poor artists iron it out in their touching attempts to harmonise the hopeless mess for a few moments."[6] Petra Morsbach describes her characters in such a way that their lives are tragic as a whole, but also comic in detail. Tragicomedy, she says, "sums up the contradictions of life, its wit and its futility. It shatters and reconciles at the same time, and these feelings do not cancel each other out but reinforce each other."

Artist of "dense description"

From then on, Petra Morsbach opened up a different life world with each subsequent book. The "art of dense description" saves her from the danger of the milieu novel of stylising the environment as fate. This art is one of narration. It perceives the world linguistically. The opera novel, published in 1998 in Enzensberger's series Die Andere Bibliothek, is not an insider novel only for opera lovers, but an epic drama from the world of music in five acts. Using five repertoire pieces as examples - from Wagner's Tristan und Isolde to Brahms' Deutsches Requiem - Morsbach stages the great hopes and small life lies of a provincial theatre ensemble from the prima donna to the canteen hostess, without ever letting the view behind the scenes seem indiscreet. The opera in the opera novel is a miniature social cosmos in which the director assigns the role compartments and brings together the extremes with almost somnambulistic certainty: "the sublime and the ridiculous, intensity and intrigue, enthusiasm and envy, devotion and greed".

The title of Petra Morsbach's third novel should not be taken too literally either. Die Geschichte mit Pferden (2001) is, without any equestrian romance, the female variation of the master-and-servant theme, a revealing study of social exploitation and life lies. The narrator is a woman in her declining years who has taken a job as a cook at a North German equestrian farm and experiences how the guests and staff are fleeced through the teeth by the posh boss and her husband. The heroine also wrestles with the dreamless unhappiness of her own past and seeks liberation from the "senseless love" for her sick husband.

The Harpsichord Player (2008) is a novel about the fictional harpsichord player Moritz Bauer, who has lost his sight. The case of blind musicians, who are six times more likely to have the gift of absolute hearing than their sighted colleagues, is well known. We know from neurologists that blind musical geniuses benefit particularly from their apparently indestructible memory for tones: they not only hear melodies, they virtually hear with the melodies. Morsbach's novel describes the painful birth of the artist from an unmusical family that initially has only ignorance and hysteria for the child prodigy. The novel vividly describes how the young talent frees himself from this milieu, composes fugues in G minor, acquires an expensive instrument, an excellent education and, with Bach's "Chromatic Fantasy and Fugue", a piece from the royal class of harpsichord playing. The second and much longer part of the novel is dedicated to his concert career, which leads from the study of church music via the conservatoire to the European concert stage. There, a series of private patrons of the arts provide for a cushioned life of travel, which includes cruises and luxury villas, truffles and champagne, as well as the casual tolerance of "better society" towards homosexual partnerships. But the harpsichordist, having arrived at the lower end of the upper ten thousand, experiences a wishful misfortune. The market value of his genius, which is made up of 40 per cent each of diligence and connections, and only 20 per cent of talent, depends heavily on the public's interest in harpsichord music, which dwindled in the 1990s. And on the whim of his patrons, who are demanding but ultimately just consumers, driven by "striving for prestige, identification with success". Petra Morsbach demonstrates the tensions between artistic freedom, public taste and the spirit of the times in a vivid way and with a sense for comic moments. The harpsichord player warns against overestimating artistic genius, but at the same time reminds us to respect the "brilliance, drama and imagination" of great music.

Chronicler without a message

Since her first three novels at the latest, Petra Morsbach has been considered an established figure on the book market. Among storytellers, she is a "precise ethnographer", a researcher, a chronicler without a message: "I don't filter my observations through a worldview concept, I don't give them a 'spin' and I don't tell readers what to think of the stories." Important writing prerequisites for her are observation, empathy and imagination, always in accordance with shapable reality. On her homepage, the author explained her concept of realism as follows: "A realist author should adapt his interpretation to reality, not the other way round. The more reality he grasps, the more meaningful is his testimony." The aim of this description of reality, which is as accurate as possible from a life-world perspective, is truth. This 'truth' is not a term for a mere depiction of art and nature, but an "enriching version of life" and a religiously underpinned claim, as one also learns from the catalogue of questions on her homepage: "Without being able to prove the truth, I dedicate my life to it. It's quite difficult, risky and sometimes ridiculous - but it's exactly what I have to do, a so-called vocation I guess."

The principle of truth determines the work on what is perhaps her most important novel to date: Gottesdiener (2004). It deals with a delicate subject, the priestly novel, on which some authors have made a mess of themselves, and only a few have proven themselves; Stefan Andres (Die Versuchung des Synesios, 1971), Dieter Wellershoff (Der Himmel ist kein Ort, 2009) and Michael Göring (Der Seiltänzer, 2011) would be among the latter. Petra Morsbach did extensive research for her book, she attended Jesuit lectures, studied missals and Catholic rituals, participated in retreats and pilgrimages and interviewed many priests who were willing to do so. But she threw to the wind the recommendation to attach a mistress to the priest-hero and to take up the subject of child abuse. Although she draws philosophical, moral and spiritual parallels between priests and writers, she does not want to be understood as an author of "Catholic novels", which, according to Martin Mosebach, are a burden on artistic work because they deny the absurd and humour and in the end allow "grace to triumph after the most difficult challenges":

"Not even determined Catholics like Graham Greene, Martin Mosebach, Heimito von Doderer and Evelyn Waugh have written Catholic novels. Good literature explores life, it must be, as it is called today, 'open-ended'. But on this path of free search, it can get to the roots of what is also the best side of Christianity: humanity, grace."

Gottesdiener is a portrait of a Bavarian country priest and his congregation that dispenses with transfiguration and folklore. Of course it is about the priestly hardships of life and love, about the question of why someone becomes a priest and why he remains one. But behind it, the profound change in basic Christian values becomes just as visible as the search for spiritual and social orientation in the changing values of our society. The priest, a "religious machine in a state of implosion", embodies the possibilities and limits of religion in media modernity. According to Burkhard Spinnen, in this "study on the state of residual transcendence in the Christian Occident", the author also makes an "excellent contribution to the debate on our inner position vis-à-vis Islamic fundamentalism, which is otherwise often somewhat lacking in material"[18] But the religious elevates Petra Morsbach's novels beyond a world-immanent narrative. What she said in her acceptance speech for the Jean Paul Prize in October 2013 at the Munich Residenz about Jean Paul's speech of the dead Christ from the world building that there is no God, one of the earliest documents of literary atheism, also applies to her own storytelling. It rewards with recognition and redemption, but without any claim to complete enlightenment: "The reader is offered redemption, although nothing is clarified. It is sorcery - a louder one, not one of deception, because it does not conceal any uncertainty."

One of the aspects of the novel worth reading is the humour. The hero with the unspeakable name Isidor Rattenhuber has built up a private programme of life maxims that encourage him in crisis situations: "Sentence one: Salvation lies in knowledge. Sentence two: You have to behave decently, even if it doesn't help. Sentence three: Everything balances itself out. Sentence four: The first consequence of misbehaviour is darkening of consciousness. Sentence five: Habit is stronger than sexuality.

Not without unintentional comedy, the balance-sheet-addicted Isidor, who cannot refrain from "constantly interrogating the life surrounding him for value and dignity" (G 38), encounters the limits of this programme. For example, when he abuses the "unfathomable marriage annulment regulations of the holy Roman Catholic Church" to prevent a mesalliance between an "old sack" and an "unsuspecting young woman", and even confesses this with clammy glee to his brother minister (G 184f.). In another scene, which invites no less scrutiny of Isidor's maxims of life, he disputes with an atheist physicist friend about the origin of the earth, but learns that his basic law of physics can be reduced to pure "erotic relations" (G 278).

A light-hearted literary novel

For her latest novel, Dichterliebe (2013), Petra Morsbach once again took her time, time for intensive and persistent ethnological studies on the object. It is a new and, this time, very special milieu whose bright and dark sides Petra Morsbach knows only too well: the literary world. She is, so to speak, putting it to the test. What happens when poets write about themselves and the milieu in which they have to cope not only with begrudging critics and unpredictable readers, but also with money and love troubles, with production crises and all kinds of fears of influence? Petra Morsbach has added an ironic touch to the literary novel. In doing so, she takes up the romantic legacy of the artist novel. Irony creates distance from the business side of art and at the same time reflects its aesthetic side. In this way, Petra Morsbach gets to the heart of business dependencies and business resentments with love for poets and with the - often idiosyncratic - love of poets.

This "love of poets" takes us to the heart of the literary business, to where it is - perhaps - at its most beautiful: to a "scholarship place" in East Frisia, in the middle of a brooding summer. There we see the poet Heinrich Steiger, who comes from the Erzgebirge and now calls himself Henry, arrive. Long ago, he had an exemplary rise in GDR literature behind him, as a highly decorated lyricist with travel squad privileges. But now, years after the fall of the Wall and German unification, he is struggling to make a new start. Abandoned by his wife and children, tormented by nightmares, struggling with his "mistaken fate", an alcoholic who is after every skirt. But pitiless with himself and therefore anything but unsympathetic.

What happens to such an existence in the artists' enclave? Petra Morsbach stages a portrait of the artist as an aged man. Success and audience fail to materialise. Henry moves between desk, Edeka and fax box. Apart from a few measly readings, favours from cultural institutions that have to spend surpluses, and conversations with fellow scholarship holders, he lacks any publicity. Poetry is no longer in demand. The publisher - there are no more editors - has advised him to try a novel. A few "provincial sketches" emerge, rewrites and studies for an ambitious project called "Metamorphoses".

This is, of course, a telling, even calling image. On the one hand, society has turned, and instead of the former protest in the East, it is now focused on market success. But the tide is also turning for Henry himself. Right in the opening scene, a delightful parody of the culture industry, a not-so-young but attractive and bright "woman with sunglasses" approaches him, "a Western snipe". This, the narrator says, is how "I imagine a dentist's wife on a cultural tour". And he immediately falls in love with the author, who finds all poems "poetic", writes them too, but "pretty, without development" and tries her hand at an opera novel. She is in fact a separated dentist's wife and is called Sidonie Fellgiebel, which is a cryptic allusion to the Bohemian baroness Sidonie, the life partner, muse and addressee of the great satirist Karl Kraus.

Petra Morsbach plays virtuously with old and new literary stories. She weaves verses by well-known and lesser-known poets into her novel, guideposts in times of prolific writing. The fact that the novel ends in an online chat between Henry and Sidonie, who nevertheless live only a stone's throw apart, is the latest in a series of subtle punchlines. "Dichterliebe" (Poet's Love) shines a light on the poet's image of arrogance, nervousness and longing for love, which is, so to speak, a matter of company law. And discovers anew the truth of storytelling. Petra Morsbach has rarely succeeded in doing this as cheerfully as she does in this artist drama.

In search of the "pattern of life"

Giving testimony to time is not Petra Morsbach's main concern. As an artist, she is searching for the "pattern of life". In this respect, exemplary life stories are particularly interesting for her investigations: "Since the basic condition of life is its transience and the existence of man is a random and fragile individual experience, the epic poet can only portray life in individual sequences. This so-called fate with its puzzles and questions is at the centre. Admittedly, the investigation is more precise if the social and historical background is also illuminated."

This is precisely what she undertakes in her essay Warum Fräulein Laura freundlich war. On the Truth of Narrative. It deals with the books of memoirs by Alfred Andersch, Marcel Reich-Ranicki and Günter Grass and these authors' delicate relationship to truth. Morsbach forcefully demonstrates that intellectual freedom makes good novels "ideologically suspect" in the best sense of the word and that Grass in particular threatens to give up his freedom vis-à-vis biographical material and history in favour of the ideology of (his) "grandiose ego". This evidence is brilliantly presented in the root of Grass's work, The Tin Drum (1959), in which the historical perspective of terror and inhumanity of the Nazi dictatorship is just as much hidden as the emotional structure of fear and shame of the main character. Morsbach's findings can also be applied to Grass's memoir Beim Häuten der Zwiebel (2006), which the author was not yet familiar with when she completed her essay in spring 2006. Grass's SS confession did not surprise her in the least, she says:

"In The Tin Drum, a basic experience of the 'Third Reich' is denied. The main techniques of the Nazis - seduction, manipulation and sadism - do not appear.
sadism - do not appear; instead, an unconvincing, manipulative and sadistic imp ridicules a few brown dolts. It is an infantile magical counter-spell, legitimate as a defence against trauma, but certainly not a coping mechanism. Attentive readers would not have to feel deceived by Grass's confession."

Perhaps that is why the critics hardly took any notice of the essay. Yet the reviewers could perhaps have learned something from the book. Morsbach's stylistic criticism, which judges without condemning and applies not to the person but to his or her programme, includes self-criticism and knows how to combine the epic virtue of objectivity with an aesthetic sensibility trained in musical demands. For her, the highest commandment in writing is the recognition of the world in literary narration. The introductory essay of the Fräulein Laura volume summarises this thesis in six points:

"1. language is an instrument of knowledge.

2. storytelling is a system of knowledge.

3. individual narration is a cognitive process, even if we are not aware of it.

4. that is why language records the achievements and failures of storytellers.

5. that is why readers can also gain knowledge about authors and their subject matter from failures.

6. this is why writers can also gain knowledge about themselves and their subject matter from their own failures."

It could hardly be said more clearly and succinctly. Like the Russian storytellers she holds in high esteem, Petra Morsbach researches as a "positivist of modesty", she writes as a "servant of ameliorating truth".

Author: Michael Braun

State: 2016

Comments:

*This article is based on the essay with the same title in: Erich Garhammer (ed.): Literatur im Fluss. Bridges between Poetry and Religion. Regensburg 2014, pp. 134-144. (For the sake of better readability, footnotes have not been listed here on the website. However, they are included in the original essay).

* 10 May 1953 in Schleswig

"Culture humanises everyday life"

The author Ralf Rothmann, who was born in Schleswig in 1953 and now lives in Berlin, has published an oeuvre that is as broad as it is substantial: six novels, four volumes of prose, two volumes of poetry, a drama and a volume of essays.

Biography and work

Ralf Rothmann was born in Schleswig on 10 May 1953 and grew up in the Ruhr area around Bochum and Oberhausen. After primary school and a short visit to commercial school, he first completed an apprenticeship as a bricklayer, then worked as a driver, cook, printer and as a nurse. Since 1976 he has lived with his wife in Berlin-Friedrichshagen.

The narrow biographical data framework is a literary programme. If you want to know something about Ralf Rothmann, you have to read his books. Here, the author portrays himself in the way he lets his narrators appear: as a distanced observer who nevertheless has a heart for the world and the people he describes. Ralf Rothmann refrains from daily political statements, he often withdraws from the public sphere without cultivating the nimbus of the outsider or acting as an agent provocateur like Handke or Botho Strauß. He only takes as much part in the literary world as is necessary. The great success of his rare readings and public speeches is evidenced, for example, by his guest professorship as "poet in residence" at the University of Essen (1999/2000) and his speech at the awarding of the Max Frisch Prize in Zurich (2006).

A key to understanding Rothmann's works is his generational experience. Born in 1953, he is one of those authors for whom the "Gruppe 47" is too political and the pop culture of the eighties too aesthetic. For Rothmann, writing - and reading - is the only valid form of political contemporaneity. He clings to the resolution that through literature people (starting with the author) can be changed, even improved. In his works, the epochal threshold of 1968 is not a signal of protest or a postmodern impulse, but a seal for the memories of experiences, on the one hand confining, on the other liberating, that he had as a youth in the Ruhr region of the late sixties and early seventies. Critics immediately recognised and acknowledged this about the "natural talent" Rothmann, who came to writing without academic studies - as well as his successful attempt to find his own literary tone. He was helped in this by his mentor and first editor, the writer Christoph Meckel, who deleted the adjectives from his first poems.

They appeared in 1984 in the debut volume "Kratzer". Here one finds the main thematic sources of his future works: authority and family ("childhood, / a beating"), desire for freedom and responsibility, escape from preordained life courses, social milieu and the world of work, gender roles, examination of contemporary German history, search for meaning and biblical motifs. The stories "Messers Schneide" and "Der Windfisch" followed in 1986 and 1988. These are also about young men's attempts to break out and set out, about gentle revolutions against family and church, about an unprocessed German past that is a piece of their own history.

His first books received a respectable response from literary critics. Rothmann became known to a wider audience with his 1991 novel "Stier". It opens the "Ruhr District Trilogy", which continues with the novels "Wäldernacht" (1994) and "Milch und Kohle" (2000). The trilogy, set in the area between Oberhausen and Essen around 1970, has been praised by critics as a classic novel of development in a modern milieu and as an important "socio-historical genealogy of the Ruhr region", "which focuses on three generations, their hopes, fears and mental deformations" (Mangold in Berliner Morgenpost, 26.3.2000). The working-class milieu of the "coal-mining area", which as the designated European Capital of Culture 2010 "no longer breathes dust but future" (Muschg) and today as a cultural metropolis is a model for urban regions in Europe, this Ruhr area is described by Rothmann - completely without nostalgia, with humour and self-irony - from the perspective of his and our present. In this way, the allotment garden worlds and collieries of the Ruhr enter the cultural memory of the present.

Berlin as a European metropolis - where Rothmann has lived for 30 years - is the second epicentre of Rothmann's epic work. The novels "Flieh, mein Freund" (1998), "Hitze" (2003) and "Junges Licht" (2004) take recourse to the experiences of migration and interculturality, the working-class world and the intellectual scene in Berlin at the turn of the millennium, but at the same time go back again and again to childhood and youth experiences. In this sense, the stories in the prose volumes "Ein Winter unter Hirschen" (2001) and "Rehe am Meer" (2006) also tell of Rothmann's generation, which comes from West Germany and is searching for a new identity in the European metropolis of Berlin.

What is emphasised in literary criticism as the "unique selling point" of Rothmann's prose is the high precision and authenticity of his language, with which milieu, idiom, scene, character are literarily profiled in an incomparable way. Rothmann is also a special case in the current literary landscape in other respects: Where everyone is talking about simulation and virtual worlds and letting themselves be bombarded with multimedia, he speaks of authentic experiences and pleads for the "experience of silence" that allows one to experience "inner freedom". In addition, religious experience and images of God have a central place in the prose and poetry of Rothmann, who grew up "fervently Catholic" (e.g. in the poetry collection "Gebet in Ruinen" from 2000).

Awards

Rothmann's works have received numerous prizes and scholarships: Märkischer Kulturpreis (1986), Förderpreis des Bundesverbandes der Industrie (1989), Mara Cassens-Preis (1992), Stadtschreiber von Bergen (1992/93), Literaturpreis Ruhrgebiet (1996), Hermann Lenz-Preis (2001), Kranichsteiner Literaturpreis (2002), Evangelischer Buchpreis (2003), Wilhelm Raabe Literature Prize (2004), Rheingau Literature Prize (2004), Heinrich Böll Prize (2005), Max Frisch Prize of the City of Zurich (2006), Erik Reger Prize (2007). In March 2008 Rothmann received the Hans Fallada Prize of the City of Neumünster, endowed with 8,000 EURO.

Political and literary significance

Freedom and responsibility: Rothmann's works defend the struggle for freedom as a basic human right and at the same time show that this freedom cannot be realised without social integration and responsibility.

Literature as freedom: Rothmann is convinced that "spirit and culture are relevant in this world and culture humanises everyday life". Literature helps people who are "tired of useless knowledge, trapped in the reality principle" to strengthen their freedom to think for themselves and to "ask the questions about life a little more precisely". Literature is thus a "free space for dreams, where one can lie from the heart with impunity and in the end, if all goes well, one has told the truth after all" (Frisch speech).

Rothmann's prose as another history of the '68 era: forty years after the epoch break of 1968, Rothmann's novels about the generation growing up around 1970 in the Ruhr region introduce an alternative history of protest into the cultural memory of the present: a history apart from APO, Marcuse and Dutschke, a history from industrial milieus, a history of liberation through literature, music, religion on the one hand, alcohol and aggression on the other.

Rothmann as a historian of the 'old' and 'new' Federal Republic, the archivist of contemporary social and cultural history, who takes a close look at the social, economic and ecological development of the Ruhr and Berlin.

In summary: Ralf Rothmann has everything a novelist must possess in an unspectacular way: a compositional talent with which he manages large masses of material; a language with access to poetry in places where no one else would suspect poetry; an excellent mimetic pleasure in dialogue and depiction of milieu; a seismographic memory for the memory landscapes of West German industrial cities; an empathy for the characters of this world; an astonishing neutrality that nevertheless lets one feel the narrator's involved heart.

Author: Michael Braun

State: 2008

* 28 October 1968 in Dresden

The freedom of storytelling

The author Uwe Tellkamp, who was born in Dresden in 1968 and now lives with his family in Freiburg i. B., has published three novels so far and is one of the greatest hopes of recent contemporary German literature.

Biography and works

With his year of birth, Uwe Tellkamp, who comes from a family of doctors, belongs to the generation that was "born into" the GDR (Uwe Kolbe) without having experienced an alternative to the ruling socialist system during his youth and first years of education. The events of the fall of the Wall and German unity in 1989/90 shaped him in a decisive phase of his life. He had come to know the GDR from its darkest side when, during his military service as a tank commander in the NVA, he was imprisoned for "political divergence" - he had refused orders to take action against demonstrators at the beginning of October 1989, among whom he knew his brother to be - and his place at medical school was withdrawn. After the peaceful revolution, he caught up on his medical studies in Leipzig, New York, Dresden and worked as a trauma surgeon in a Munich clinic.

In 2000, the Leipzig publishing house Faber&Faber published Tellkamp's debut novel Der Hecht, die Träume und das Portugiesische Café. The book, a novel about the region (the "Hecht" is the name of a Dresden neighbourhood), went largely unnoticed by critics. It is now out of print, and Tellkamp claims that just as many copies of the novel have been sold as there are pages in it: 163.

Tellkamp offered the manuscript for his second novel Der Eisvogel for two years in vain. It was only the editor of a Leipzig literary magazine who arranged for the text to be sent to Rowohlt-Verlag, where the novel appeared in 2005. It deals with the trial of a right-wing conservative terrorist group, the generation conflict, the tension between money and spirit in a globalised society and the aberrations of a radicalised youth scene.

Tellkamp became known to a wider public at the 28th Klagenfurt Competition in 2004, when he won the Ingeborg Bachmann Prize. He convinced the jury in rare unanimity with a reading from his novel project "Der Schlaf in den Uhren" (Sleep in the Clocks), a preliminary stage of the novel Der Turm (The Tower): The episode read aloud describes a rhapsodic tram ride through Dresden and at the same time through the past of the GDR. - After the Klagenfurt success, Tellkamp gave up being a doctor to devote himself henceforth only to writing.

German history in poetry

As a lyricist, he has been known to connoisseurs for some time. The Dumont anthology Lyrik von jetzt (2003) contains parts of a large epic world poem (working title "Der Nautilus") that Uwe Tellkamp has been working on for some time. In this Homeric poem, the author travels to the "sunken cities and sunken times" of German history. At the centre of the project - last partially published in the F.A.Z. of 18 December 2008 (travel section) - is a large Argonaut and spaceship that steers its passengers past the cliffs of German history. The mythical cargo on this endless journey includes material such as the Kyffhäuser saga, romantic "wunderhorn-töne" and historical primal scenes between the Battle of Alexander and Stalingrad.

The nautical in Tellkamp's work is by no means just a poetic imagination: in his self-produced film portrait for the Klagenfurt competition, he presented himself as a ship's doctor. This is lived family history: the Tellkamps originally came from Hamburg, were seamen, river pilots, gold seekers and merchants.

Appreciation of the novel "The Tower"

Uwe Tellkamp's almost thousand-page novel Der Turm (The Tower) has been described by critics in rare unanimity as a "work of superlatives". According to the Neue Zürcher Zeitung, "for the first time, a German writer has attempted a historical-philosophical interpretation of the 'peaceful revolution' in the GDR" and presented the "historical totality of the epochal break" in a "symbolic, allegorical narrative style". In Die Zeit, the novel is praised as a "concluding look at the GDR", in the Stuttgarter Zeitung as an "epoch novel", in the FAZ as a Dresden book that "will be indispensable in literary history". And the Süddeutsche Zeitung predicts that "just as we see the world of the citizen through Thomas Mann's eyes today, later generations will be able to relive the torpor and implosion of the GDR in Tellkamp's novel".

What aspects make the novel so outstanding?

First of all, the enormous compositional achievement with which Tellkamp mastered this immense mass of material in almost three years of work. The book is of great epic proportions and composed like a Wagneresque opera (with overture, interlude and swan song). Tellkamp has arranged the narrative time of the novel, which covers the last seven years of the GDR, in two "books"; the first book, "Die pädagogische Provinz" (The Pedagogical Province), tells of the developmental path of a Dresden educated middle-class child in the style of a modern Bildungsroman (Bildungsroman), the second book, "Die Schwerkraft" (Gravity), tells of his experiences with the National People's Army, with the working world and the civil rights movements of the GDR.

The GDR as a literary place of memory

The Tower is, in time for the 20th commemorative year, a political novel about the eastern prehistory of German unification. Tellkamp has thereby anticipated insights of critical historiography. In his novel, one finds again in symbolic form many of the reasons that were named for the downfall of the GDR: its bloated state and state security apparatus, the "social culture of organised irresponsibility", a drastic modernisation backlog, a self-inflicted environmental catastrophe and, last but not least, a radical isolation from the inside. Der Turm transforms the vanished state into a novel, into what the subtitle calls "history from a sunken land": the GDR becomes a literary place of memory.

Der Turm is a singular social novel of the GDR that combines the great European novel tradition (Balzac, Th. Mann) with a well-known German theme in a timely manner. It also illuminates the milieu of the educated bourgeoisie, neglected in literature, which was not envisaged in the political ideology of the SED regime: enclaves of a better society in the midst of the declared "workers' and farmers' state", who reside in a noble Dresden villa district on the eastern slopes of the Elbe and limit their understanding of freedom to "becoming wise about themselves" (303) and "doing what is helpful" (863). This socialist bohemian society, which constantly vacillates between external conformity and internal protest, replaces politics with alienation from the world and turns education into a substitute religion, is portrayed by Tellkamp's novel in a highly differentiated, critical manner.

The Tower is a post-modern Bildungsroman, which on the one hand illustrates the self-endangerment of social elites (e.g. through emigration, ostracism or suicide), especially of the medical profession, and on the other hand their importance. This is illustrated by the character Christian, whose desire to educate himself entirely according to his dispositions and his abilities is denied by a system that alone determines what he is allowed to know and how he is to interpret this knowledge. The novel stages the pedagogy of a "father-strong society" that is concerned with rewarding conformity, suppressing criticism and punishing protest. In accordance with the classic definition that a Bildungsroman should "simultaneously present and teach" education, Tellkamp's novel also educates its readers. They can read the downfall of the GDR symptomatically in Christian's developmental path.

Religious dimension of the "tower"

The tower has a religious value dimension that has escaped criticism. It is reminiscent of the biblical image of the building of the tower, which plays an important role in literature from the GDR, from Johannes R. Becher's poem "Tower of Babel" to the works of Hermlin and Heym. Tellkamp's "Tower" also collapses in the end. The "tower society" turns out to be a cultural substitute religion that misunderstands itself as the better politics. In this way, Tellkamp's novel not only moves in the historical horizontal of GDR history. He also directs his gaze into the religious vertical by sending his characters in search of meaning and orientation in a doomed era.

Finally, Der Turm is also a Dresden novel. It recalls the blossoming and decay of the city's cultural tradition and describes its topography with a precision that can be relived at every turn. At the same time, it alienates - through magical, fairytale-like motifs - the familiar image of Dresden and thus calls for a critical, contemporary correction of Dresden and GDR nostalgia.

Awards

After the Saxon State Scholarship for Literature (2002), the Merano Poetry Prize (2002), the Sponsorship Prize for the Christine Lavant Poetry Prize (2003), the Dresden Poetry Prize (2004) and the Ingeborg Bachmann Prize, Uwe Tellkamp was awarded twice for "The Tower" in 2008: once with the German Book Prize, which as a public industry and competition prize, unlike classical literary prizes, is not presented in a ceremony with a laudation and acceptance speech, and with the Uwe Johnson Literature Prize, for which KAS chairman Prof. Dr Bernhard Vogel gave the laudatory speech.

Political and literary significance

As a social, educational and contemporary novel, Uwe Tellkamp's Der Turm has outstanding political significance twenty years after the reunification of Germany. It is a testimony to the literary culture of remembrance that combines history and fiction and lifts up what must not be forgotten of the last decade of the GDR. At the same time, it is a document of the freedom and dignity of the individual against the attempts at appropriation by an educational dictatorship.

Author: Michael Braun

State: 2009

* 31 July 1933 in Den Haag

The European ideal of freedom

Born on 31 July 1933 in The Hague and now living in Amsterdam and on Menorca, Cees Nooteboom (baptised Cornelis Johannes Jacobus Maria) has published several novels, numerous short stories (most recently in: Nachts kommen die Füchse, 2009), an extensive body of essays, a body of travel literature covering the five continents, as well as several volumes of poetry and (with his wife, the photographer Simone Sassen) illustrated books. On the occasion of his 75th birthday in 2008, Suhrkamp Verlag published a nine-volume edition of his Gesammelte Werke. Nooteboom's books have been translated into more than 15 languages and have been available to the German public in translations since 1958. In the Netherlands, he is considered one of the best-known and most renowned authors; in Europe and beyond, he is a highly respected writer.

Surprisingly, Nooteboom has not received many - but prestigious - prizes so far: in 2009 the Prijs der Nederlandse Letteren (the most important literary prize in the Dutch-speaking world), in 2004 the P.C. Hooft Prize in 2004, the Austrian State Prize for European Literature and the Hansa Goethe Prize of the Alfred Toepfer Foundation in 2003, the Aachen Media Prize "Médaille Charlemagne" in 2001, the International Compostella Prize in 2000, the 3rd October Literature Prize and the European Literature Prize "Aristeion" in 1993, and the Grand Cross of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany in 1992. He received the Anne Frank Prize as early as 1957. He holds honorary doctorates from the Free University of Berlin (2008) and the Catholic University of Brussels (1998) and is a member of the Berlin Academy of Arts (since 1993) and the Bavarian Academy of Fine Arts (since 1996).

Biography and works

Nooteboom grew up as a "war child". His father was killed by British bombing when the family was evacuated. Nooteboom was influenced by a Catholic upbringing (in the monastic boarding schools of Eindhoven and Venray) and a background of Christian values, e.g. in the novel Rituals, which was first published by a GDR publishing house (1984) and a year later in the Federal Republic (1985), and was also made into a film in 1989, as well as in the Berlin epic Allerseelen (1999). In 2009, Cees Nooteboom was received by the Pope as a member of a Dutch delegation.

After his debut in 1955 with the novel Philip en de anderen (German 1958: Das Paradies ist nebenan) - a "minor global success" (Frankfurter Rundschau, 31.7.08) that made him famous in the Netherlands virtually overnight - Nooteboom wrote mainly travelogues to earn a living, then not until 1980 did he return to fictional prose. The story The Following Story was a great success in 1991.

His works focus on people who seek orientation in the face of value pluralism and globalisation, and in doing so, repeatedly reach out from everyday experiences (love, travel, cultural conflicts and encounters) to the ultimate things (old age, death and life). As one of the first writers of his generation, Nooteboom dealt with the structural change of Europe, its diversity and its unity. He calls for an awareness of cultural tradition and a commitment to European memory: a "clear view of the past" in order to recognise what "has disappeared and is still disappearing" (Die Zeit, 21.1.2010).

Nooteboom's writing follows a "method of heightened looking" that discovers cultural traditions behind everyday observations, metaphysical questions behind inconspicuous rituals; he seeks, as he says, "the life behind the first, the visible reality". He is a "master of the sparingly illustrated and suggestive scene" (Die Zeit, 26.3.2009). "Staged biography" (Alexander von Bormann) and contemporary history, historical images and literary stories, fantasy and realism belong together in his works.

Appreciation

A number of literature prize winners of the Konrad Adenauer Foundation come from Eastern and East Central Europe (Louis Begley, the 2009 Nobel Prize winner Herta Müller, Adam Zagajewski) or from the former GDR (Günter de Bruyn, Wulf Kirsten, Uwe Tellkamp). Cees Nooteboom is the first author from a neighbouring Western European country to be awarded the Foundation's Literature Prize. Following the internal view of 20 years of German unity in Uwe Tellkamp's novel "Der Turm" (The Tower, 2008), he presents the external view of Germany from a Western European neighbour.

Nooteboom's closeness to Germany is evident in his literary accounts based on Berlin. He analyses and reflects on the divided city as well as the division of the country. He was a sympathetic eyewitness to the peaceful revolution in Germany and its reunification. He visited the city in 1989, 1999 and 2008. His volume Berlin 1989/2009 is a personal chronicle and historical commentary on the once divided, now reunited city. In his own words, Berlin is "part of his life" (SZ, 6.11.09).

His essay Wie wird man Europäer? (1993) is the core of his literary work on the process of European unification, which aims at reconciliation and understanding. Europe, Nooteboom argues, is not so much to be thought about as to be experienced and described. In addition, he advocates dialogue between religions (cf. his essay "Eye to Eye with Islam", in: Zeit, 7.10.2004). His entire preoccupation with the Eastern Bloc (from the Hungarian uprising in 1956 to the fall of the Wall in 1989) testifies to a decidedly anti-totalitarian, anti-communist basic attitude.

Political and literary significance

Cees Nooteboom is an esprit and irony-laden, creatively diverse writer of international standing. As a travel narrator, he "reads" foreign languages and cultures, comparable to a "pilgrim on his way to a distant land" (NZZ, 29.12.2007). Rüdiger Safranski, with whom he has been friends for over 40 years, praises him as a "politically alert contemporary" and a "philosophising poet". As a curious wanderer between worlds, Nooteboom builds bridges of understanding between cultures without being blinded by ideologies. As an eyewitness, he follows the "flow of democracy" and worries about the continuation of the rich tradition of European culture. He defends the "ideal of freedom against unmasked lies" (Die Zeit, 20.11.2008).

Author: Michael Braun

State: 2010

* 22 July 1968 in Bregenz

"The Happiness Seeker"

Arno Geiger, who was born in Bregenz in 1968 and grew up in Wolfurt/Vorarlberg, has so far published a drama, five novels, a volume of short stories and, most recently, the autobiographical book Der alte König in seinem Exil (The Old King in Exile), which was received with an exceptionally positive response, was nominated for the 2011 Leipzig Book Prize and came second in the Spiegel bestseller list of 21 March 2011. In the German literary world, the author has enjoyed a high reputation since he was awarded the German Book Prize (2005). On 18 September 2011, Arno Geiger will be awarded the Literature Prize of the Konrad Adenauer Foundation in Weimar. The laudatory speech will be given by the Berlin literary critic Dr Meike Feßmann (Alfred Kerr Prize for Literary Criticism 2006).

In 1994, Geiger was awarded a young writer's scholarship by the Austrian Federal Ministry of Art, in 1998 the Abraham Woursell Award for Young European Literature (an American scholarship) and a scholarship by the Literary Colloquium Berlin. In 1999 he received the literary scholarship of the state of Vorarlberg, in 2001 the Carl Mayer Screenplay Promotion Prize, in 2005 the Promotion Prize for the Friedrich Hölderlin Prize, in 2008 the Hebel Prize of the state of Baden-Württemberg, in 2010 the Literature Prize of the Vorarlberg Book and Media Industry, and in 2011 the Hölderlin Prize.

Biography and works

In 1993 Geiger, who grew up as one of four children of a municipal secretary and a primary school teacher, completed his studies in German philology, ancient history and comparative literature in Vienna and Innsbruck. From 1986 to 2002 he worked as a video technician at the Bregenz Festival.

He made his literary debut in 1996 at the Klagenfurt Ingeborg Bachmann Competition. In the same year, his story "Das Kürbisfeld" (The Pumpkin Field) was published in the Austrian journal manuskripte. In 1997 his first novel was published by Hanser Verlag: Kleine Schule des Karussellfahren (Little School of Carousel Riding), the highly acclaimed novel about a good-for-nothing who vacillates between the disappointment of the revolutionary year 1989 and the dreamy memory of the French Revolution of 1789. The second novel Irrlichterloh (1999), a modern road novel, also centres on a good-for-nothing character. Critics have attested the first two novels "high tempo" and dialogue wit. By contrast, the drama Alles auf Band oder Die Elfenkinder (Deuticke Verlag, 2001), which Geiger conceived as a radio play together with Heiner Link, met with little public response.

The third novel Schöne Freunde (2002) was well received by critics. It is about a mining accident and the departure of the survivors into an unknown world. The narrative principle of these novels is: instead of a single-strand plot, the montage of anecdotal and laconic, cheerful or tragic mini-stories with surprising twists and discoveries dominates. "For me, writing is always discovery," says Geiger.

This principle dominates the volume of stories Anna nicht vergessen. It was published in 2007 and became a bestseller in 2009 as a dtv paperback. Here Geiger demonstrates his talent for fabulously experimental arrangements of family constellations. The critics attested to his "joy of experimentation, consistency, empathy" (NZZ). The title story is about a woman who "is commissioned by women to test their husbands to see if they are available for amorous detours", but suffers from her daughter's fear of "disappearing from her mother's memory".

Geiger's breakthrough came in 2005 with the book prize-winning novel Es geht uns gut, which sold over 400,000 copies and was translated into 20 languages. The book is one of the most important contemporary novels of memory and family. It tells how politics intrudes into the everyday life of three generations in 20th century Austria and how the past reverberates in the present; the time span narrated stretches from 1938 to 2001. Critics particularly emphasised the theme of memory and remembrance, the power of language, the art of dialogue and - in the international review - the successful connection to the great Austrian novel tradition from Broch to Menasse (Le Monde).

The fifth novel All About Sally (2010) is an "adventure novel about marriage" with a happy ending (Meike Feßmann), a "psychological cabinet piece" (FAZ) about the narratability of marriage and about love as active memory work. (The Cairo chapter of the novel gained unexpected topicality in intercultural dialogue in spring 2011).

Arno Geiger's most recent book Der alte König in seinem Exil (2011) was highly praised by critics. The book is many things at once: autobiography, family history, father narrative, village chronicle and, above all, a strongly family-tinged history of the disease Alzheimer's dementia. It is about Geiger's father, born in 1926, who showed the first signs of the disease in 1995. When his father had to be temporarily placed in a nursing home, his son began writing about his father and coming to terms with his life story.

Geiger's book treats the subject of ageing and dementia in a novel way: not diagnostically like Jonathan Franzen (Das Gehirn meines Vaters, Die Korrekturen, 2002), not as an accounting like Tilman Jens (Demenz: Abschied von meinem Vater, 2009), not in the packaging of a fiction (as in Martin Suter's novel Small World, 1997), but with empathy, in a humble attitude towards the disease that fundamentally changes family life.

The King book (the title quote is from Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse, 1927) is significant for several reasons:

• it focuses on the topic of ageing and society (in 2025, the proportion of people over eighty in this country will have quadrupled to 12 percent of the total population);
• it testifies to the human dignity of people with dementia;
• it emphasises the connection between memory and homeland without any nostalgia or polemics;
• it traces an exemplary autobiographical family history of the 20th century and above all the fate of the generation of student soldiers to which his father belongs;
• it bears witness to great artistry of language and dialogue, precision of observation and moral greatness.

Appreciation

Geiger's works, especially Es geht uns gut, Anna nicht vergessen, Alles über Sally, Der alte König in seinem Exil, are - according to the jury's statement - contemporary novels of high socio-political relevance. In their themes, our society can recognise itself in the technical-global modern age: They are about freedom of the will, about human dignity, about language and personality, about dealing with illness and ageing, about intercultural experiences.

At the same time, these works testify to an ethic of familial and social responsibility that proves itself when character becomes stronger than intelligence, understanding becomes more important than knowledge. Thus Geiger writes courageous character books that make the reader ask about the meaning of his own life and ageing.

Arno Geiger's memoir novels plead for a communicative memory that does not separate the generations but brings them together and holds them together.

Arno Geiger writes far from epigonism, with genuine linguistic-aesthetic creative power "about the fundamental things that drove us to become the people we are."

Author: Michael Braun

State: 2011

* 30 January1924 in Bratislava

† 29 July 2019 near Afula

Contemporary witness with the power of understanding

Tuvia Rübner, who describes himself in his poem "Wer hält diese Eile aus" (2007) as "a child of the twentieth century", was born on 30 January 1924 in Pressburg (Bratislava) into a German-speaking bourgeois family "of the upper middle class"; he received his grandfather's Hebrew name in addition to his two German names Kurt Erich. His father Moritz Manfred Rübner, born in Losoncz in 1885, was the administrative manager of the Bratislava branch of an international forwarding company and was dismissed at "his own request" when the company became the property of the Deutsche Reichsbahn. His mother Alica Grünwald (born 1899) came from Šaštín in north-west Slovakia.

From Bratislava to Merchavia

After Jewish pupils in Bratislava were no longer allowed to attend the German State Realgymnasium and the Slovakian Gymnasium, Tuvia Rübner found employment in a company where young Jews prepared for emigration. With a small group of friends from the Zionist Youth League "Haschomer Hatzair", he arrived in May 1941 from Slovakia via Budapest in what was then Palestine, in the kibbutz "Merchavia" (the name means, after a psalm, "God's vastness"). This kibbutz, founded in 1911 as a cooperative settlement according to the plan of the German-Jewish sociologist Oppenheim, was the first kibbutz in the Emek Jezreel. Rübner stayed and worked here for 12 years, initially as a shepherd. Golda Meir, later Prime Minister of Israel, also lived here for a time.

From the kibbutz, Tuvia Rübner corresponded with his parents in the "enemy country of Slovakia" via the Red Cross postal service, which was limited to one letter every two months of 25 words each and only personal messages. On 12 June 1942, Tuvia Rübner's parents and his then thirteen-year-old sister Alice were deported to Auschwitz and murdered there. The last news from them was a telegram sent via the International Red Cross in July 1942: "Have been resettled to Generalgouvernement former Poland. New domicile learned through Jewish Social Self-Help Krakow, P.O. Box No. 211". (quoted in Ulrike Kolb: Dichten müssen. On the 80th birthday of the Israeli poet, translator, literary scholar and photographer Tuvia Rübner. In: Frankfurter Rundschau, 30.1.2004).

On the kibbutz, Rübner became familiar with modern Hebrew, his second mother tongue. It was here that he met the Bukovina-born poet Dan Pagis (1930-1986), whom he later translated from Hebrew into German. On the way back from Tel Aviv to the kibbutz, a serious bus accident occurred in February 1950 in which Rübner's wife, whom he had married in 1944, died; he himself survived, seriously injured, with his daughter, born in 1949.

On the kibbutz, Rübner became a librarian and literature teacher at a secondary school. Later he worked as a professor of Hebrew and German literature at the University of Haifa. In 1953 he married the concert pianist Galila Jisreeli, whose parents came from Russian-Jewish families. Two sons were born of this marriage, one disappeared in Ecuador in 1983, the other became a Buddhist and lives in Nepal.

From 1963 to 1967, Rübner was an emissary of the Jewish Agency in Zurich. He attended lectures by the Germanists Emil Staiger and Wolfgang Binder. He became friends with Friedrich Dürrenmatt. In 1974, he arranged the Swiss playwright's historic invitation to Haifa, which resulted in Dürrenmatt's Israel essay "Zusammenhänge".

After exhibitions of his photographic work in Switzerland, France, Italy and Israel, well-received volumes of his photographs have been published in Israel. Rübner's photographs of kibbutz life are - as Hans Otto Horch writes in the epilogue to Rübner's poetry collection "Pomegranate" (1995) - among the "most impressive testimonies to documentary photographic art from Israel".

Bridge builder between German and Hebrew

Until 1954, Rübner wrote German poetry: "I wrote in a language I hardly spoke any more. It was my home. In it I continued to 'speak' with my parents, with my sister, with grandparents, relatives, friends of youth, all of whom have no grave. Then I no longer wanted to be in what I thought was my actual life, in the poems, in the past, even if it had not passed. Not to cope with it ... but with it: to live .... Hebrew does not come naturally to me." He then switched to (New) Hebrew, a "learned language" in which eight volumes of poetry appeared until 1990. In 1990, Piper Verlag published a selection of Rübner's poems in German translation by Efrat Gal-Ed and Christoph Meckel, under the title "Wüstenginster". Six German-language volumes of poetry by Tuvia Rübner have been published by the Aachen-based Rimbaud Verlag since 1990.

Rübner's books are considered "great works of Hebrew modernism" (according to Karin Lorenz-Lindemann in the Zurich magazine "Orientierung", 15.11.2008). His lyrical work belongs to the stock of classical exilmodernism. His poems are characterised by traditional forms such as the ode, paraphrases, paradoxical similes and counterfactuals. He often transforms classical motifs, such as the moon motif from Matthias Claudius' "Evening Song", which is converted into a horror motif from Holocaust poetry in Rübner's poem of the same name from 1997 (in the volume "Rauchvögel", 1998). Claudius' evening fantasy gives way in Rübner's poem to the daily remembered trauma. The colour grey replaces green, the stars illuminate only refugee landscapes. In the thematically related poem "Die goldenen Sterne" (in the volume "Wer hält diese Eile aus", 2007), Claudius' word "prangen" is rhymed with "bangen". In many cases, Rübner draws images from the Bible, rabbinic tradition, Jewish culture and Holocaust memory. His guiding themes are "longing and language and night of the dead", memory and the defence against forgetting, home and propertylessness, figures of hope - and again and again the problem of time. Rübner's language is simple, direct, conscious of memory. Rhyme and metre provide "euphony and order". The core of Rübner's poetics is "the question of the connection between morality and poetic craft" (Harald Hartung).

Tuvia Rübner's autobiography "Ein langes kurzes Leben" (2004) is the fragmentary, haunting testimony of a German-speaking survivor of National Socialist persecution and a Jew in Israel, in which political contemporary references are not lacking.

Rübner is not yet as well known to the German public as his work deserves. According to Michael Mertes, head of the Jerusalem representative office of the Konrad Adenauer Foundation, Tuvia Rübner does not appear publicly in political controversies in Israel. In his autobiography, Tuvia Rübner criticises the "wrong policies (on both sides)", terror and hypocrisy, "cruelty and arrogance" and a dialogue with Arab neighbours burdened by "too much pain and sadness and hatred". "When will," asks Tuvia Rübner, "the world's wise realise that the Palestinians' weakness is their strength and Israel's strength is its weakness?"

In 1988, Rübner was accepted as a corresponding member of the Darmstadt Academy for Language and Poetry. His awards include the Celan Prize (1999), the Austrian Theodor Kramer Prize and the Israel Prize (2008), the country's highest award.

Power to understand

Rübner is an important moral witness voice with the power to "address and understand" (Thomas Sparr). His writing after Auschwitz is characterised by the truthfulness of speech: "What matters to me is that Auschwitz created a new human being, I don't say German, but human being, namely the human being who, if he wants to be human, is scared out of his wits because thanks to Auschwitz he has come to the realisation of what he is capable of as a human being" (as it says in "A Long Short Life. From Pressburg to Merchavia").

Rübner is a commendable mediator between cultures and languages. He writes poems in Ivrit (New Hebrew), then translates them into German, and vice versa. In this way, the poems retain an expression of distance and foreignness. The maxim of his translation work is not "to translate the foreign into German, but to transform the German, since otherwise the human tone, opinion, heartbeat would not be audible", and "so that the linguistic body of the target language is shaken up, not only lexically". Translation, in the sense of Karl Kraus, means the 'understanding' of two thoughts in a new linguistic form. In this sense, Rübner has translated Goethe and Kafka, among others, from German into Hebrew. He translated the last novel by the Israeli Nobel Prize winner Samuel Agnon (1888-1970), "Shira", from Hebrew into German for the first time - the love and social novel is set in Jerusalem in the 1930s and was published by Jüdischer Verlag at Suhrkamp in 1998 - and made it known to a wider audience. The great strength of his work lies in this intercultural bridge-building.

Above all, however, Tuvia Rübner speaks as a Jewish contemporary witness of the 20th century who finds a language for his survival and for the memory of the Shoah. "I am there to say", statues the poem "Zeugnis" (in "Rauchvögel", 1998), and the "Abendlied" ends with the verse: "Silence is not enough". Against the "language of silence" (Alexander von Bormann) is the unceasing witnessing of the losses and destruction, the urgent warning against an "anti-Semitism after the Shoah", the hope for a hate-free and peaceful dialogue of cultures. In view of the 70th anniversary of the Wannsee Conference, and also in view of the neo-Nazi scene in Germany and the attacks against Muslims, this voice wants and needs to be heard.

Author: Michael Braun

State: 2012

* 31 July 1951 in Frankfurt am Main

Novels of bourgeois society

According to an anecdote, the Berlin publisher Wolf Jobst Siedler once bet the historian Joachim Fest five euros that they would not see a man in a tie on Kurfürstendamm at lunchtime. Siedler won the bet - and Fest had a strong thesis: the old middle classes no longer existed. At least not in Berlin.

But apparently it does! At least in Frankfurt am Main: Martin Mosebach, born there in 1951, who has made a name for himself as the author of nine novels, travel literary works, volumes of prose and essays and has also written poetry, libretti and radio plays, has long been considered the famous exception to this rule. Critics speak of a renaissance of the bourgeoisie in his works. The author himself appears with the bourgeois habitus of a guardian of culture who seeks to preserve what is worth preserving, values tact as a "political virtue" and confesses that he has not spent a day of his life "rebelling against tradition and authority".

Good "manners"

It is true that Martin Mosebach wears a tie. He practices the classic kiss on the hand, of which the Ethiopian Prince Asfa-Wossen Asserate (who came to Frankfurt in 1972) says in his cultural guide to European "manners" (2003) that it is a "little dance figure" that expresses "self-respect, distance and respect". In this sense, too, Martin Mosebach can be described as a highly cultivated value conservative who measures his present against tradition and advocates the aesthetics of bourgeois manners that are called "good manners".

The bearer of these manners is the European bourgeoisie, to whom we owe the democratisation of the continent, the "structural change of the bourgeois public sphere" (Habermas), the modern education system, but also and that secularising development of religion, to which Mosebach criticises the "disintegration of the hierarchical and sacramental church after the Second Vatican Council". "The Church is dying, we must be alone with God. Prayer is the only intelligent act", he quotes the Colombian philosopher Nicolás Gómez Dávila. With Brecht, he explains elsewhere, the bourgeoisie had a bad hand with the commoners. Exactly 100 years ago, the expressionist poet Jakob van Hoddis commented ironically on this in his famous poem "Weltende" ("End of the World"): At the beginning of technical modernity, the bourgeois, whose "hat flies off his pointed head", is worried by his cold, but not by the world war, the mother catastrophe of the 20th century.

The city, the bourgeoisie and the foreigner

Was that the beginning of the not-so-funny end of the bourgeoisie? Mosebach has good reason to talk about this. His novels are critical social studies of the bourgeois milieu, cultural lessons about subtle differences, schooled in the narrative tradition of Thomas Mann and Heimito von Doderer. Mosebach's third novel, "Westend" (1992), about the rise and fall of a real estate empire in the post-war period, is reminiscent of Mann's "Buddenbrooks" (1901). The banking city on the Main is an emblem of his work; it is the setting for the novels "Lange Nacht" (2009) and "Was davor geschah" (2011).

No doubt, Mosebach's novel characters are descendants of the "Buddenbrooks", city dwellers with bad consciences and bright minds. They are adventurers on the hunt for freedom in the thicket of the cities and therefore also runaway citizens who have lost their bourgeoisie, has-beens and impostors. They take their very own routes, away from education, school, family, state, always ready but often unable to make a "biographical break" (Uwe Wittstock). This hesitant non-conformism also proves itself in foreign milieus. The Indian novel "Das Beben" - nominated in 2005 on the shortlist for the German Book Prize - and the travelogue "Stadt der wilden Hunde" (City of the Wild Dogs), published in 2008 and based on his stay in Bikaner in autumn 2006 - with which one should begin one's reading of Mosebach - open up the sacred in other cultures.

And they do so with a humorous distanced view of the foreign. In Bikaner there are no books and no readers, but there is a library stamp and a great writer to whom the German poet does a small favour. It consists in dictating a thick praise to the Indian host, who makes him wait an unseemly long time and then asks for his opinion on the "incomparable book" he has written. This praise of the "visiting scholar Mr. Martin" was then printed in the newspaper the next day.

"Still Life with Wild Animal"

What critics repeatedly emphasise about Mosebach's novels is the "confidence in the grotesque turn of phrase and the eye for the speaking detail" (Felicitas von Lovenberg), is the sentence structure, which testifies to a "perfectly formed style" (Andrea Köhler), are the "resiliently well-placed sentence periods" (Ijoma Mangold). This stylistic art, which convinces through elegance, witty irony, grace and boldness, is admittedly not an artistic self-celebration. Every word that pulls the ordinary into the precious serves to illuminate a present neglected by language.

For Mosebach, linguistic carelessness is a vice, because the writer must not master his word material, but interpret it. His task is to "expand the boundaries of language, to weave his way through its obstacles, to put it in a surprising light, to darken it, to make it shorter, to heighten its effect, to stage its sound" ("Schriftstellers Deutsch", 2003). This also includes an imaginative approach to the special languages and dialects of German. He fights "Denglish", according to G.B. Shaw the easiest language to speak badly, because it does not denote reality but only the affiliation of the speaker ("Die Schriftsteller und die Fremdwörter"). He tolerates the foreign words as long as they remain descriptive and - like the Frankfurt philosopher Adorno - appreciates them as veins of gold in the body of the German language.

A brief example of Mosebach's stylistic art as language and social criticism is "Still Life with Wild Animal", one of the early stories from the volume of the same name (2001). The Neapolitan Esposito family has set up a stately Christmas cot with over three hundred hand-sized figures in their living room. While the city life is going on outside, a mouse stirs in the manger landscape, pursued by a cat, which starts to jump and thus causes a disaster in the Espositos' bourgeois living room. "The silence has not been disturbed, and yet the valley at the feet of the Holy Family resembles a battlefield." This grotesque ending to the story comments on the incursion of world violence into an art that has frozen into "stillness". In a classically calm tone, the religious arts and crafts are put to the sword.

And what does the author think about Christianity?

Since receiving the Doderer Prize (1999) and the Kleist Prize (2002), Martin Mosebach has increasingly written essays on the cultural and spiritual-religious situation of our time. In autumn 2004, he participated as a skilful discussant in the Bonn event series of the Konrad Adenauer Foundation on the dialogue of religions. In June 2004, he pleaded in the daily newspaper "Die Welt" for a reference to God in the European constitution: "With God in the constitution, the emerging giant state confesses that it is not perfect and cannot be perfect".

Not infrequently, the author polarises with controversial theses. For example, Mosebach's 2007 Büchner Prize speech ("Ultima ratio regis") draws a line of comparison between the French Revolution and the totalitarianism of the 20th century, between Paris and Posen, St. Just and Himmler. And asks about the price of freedom without humane responsibility: "Where does the bad conscience come from in Büchner's protagonists, who believe themselves to be in possession of the victorious law of history?"

In his book "The Heresy of Formlessness" (2002, new edition 2007), he advocates the pre-conciliar liturgy and criticises the reforms of Vatican II as an "act of tyranny", exercised by "modernisers and believers in progress". His criticism as a devout Catholic and as an "enemy of kitsch" is directed against a church in which one sees the "altars covered like coffee tables", as Felicitas von Lovenberg writes.

His plea for a "ban on blasphemy" in the "Frankfurter Rundschau" of 18 June 2012 made critics speak of the "God warrior in a tweed jacket" ("Der Spiegel") and "Germany's religious police" ("Cicero"). But Mosebach also found approval, as the author said in December 2012 at an event in the Belgian House in Cologne: from the philosopher Robert Spaemann and the Archbishop of Bamberg Ludwig Schick. We should follow the good advice of Mosebach's Büchner Prize laudator Navid Kermani and read his texts carefully. For Mosebach, says Kermani, is by no means criticising artistic freedom. He is bothered by blasphemy when it appears as a "casual attitude or a calculated gimmick", as a "flourish, whimsy or naughtiness".

Accordingly, Mosebach defends the author's privilege to empathise with "'Criminals of Lost Honour' and Kohlhaase". For him, however, the demarcation line of artistic freedom runs along the "good manners" that regulate the civilised life of human society. That is why he warns in a postscript to his controversial article: "Those who allow themselves contempt will reap anger and damage the coexistence of all".

Astonishing realism

Martin Mosebach's poetics is committed to an "astonishing realism", which he explained as a fellow of the International College Morphomata in Cologne with the loving gesture with which the writer knows how to reconstruct dreams from the world of the day and examines things from the inside for their quality. In contrast to this, he said, was the "depressive realism" of those authors who claimed the right to be born in Arcadia but lived in Wanne-Eickel and died there from their laments. In this way, Mosebach tends more towards philosophical than political writing.

Astonishment is the beginning of thinking, and Martin Mosebach's works are an elegant school of thinking for oneself. Progress and zeitgeist certainly have their place in it, provided they do not endanger historically proven basic values - such as responsibility for the freedom of the word. In this way, Mosebach reminds us that human beings not only have a political and aesthetic existence, but also depend on history and tradition. You don't have to wear a tie to be a passable citizen. But know that every civic freedom loses value and flattens if it is not oriented towards the values from which it grew in often difficult processes. So it is not a return to the past that is the motto of the bourgeois writer Martin Mosebach, but the preservation of what is worth preserving: "Hands off the status quo". And may this also be an intellectual challenge, an invitation to discuss bourgeois values.

Author: Michael Braun

State: 2013

* 1 January 1945 in Rottweil

The adventure of freedom

In his self-introduction to the German Academy for Language and Poetry in Turin in 2001, Rüdiger Safranski confessed to having grown up with the experience of two worlds, art and politics. Born in Rottweil on 1 January 1945 as the son of an East Prussian lawyer who had fled Königsberg with his wife in the late summer of 1944 and settled in the Black Forest, he grew up under the wing of his pietist grandmother. The devotion and love of cinema in childhood, then later (1968) protesting leaflet campaigns and Proust reading: Life in this "bicameral system" shaped Safranski's path to becoming, in his own words, a "philosophising and discursive narrative writer".

In 1965, Rüdiger Safranski began studying philosophy, German language and literature, history and art history in Frankfurt am Main and listened to Adorno, among others; in 1970, he passed his Master's examination at the Free University of Berlin. In 1976, while also a research assistant at the FU, he completed his doctorate there with a dissertation on workers' literature in the Federal Republic. From 1977 to 1981 he co-edited the cultural-political journal Berliner Hefte and worked as a lecturer in adult education. From 2002 to 2012, he co-moderated the cultural discussion Das philosophische Quartett with Peter Sloterdijk on ZDF. Since the summer of 2012, he has been an honorary professor in the Department of Philosophy and Humanities at the Free University of Berlin. Rüdiger Safranski is a member of the German Academy for Language and Poetry and the PEN Centre of the Federal Republic of Germany, among others. His books are published by Hanser Verlag, which was headed by Michael Krüger until 2013.

Master Biographies of German Poets and Thinkers

Rüdiger Safranski has become known and famous for a handsome series of biographies in which he traces the history of German poets and thinkers from the 18th to the 20th century: E.T.A. Hoffmann. The Life of a Sceptical Phantast (1984), Schopenhauer and the Wild Years of Philosophy (1987), A Master from Germany. Heidegger and his time (1994), Friedrich Nietzsche. Biography of His Thought (2000), Schiller or The Invention of German Idealism (2004), most recently Goethe. Kunstwerk des Lebens (2013). In addition, he has written numerous cultural-political essays and treatises on contemporary issues, including Wie viel Globalisierung verträgt der Mensch? (2003).

Rüdiger Safranski's books have been translated into more than 20 languages and have been honoured with numerous national and international prizes, including the Ernst Robert Curtius Prize for Essay Writing in 1998, the Premio Internazionale Federico Nietzsche (2003), the Friedrich Hölderlin Prize and the World Prize for Literature in 2006. In 2009, Safranski was awarded the Cross of Merit 1st Class of the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany.

The trade secret of Rüdiger Safranski's books, which have been successful with critics and readers alike, was once explained by KAS Literature Prize laureate Cees Nooteboom as Safranski being a thinker "who formulates the thoughts of others, without thinking them, in such a way that the person reading them has the feeling that he cannot get any closer". Thinking along and reflecting, Safranski dusts off the classics and questions - also critically - their modernity.

Freedom and European cultural history

Rüdiger Safranski is an outstanding European cultural historian who conveys German cultural traditions abroad at the height of the times. As a sceptical "questioner" and "expert of pointed characterisation" (Franziska Augstein), as a "great portraitist of German intellectual history" (Ijoma Mangold), he brings the "literary-philosophical narrative of Germany" to life.

Thus, Safranski's reflection on German thinkers is at the same time a European reflection: it is about the question of how the cultural heritage of the "miracle era before and after 1800" (Focus 1/2005) - with its luminous sides, but also its errors and wrong turns - can be interpreted and communicated to the Europe of the 21st century. At the core of this European cultural mission is the idea of freedom, the discovery of the responsible, mature subject, the locational advantage of the free creative spirit that does not shake off the political weight of the world. Only aesthetic upbringing and education - according to the conviction inspired by Goethe and Schiller - enable people to perceive freedom responsibly. From art, one can learn "the experience of open expanse in narrow limitation" (in: Wieviel Globalisierung verträgt der Mensch?). With this basic cultural equipment, the impositions of "normative globalisation" can be mastered: loss of tradition, uprooting, the "nihilism of consumer culture" and the blending of the near and the far.

The adventure of thinking

Safranski's biographies combine philosophical phenomenology with political anthropology. The focus is never solely on the art or the idea, but on the person who applies it. Politics, as it says in the essay How Much Truth Does Man Need? (1990), is "the business of peacemaking in the field of combative truths". This includes enabling artistic freedom within the framework of rules that serve the community.

This fine distinction between cultural and political truth, between the thinkable and the livable, which is not always easy to establish, is expressed above all in his new biography of Goethe. Safranski portrays Goethe, who headed a ministry (mining, roads, finance) at the Weimar court for many years, not only as a poet with great strengths and small weaknesses ("there is a lack of humour"). Goethe also appears as a political actor and master of the interplay between knowledge and experience. This biography thus becomes a vademecum of political ethics.

What constitutes good governance? How much Europe do debates in Germany need? Goethe's life, writes Safranski, is an example of "intellectual wealth, creative power and wisdom". Currently, Goethe's art is to combine his universal spirit with an "unbelievable obstinacy" (conversation with Daniel Kehlmann, FAZ, 21.9.2013): "For me, Goethe is someone on whom one can observe how a cultural immune system functions. For that, you need mobility and a will to preserve yourself. You could also call it existential judgement. In any case, it doesn't depend on being networked with everything and everyone."

"Happy Event": Schiller and Goethe

As the "inventor of idealism", who cannot be held liable for the "German affair" of the Romantic mindset and for ideological abuse, Rüdiger Safranski has paid tribute to Friedrich Schiller and his cultural-historical environment in two stimulating studies (2004 and 2007). In the Schiller Year 2009, Goethe & Schiller. Geschichte einer Freundschaft (History of a Friendship). Safranski shows how, in the summer of 1794, rivals became friends, competitively working on common causes, and why their conversations in Jena and Weimar, during which they sometimes laughed so loudly that Schiller's wife could not sleep, were so profitable for both sides not despite but precisely because of the glaring contrasts. Here the professional writer Schiller who married up, there the civil servant Goethe with ten times the income who dared a downward connection, here the idealist with too little world and there the realist with too much world, here the word-powerful gospel of freedom and the idea of aesthetic education, there the insistence on tender empiricism and the practice of sociable education. Safranski's double biography shows how these differences gave rise to works and insights that have written European cultural history.

Science as art

Safranski's biography is characterised by vividness and elegance and by a confident narrative style that combines philosophical reflection with poetic intuition. Critics have therefore often praised his books as "adventures of thought"; Die Zeit (6.9.2007) attested the book Romantik. A German Affair. Without manipulating the complexity of artistic life histories, Rüdiger Safranski thus practices science as art. His essayistic writing is in the tradition of European moralistics (Montaigne, Heine), which describes social and human conditions as they are, and not (according to moral philosophers) as they should be. In this way, Safranski's books are a welcome invitation to discuss the future of the cultural heritage of German poets and thinkers in Europe.

Author: Michael Braun

State: 2014

* 3 August 1973 in Zadvarje

The cultural reorganisation of Europe

Even Germanists have a hard time with the spelling and German pronunciation of authors' names that come from non-German-speaking countries. "My roof-embellished z and my bird's landing place of the c in my surname makes people sweat even from a distance," says the writer Marica Bodrožić. Her name draws attention to the difference between writing and voice, to the poetic spaces between name and meaning, to the (if you will) European in German. For "Mariza" is not only the name of one of the semi-divine nymphs in the songs of Virgil and Ovid. It is also the name of the river that rises in Bulgaria's Rila Mountains and flows into the Aegean Sea (Latin "Hebrus"). We are thus on the one hand at the ancient cradle of European culture, and on the other hand in the South-Eastern European present, in today's Croatia, which until 1991 belonged to the multi-ethnic state of Yugoslavia and on whose former territory a series of bloody wars were fought until 1995. The first free elections took place in spring 1990. A year later, on 25 June 1990, the Croatian government declared Croatia's independence. Croatia has been a member state of the European Union since 2013.

German as a second native language

Born on 3 August 1973, Marica Bodrožić grew up in Tito's dictatorship, where even the Catholic-influenced milieu did not prevent children from taking part in every May Day parade and wearing pioneer caps in the fraternal socialist spirit. Her parents moved to Germany at an early age as (what was then called) "guest workers", to Sulzbach in Hesse. She remained in the care of her grandfather, who could neither read nor write, and spent the first nine years of her childhood there in a Yugoslavian village. When her parents came to visit her on home leave, they brought German with them like a secret belonging only to them, from which the child who did not yet speak German was excluded. German was the language of longing - in contrast to the forbidden language of the dictatorship, in which one had to address the teacher as "Brother Comrade".

In 1983, Marica Bodrožić moved to Hesse to live with her parents. There she learned German as her "second mother tongue". She did a bookseller's apprenticeship in Frankfurt, then studied cultural anthropology, psychology and Slavic studies there. In 2002, she published her first volume of prose, Tito ist tot, which was followed by another volume of stories - Der Windsammler (2007) - and a novel Der Spieler der inneren Stunde (2005), as well as the poetry volumes Ein Kolibri kam unverwandelt (2007), Lichtorgeln (2008) and Quittenstunde (2011). Her autobiographical trilogy about the recent history of war and peace in Southeast Europe received special attention. Two novels are forthcoming, Das Gedächtnis der Libellen (2010) and Kirschholz und alte Gefühle (2012). The major autobiographical story Mein weißer Frieden (2014) is a bridgehead to the final volume of the trilogy, which the author is working on in Brussels in winter 2014.

In 2007, a documentary film that Marica Bodrožić made together with filmmaker Katja Gasser was broadcast by 3sat (The Heart Painting of Memory. A Journey through My Croatia).

Fantasy and realism

Critics have welcomed Marica Bodrožić's works with open arms. Above all, her narrative energy, the realism of her literary observations in historical space, the rhetorical joy of experimentation, "great and original humanity" (SZ, 31.8.2010), her pictorial power and linguistic imagination were praised. She is - according to critic Meike Feßmann - "a writer who can brilliantly portray both: the airy soaring of the imagination and the earthiness of existence ... the self-evident coexistence of different cultures and religions, the new nationalisms and the old myths" (Sinn und Form 5/2013).

Marica Bodrožić has received several German and European awards in the promotional and middle prize segments. She received, among others, the Heimito-von-Doderer-Förderpreis (2002), the Förderpreis des Chamissopreises (2003), the Kulturpreis Deutsche Sprache (2008), the Liechtenstein-Literaturpreis (2011), the Prize of the LiteraTour Nord (2013) and the Kranichsteiner Literaturpreis (2013).

The Konrad Adenauer Foundation stood at the beginning of Marica Bodrožić's literary path and has continuously accompanied her career. After the publication of her debut book (2002), she received a scholarship from the Else Heiliger Fund. In the years that followed, she participated several times in KAS events (EHF scholarship workshop, authors' workshop in Cadenabbia, readings in Berlin, lectures and workshops) with great resonance. In 2009, she was awarded the Bruno Heck Prize of the former scholarship holders of the Konrad Adenauer Foundation.

Migration and memory literature

The importance of the German language is an important key to Marica Bodrožić's works. The German language holds together what would otherwise fall apart: the memory shards of childhood and war, the origin from a country that no longer exists, and the arrival in a new country with a new language. Marica Bodrožić's first mother tongue was a South Slavic Serbo-Croatian conglomerate, intermixed with Herzegovinian words, Ottoman sounds and a Dalmatian dialect that was not understood in Croatian cities. When Marica Bodrožić tried her hand at writing her first poems in Croatian in Germany in 1991, her country of origin was a war zone; there was talk of "combat zones, military units, guns, grenades", and later the words "poverty" and "hunger" were added.

The German language as a "second mother tongue" is a central medium of belonging for Marica Bodrožić. She provides information about her "arrival in words" in her biographical essay Sterne erben, Sterne färben (Inherit Stars, Colour Stars) from 2007, from which texts were also selected for the Central Abitur. She invokes Rilke, who writes: "The German language was not given to me as a foreign thing, it works out of me" (lecture at Burgtheater Vienna, 2012).

Marica Bodrožić's epic works are European migration and memory literature. For her, migration is not only a transnational spatial process, but also a journey in time, a narrative of the cultural memory of Southeast European contemporary history. This view into space and time breaks through intact family worlds and rigid friend-foe images in order to make visible behind them "God-observation notes" in Catholic Orthodoxy, problems of labour migrants and multi-ethnic conflicts. Writing between European cultures has rarely been practised in such a nuanced and powerful way as in Bodrožić's books.

Literature and the Reorganisation of Europe

With her epic works, Marica Bodrožić makes a significant cultural contribution to the reorganisation of Europe after 1989. She tells of the transformation of a Europe of nations into a multipolar world in a haunting, realistic and at the same time poetic and imaginative way. At the same time, she describes Europe's endangered path to freedom and the common future task of peaceful integration. She pleads for freedom of thought beyond national borders and builds on the integrative power of literature to remember and shape the process of Europe growing together. "If we always separate the disputants from each other and do not allow them to learn anything from each other, the depth from which reconciliation would be possible and in which a language of peaceableness would emerge will also be poisoned".

Author: Michael Braun

State: 2015

* 24 August 1959 in Stuttgart

European thinker of freedom

Human rights, the welfare state, a "morality of first aid" and a defensible humanism: these are the convictions with which Michael Kleeberg (in an interview with the "Welt" of 20 November 2015) views the European and German present. On 5 June 2016, the author, who is one of the most sovereign narrators of contemporary literature, will be awarded the Literature Prize of the Konrad Adenauer Foundation at the Schloss Belvedere Music High School in Weimar.

The literary path

Born on 24 August 1959 in Stuttgart, Michael Kleeberg studied Political Science and Modern History at the University of Hamburg and Visual Communication at the Hamburg University of Fine Arts from 1978 to 1982. After several stays abroad - in Rome, in Amsterdam and from 1986 to 1996 as co-owner of an advertising agency in Paris - he currently lives in Berlin as an author, translator (from French and English) and essayist (in 2017 he will give the Frankfurt Poetics Lectures). His works have been translated into the following languages: Albanian, Arabic, Danish, English, French, Greek, Japanese, Spanish. Kleeberg has received the Anna Seghers Prize (1995), the Lion Feuchtwanger Prize (2000), the Protestant Book Prize (2011) and the Hölderlin Prize (2015). In 2008 he was Mainz's writer-in-residence.

His first collection of stories, Böblinger Brezeln (1984), is obviously influenced by Hemingway's short stories. The independently published story Der saubere Tod (1987) is set in the youth milieu of Berlin-Kreuzberg and already reveals an important theme of his writing: the elegant epic panorama of mentalities and educational paths in contemporary milieus, in this case: the no-future mentality of a history-less youth generation. The developmental novel Proteus, the Pilgrim (1993), schooled on Wieland, and the volume Der Kommunist vom Montmartre (1997) extend this view of the "identity fatigue" of Western man into the European history of the 20th century.

Counter-histories and portraits of the present

Kleeberg achieved his breakthrough with his novel Ein Garten im Norden (1998). Critics were almost unanimous in classifying the book as a "civic guide" for the Berlin Republic (Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung). The novel contains a "historical depth dimension" (Erhard Schütz) that, in Kleeberg's own estimation, makes the book a "counter-book to Thomas Mann's Doktor Faustus", an attempt to counter the "'doom' of German history in the 20th century" with a utopian alternative model in which Central European history can also go well for once - without war - culturally and politically. With this licence to invent an 'other' than historical memory, Kleeberg makes Richard Wagner, for example, appear as a cheerful enlightener or Martin Heidegger as a tango-dancing salon philosopher. Critics praised the sovereign and exciting constellation of "politics and history, diagnosis of the times and determination of the future, music essay and debate on literary theory, heavenly and earthly love" (Die Welt, 22.8.1998). The voices on the homepage www.michael.kleeberg.de testify to the fascination that the novel also exerts on readers in France, Italy and the USA.

With the novels Karlmann (2007) and Vaterjahre (2014), Kleeberg creates a difficult portrait of the German middle class in the 1980s and 1990s. This is recognised by the State Library's book prize "HamburgLesen" 2015. Karlmann ("Charly") Renn is an average citizen who has neither metaphysical consolations nor special intellectual skills at his disposal. He reacts to the impositions of accelerated modernity with an indomitable courage to live, even if it is during a fascinating flight on a Hamburg golf course. His social conditioning and the existential catastrophes he undergoes are unfolded from the gliding perspectives of a narrator who makes use of pathos and irony. In doing so, he succeeds in combining empathetic narration with cool, almost naturalistic insights in the style of Balzac and Zola. A third volume around this exemplary, 'symbolic German' hero "Karlmann" is to round off the trilogy.

The novel Das amerikanische Hospital (2010) impresses as a "work of the highest maturity" with "worldliness and literary skill" (Schütz). It tells the story of the encounter between the traumatised Iraq war veteran David Cote and the French woman Hélène, who is unable to have children. The confrontation of the life stories is at the same time a rending test of the technological belief in feasibility. Michael Kleeberg is more concerned with diagnosing than criticising society; he aims to "portray people who are used to acting without questioning the conditions in which they act" (according to the author in an interview in the FAZ).

The ethics of literature

Michael Kleeberg writes realistic social novels of the German middle class. Hardly any other author gets to the bottom of bourgeois identity, personal claims to freedom and a sense of social responsibility as forcefully as he does. His literary driving forces are: "search to 'tell it like it really was', restriction to the areas covered by one's own experience and knowledge, (literary and human) distrust of rhetoric and hollowness".

At the same time, Kleeberg is not a moral philosopher who describes the world as it should be, but a value- and morality-conscious author in the moralist tradition of Montaigne and Kleist, who conducts behavioural research on modern man, rebels against the moral costs of globalised progress and - as Wolfgang Frühwald points out - advocates a human image of charity and mercy.

In his essays and articles (in the FAZ and Spiegel, among others), Kleeberg shows himself to be a highly reflective citoyen who intervenes in the concerns of public life and political discourse without any compulsion to be topical, but with a deep historical perspective. In February 2015, after the attack on the editorial office of the Paris satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo, he compared the history of the Jewish and Islamic minorities in French society. In the FAZ, he reported in May 2015 on the Kafkaesque balance of repression and progress in Iran. The Lebanese Diary (2004) also shows the author as a political narrator of his time, "sceptical, ironic, more committed to freedom than equality".

Michael Kleeberg's literary heart beats for human freedom in the delivery room of history. He lets his characters speak about the horror of history in the tone of late mourning. In this way, he ensures the transport of the past into our present and allows literary memory to become a part of our social identity.

Not to be forgotten: Michael Kleeberg is a Franco-German bridge builder par excellence. With his translations of Marcel Proust, among others, with essays and contributions to discussions, he is in the tradition of the German "transitors" (Rüdiger Görner) who build cultural bridges between neighbouring countries.

Affiliation with the Konrad Adenauer Foundation

The Foundation has steadily accompanied Michael Kleeberg's literary path. In the 2000s, he participated several times in the Konrad Adenauer Foundation's writers' workshop in Cadenabbia on Lake Como. In 2013, he gave a lecture on the courageous Georg Büchner at the Bonn Waterworks at a soiree opened by the Chairman of the KAS, the former President of the European Parliament Dr Hans-Gert Pöttering, which was published in the European cultural journal Merkur. In 2015, he completed a highly acclaimed reading, together with Frédéric Ciriez, on urban milieus and European dimensions of Paris in the KAS cooperation series with the Bonn Institut français.

Author: Michael Braun

State: 2016

* 15 October 1949 in Hard

The art of the storyteller

A "natural born narrator" is how the Welt (18.10.2014) pays tribute to Michael Köhlmeier, alluding to a film title. Born on 15.10.1949 in Hard on Lake Constance, the author is an important narrator and re-narrator. His epic range is enormous: from novels and novellas to libretti, audio and screenplays to retellings of biblical stories, ancient myths, fairy tales and Shakespearean dramas. Storytelling means transforming history and the material of life into art with the signs of the times. For James Wood, the 'Reich-Ranicki of American literary criticism', the storyteller "asks us not to believe things (in a philosophical sense) but to imagine them (in an artistic sense)" (The Art of Storytelling, 2013). In this sense, Michael Köhlmeier introduces us to our time, our origins, our traditions and values in a way that is as frank as it is artistic.

Biography and literary curriculum vitae

"I grew up" - writes Michael Köhlmeier - "in a family addicted to storytelling and already knew as a child that I would like to become a writer." Pre-literary storytelling has shaped Köhlmeier's development. It involves inventing and remembering. It is community-building, connects generations, but must be transferred from oral everyday practice into individual written form in order to be art. This is demonstrated in the novel Bleib bei mir (Stay with me, 1993), a post-war love story about his parents who met in Coburg.

Köhlmeier began writing as a pupil at the Capuchin boarding school in Feldkirch, in an atmosphere characterised by peer pressure and competitions for authority. The novel Die Musterschüler (1989) provides information on how much storytelling is also always wonder and consolation. The third early writing influence - after parental home and school - was the study of German in Marburg (1970-1978); in addition, Köhlmeier studied mathematics and physics in Giessen and Frankfurt am Main. In 1975 Köhlmeier sent a text to the Rauris Literature Competition, forgot about it and was reminded of it when he received a letter saying he had won the prize. Michael Köhlmeier sat down in his VW, drove to Wetzlar, went for a walk and decided to be a writer from then on.

Narrator to listen to

His literary work began with the original sound radio plays he wrote in the early 1980s about conflicts in the world of work and marginalised social groups. A breakthrough was the collection of retellings of sagas of classical antiquity (1995-1998, 15 CDs). Since 2007, a series of further retellings of ancient stories has been running in an 80-part broadcast series of the Bayerischer Rundfunk (broadcast by ARD-alpha).

For Köhlmeier, the biblical, ancient and Germanic myths, the second main trunk of his work alongside the novels, are "distant mirrors" that make it easier for us to understand our history. In them, the triumph of the gods and the catastrophe of war stand side by side, calculated falls from the sublime to the vulgar and banal occur, the characters are psychologically deepened. If the narrator is someone who "advises the listener", then Michael Köhlmeier is a wise narrator; in myths lies the "epic side of truth" (Walter Benjamin). This is shown in his most recent book Wer hat dir gesagt, du nackt bist, Adam? (2016). Oriented towards fundamental questions of our time, the volume contains fairy tales, legends and stories about heroes from the Bible and antiquity, narrated by Michael Köhlmeier and explained by the Viennese philosopher Paul Konrad Ließmann. It is about the double face of "curiosity" in the biblical story of paradise, the fatal connection between "violence" and "sadness", the "Daedalus principle" of "work": our work is the solution to the (ecological, technical, social) problems left to us by the machines we have developed to accelerate and simplify work.

Novels and stories

Michael Köhlmeier's epic work comprises several novels and novellas. They are characterised by a narrative that is sovereign and calm and, for all its sympathy for the characters, does not lack clever foresight. The author takes the view that "unconditional love of humanity" and "unconditional hatred of humanity" cloud the narrator's vision. That is why he lets his characters oscillate between hope and depression, takes them to the places of victory and to the battlefields of history, gives them an archetypal deep structure. It is a basic characteristic of Köhlmeier's storytelling: "When I tell about a father and there is a thought of Abraham or the father himself shimmering behind it, then it takes on an immense depth effect that justifies any storytelling" (Die Presse, 12.3.1994).

The novel Abendland, nominated on the shortlist for the German Book Prize 2007, tells a story of the 20th century using the example of the almost hundred-year-old mathematician, cosmopolitan and jazz fan Candoris (who was inspired by the Austrian Leopold Vietoris). This life story is recorded by a writer. Both - the politics in the story and the personal narrator in the novel - are important elements of Köhlmeier's compositional art. Story and history, fact and fiction form an epic unity. "One can only tell stories of individual people, history as such cannot be told", Köhlmeier writes. Die Zeit (20.9.2007) praised the work as a "period novel about modern man, enlightened and suffering, infiltrated and overwhelmed by Freud, the sexus, the death instinct and the demands of emancipation, exposed to the dangers of natural science, its possibilities and consequences".

The same principle governs the novel Two Gentlemen on the Beach (2016). Here, too, a narrator appears who reveals the life stories of Charly Chaplin and Winston Churchill. Both make a pact: to help each other when one of them falls into severe depression. The novel is an "ingenious play of fables" (Die Welt, 18.10.2014) with real and invented sources, a story about a friendship that has remained largely unknown, sustained by the common but different means used to fight Hitler. The question of truth and deception, good and evil also underpins the 2013 novel The Adventures of Joel Spazierer, a picaresque novel about dictators and their accomplices in the 20th century.

Michael Köhlmeier's novellistic storytelling is in the Goethean line: a problem is pointedly, excitingly staged and resolved in a fragile idyll. Sunrise (1994) is a doppelganger story and modern adaptation of Ackermann aus Böhmen by Johannes von Tepl from 1400. Idylle mit ertrinkendem Hund (2005), Book of the City of Cologne 2013, is a tale of happy mourning in which the author, unveiled as rarely before, comes to terms with the accidental death of his own daughter. Das Mädchen mit dem Fingerhut (The Girl with the Thimble), a coming-of-age legend and a parable of Western European immigration society, was published in 2016.

The poetry should also be mentioned; the volume Der Liebhaber bald nach dem Frühstück (2012) will be followed in February 2017 by Ein Vorbild für die Tiere. Almost all of Köhlmeier's books are published by Hanser Verlag, Munich.

Appreciation of the work

In literary criticism, Michael Köhlmeier is appreciated as a gifted narrator with a wide epic range. Köhlmeier draws on the rich store of material in Western cultural history. He is a virtuoso master of the genres and media of narration, from folk tale to legend, picaresque novel, memoir fiction and generational epic to novella critical of the times, and exploits the possibilities of storytelling, from the fantastic and entertaining to the therapeutic and instructive. He persistently poses the question of man's origins and Christian-human values, orients himself to the experiential knowledge of our time, and considers the challenges of the present: migration and violence. Between tragedy and idyll, the storyteller Michael Köhlmeier finds an original path of poetic freedom in political responsibility. - His books and stories have long been translated into many European languages and are read today in French as well as in Turkish, Spanish or Slovenian.

Michael Köhlmeier has been awarded the Hebel Prize (1988), the Hasenclever Literature Prize (2014) and the Düsseldorf Literature Prize (2015), among others. On 21 May, he will receive the Kaschnitz Prize awarded by the Evangelische Akademie Tutzing. The Literature Prize of the Konrad Adenauer Foundation will be awarded on 25 June 2017 in Weimar, the laudatory speech will be given by the Konstanz-based cultural and literary scholar Prof. Dr Aleida Assmann. Michael Köhlmeier is the 25th laureate of the Foundation.

Author: Michael Braun

State: 2017

* 11 January 1972 in Niort

Europe's home is in the East

Beethoven's compass points east. Why is that? Mathias Énard tells us in his novel Compass (2016). It is a book about the fascination that the Orient exerts on modern European cultural history. As a multilingual citizen of the world, as a pioneer of an Oriental renaissance and as a convinced European, the French author, born in 1972, advocates a democratic dialogue between Occident and Orient, for "togetherness and continuity". On 6 May 2018, Mathias Énard was awarded the Literature Prize of the Konrad Adenauer Foundation in Weimar. The laudatory speech was given by Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer, Secretary General of the CDU.

Biography

Mathias Énard was born on 11 January 1972 in Niort in western France, a small town between Poitiers and La Rochelle. From there he set out into the world. He first studied contemporary art. In the early 1990s, he came to the Institut national des langues et civilisations orientales in Paris. With a keen sense for the political situation of the time, he learned Arabic and Persian: "It was the time when a civil war began after the Algerian elections in 1991. Some took sides with the Islamic Salvation Front FIS, others against a radical political Islam that encompassed all parts of society" (Interview in Tagesspiegel, 22.03.2017).

After his studies, Énard lived in Tehran, in Beirut, in Damascus, a Syrian village, where he taught French, and in Rome (with a scholarship from the Villa Medici in 2005/06). Longer stays took him to Brussels, most recently also to Berlin: "That means 25 years outside France. You learn a lot" (Deutschlandfunk, 17.03.2017). In 2000, Énard moved to Barcelona, to the multicultural district of El Raval. There he worked for cultural magazines, was a member of the editorial board of the French magazine for literature and philosophy 'Inculte - and runs the Lebanese restaurant "Karakala" in the Torrent de L'Olla.

Novels around the Mediterranean

Énard's literary career began with the novel Zone, which was published in France in 2008, in German translation in 2012, and was awarded the Franco-German Candide Prize and the Prix Décembre. The novel was hailed in Germany as well as in France as a successful experiment: the almost 600-page, punctuationless monologue of consciousness by a secret agent and French-Croatian ex-mercenary in the Yugoslav war. The "zone" is the Mediterranean, cradle and at the same time wound of Western civilisation, since Homer's Iliad the domain of the "angry gods", "lined with rocks and mountains of those cairns that point to as many graves corpse pits mass graves to a new map another network of traces roads rails rivers that still carry forgotten revered anonymous or in the great history roll recorded corpses remains fragments screams bones". (like almost all of Mathias Énard's works, translated from French into a smooth German by Holger Fock and Sabine Müller).

The book has 24 chapters; Homer's epic has just as many cantos. But Énard's "Homeric journey" (according to Katharina Teutsch in the FAZ, 29.10.2010) is neither war reportage nor agent thriller. At the same time, it is an exciting account of dealing with the traumatic memories of European history, of tragedy and revenge, of the courage to reconcile and the will to make amends.

Énard's subsequent novels are sentinels at the gates of the Mediterranean, which was called the "mare nostrum" and had been contested by Roman and Arab domination since the 7th century. Tell Them of Battles, Kings and Elephants (2010/2013) is set on the Bosphorus, in Michelangelo's time, Street of Thieves (2012/2013) on the Straits of Gibraltar, in our present day. The straits connect Europe with Asia and with Africa, they are historically and politically significant places, geographies of struggle and war, but also transfer spaces of great art and culture.

The Michelangelo novel, which is an excellent introduction to Énard's work, takes up an anecdote from the 16th century, the historical truth of which, however, cannot be vouched for: Michelangelo was commissioned by the Sultan of Constantinople to develop the construction plan for a bridge over the Bosporus. In fact, Michelangelo was in Constantinople in 1506, and there is a competing design for a bridge on the Golden Horn by Leonardo da Vinci. Énard uses the conceit to tell that "story of lost battles, forgotten kings, vanished animals" that the title of his novel borrows from Rudyard Kipling's Book of India. It is a story of the birth of cosmopolitanism from the spirit of artistic genius. Énard's Michelangelo is a sculptor and architect, but also a European diplomat and storyteller with a great curiosity about the Orient. After throwing himself into the nightlife of Constantinople, he comes up with a vision of a bridge connecting the Orient and the Occident: "How many works of art does it take before beauty enters the world", Énard makes his character think, and in the end he leaves the city with an unfinished building, "secretly", as they say.

The Michelangelo novel, honoured with the Prix Goncourt des lycéens 2010, is slim and episodic, like a rondo. The following novel, Rue des Voleurs, published in 2012 and translated into German (Straße der Diebe) in 2013, is quite different. It is an adventure book and a political portent, set between the Arab Spring, the Spanish Revolution and the political movement ¡Democracia Real Ya! ('Real Democracy Now!') at the beginning of the 2010s. The hero of the novel, a young Moroccan named Lakhdar from the banlieue of Tangier, fights for good in a bad way. He commutes between his home country and Spain, in search of work and freedom, art and love. His decision to stay on European soil and end the "fruitless journeys back and forth across the strait" can be dated to 2011: "at the end of October, when the Tunisians had just democratically brought the Islamists from the Ennahda party to government and the Spaniards were preparing to elect the Catholics from the Partido Popular, just as the Moroccans were making their way to the polls at about the same time".

Énard reads his time closely, but he does not tell it off. Moralising is as alien to him as politicising. He is a narrator of transitions and migrations, an epic anthropologist. For him, the paths that connect Europe with Africa and Asia are what people make of them, pilgrimages, crossroads, wanderings and searches. Migration and integration, terror and interculturality play a role. The refugees who die in the Mediterranean on their way to Europe are not concealed, nor are the Islamist attacks in Marrakech and in Europe. And at the end of the novel Street of Thieves, which you shouldn't give away if you haven't read it yet, there is a fist-pumping and not necessarily pleasant surprise.

Oriental Renaissance

The extensive novel Kompass (2015/2016) is, in the unanimous opinion of critics, a "literary masterpiece" (Ijoma Mangold). An "encyclopaedia of oriental culture", wrote Der Spiegel, "the dream book of the year", praised Die Welt, "a phenomenon in contemporary French literature", said Süddeutsche Zeitung. In March 2017, Mathias Énard received the Leipzig Book Prize for European Understanding for the novel. In her laudation, the French historian Leyla Dakhli said: "In my view, Compass is a path of knowledge and understanding. The novel shows the possibilities of a happy path. It runs through science, love and the beauty of books as well as people."

The novel goes a long way. In a sleepless night, the musicologist Franz Ritter recalls his love for the brilliant Oriental scholar Sarah, his places of study in the Arab-Persian world and the cultural history of the Orient - and this, of course, not by chance in Vienna, the gateway to the Orient. What emerges is a multi-coloured image of the Orient that is not reducible to politics and religion, that operates far from imperialism and colonialism (following Edward Said's book Orientalism, 1978) and that reaches deep into European cultural history, so deep that it is hardly possible to separate European and Oriental heritages. On the contrary, as Énard wants to tell it, the cultures interpenetrate and cross-fertilise each other, and it is the constant exchange between Europe and the Orient from which we can learn. In the novel, Sarah is the teacher of this renaissance of the Orient out of a cosmopolitan spirit:

"The Orient is a construction of images, a complex of representations from which everyone draws at will, depending on their point of view". It is naïve, Sarah continued in a loud voice, to believe that this suitcase of Oriental images is today solely a specific asset of Europe. No. These images, this treasure chest, are accessible to everyone and everyone contributes to them with whatever cultural goods they produce, new stickers, new portraits, new music".

The nostalgia from Arabian Nights is thus transformed into an epic cultural history in which effortless connections can be made between Goethe and the Persian poet Hafis, Balzac and his translator into Arabic, Joseph von Hammer-Purgstall, conservative Wahhabism and Disney films.

Énard's novels tell of the cultural transfer across the Mediterranean countries and the Europeans' fascination with Oriental culture. For Énard, Orient and Occident can no longer be separated, entirely in the sense of Goethe. With his epic sense of the mutual inspiration of the ethnic groups, religions and cultures around the Mediterranean, Énard is a mastermind of Mediterraneanism (Michael Herzfeld / David Abulafia) and at the same time a counter-figure to the identitarian movements, an 'anti-Houellebecq' who is concerned with the historical examination of the present, not with gloomy visions of the future of an Islamist domination of Europe. Énard is writing a cosmopolitan work. It is a work of exchange between cultures and a work of peace. This is of European, even global significance, also in commemoration of the end of the "Grande Guerre" a hundred years ago.

And Beethoven's compass?

And from there, the story of Beethoven's compass is also illuminated. Beethoven did indeed own a compass, a small round metal device with a coloured frame and a compass rose. It came into the possession of Stefan Zweig, who was sometimes called "Erwerbs-Zweig" because of his eagerness to collect, and then migrated to the Beethoven House in Bonn via the Swiss patron Hans Conrad Bodmer. There you can see that Beethoven's instrument points north. But Énard's invention has a punch line. Along with the needle, the historical sense of relationship also points east. Beethoven knew the orientalist Hammer-Purgstall. He had suggested to the composer that he set oriental texts to music. Nothing came of it, except the Turkish March from Beethoven's festival play The Ruins of Athens (1811). But what remains is the orientation of the classics and the moderns, whether in literature or in music, towards the East. Thus Énard equips his novel character with "one of the few compasses that point to the Orient, the compass of enlightenment. ... The essential thing is not to lose the East".

The cited works by Mathias Énard are published by Hanser Verlag (Berlin) and translated from the French by Holger Fock and Sabine Müller.

Author: Michael Braun

State: 2018

* 1969 in Köln

Wittgenstein à l’aéroport

Wittgenstein à l’aéroport: This is the title of the French edition of Husch Josten's penultimate novel. What a philosopher is doing in a novel can be explained by the fact that philosophy helps the author to tell stories - and the reader to think. This is especially true of Wittgenstein. Thomas Bernhard wrote the novel Wittgenstein's Nephew (1982) about it, David Markson followed him with Wittgenstein's Mistress (1988) and Raouf Khanfir with Wittgenstein (2012). Husch Josten, however, has dealt with the famous philosopher in a somewhat different way in her novel Hier sind Drachen. For her, Wittgenstein is more than just a figure who recognises the world from its linguistic logic. Wittgenstein comes from the "time of the magicians" (Wolfram Eilenberger), who in the 1920s wanted to reveal the secret of thought of a modernity overwhelmed by its language. This secret consists in the fact that although the world is determined by "facts", it cannot be explained completely, because there always remains something that cannot be said, that cannot be spoken about.

Wittgenstein is a good key to understanding Husch Josten's novels. They come from the middle of our present, from what 'is the case' today. They are mainly about the challenges of fundamentalism and terrorism. At the same time, they pose philosophical questions about fate and chance, about God and the world. Husch Josten's narration is exciting and forceful - not like Wittgenstein, who in 1929 told his doctoral supervisors in Cambridge to their faces that they would never understand his theses anyway.

Husch Josten, who got her first typewriter at the age of five, has always emphasised her passion for writing. Meanwhile, the reporter has long since become a storyteller in the lineage of the literary journal (Heine, Fontane, Thomas Mann). On the relationship between fact and fiction, she said in an interview with Laurie Durand (ENS Lyon) in June 2018, and I quote:

"Journalism has to strive most carefully for objectivity and truth, has to remain as factual as possible, has the duty to illuminate an event from all sides. The fictional novel may do what it likes - invent, add, subtract; be unobjective, emotional, subjective, one-sided. I like very much to combine the genres in a thoroughly confusing way. The facts in my fiction have to be right. The rest doesn't."

Husch Josten's characters are stumbling seekers of meaning. They want to straighten out truths, gloss over them or simply not believe them. Her second novel, Mrs Pfeiffer's Happiness (2012), is set in middle-class London at the time of the financial crisis around 2008. One day Lee, the main character, overhears a mobile phone call in a London café and learns of an apparent emergency: a carer is threatening to abandon Aurora Pfeiffer, who is almost a hundred years old. With her tendentiously neurotic partner and artist friend Leo, Lee wonders: for what sake is this ancient woman still alive, what can her happiness consist of? She visits the old lady. She, however, turns the tables and searches for meaning in Lee's and Leo's lives. Happiness is not a practical recipe for success mixed from psychology, economics, social research, bio- or neuroscience. Happiness is a search movement between fate and chance, 'bonheur' and 'béatitude', "happiness" and "good luck", successful and thwarted life.

That the "world of the happy" is a "happy world" is what Wittgenstein once noted, thus pointing to the philosophical claim of happiness. This claim to happiness is anchored several times in the constitutional narratives of modern times: the pursuit of happiness in the American constitution and, as the devise de la République, "Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité" in Article 2 of the French constitution of 1958. In Josten's novel, this happiness is threatened by bursting share packages and a disintegrating world economic order. Aurora Pfeiffer wants to leave England, she wants to go to France, to her homeland, which is still a fait accompli and not a confession. There she lost parts of her family because of the Hitler occupation, there she now walks guilelessly through cemeteries, and, it is said at the end of her life, "there was nothing sentimental, melancholy to be discovered in her, no fear, no regret, nothing of the depression of death."

The novel Der tadellose Herr Taft (2014) is about redemption and enlightenment, loss of orientation and neglected ideas. The title character is a collector of ideas who, after a "betrayal of love" (Peter von Matt), makes use of his talent: he sells so-called theme cards to people seeking meaning, at a unit price of 3.50 euros. Often there is only a single word on them, such as "Zerinnerung" or "Mut". These registers of ideas convey "illusions of freedom of thought", as the author says, but at the same time they are signs of an approach to happiness and truth, in personal life as well as in social and global interaction.

Husch Josten's critical breakthrough came with her novels Here Are Dragons in 2017 and Seeing Land in 2018, which received almost universally glowing reviews. The novel Here Are Dragons is a political-philosophical chamber play. The location of the action is London's Heathrow Airport. At Terminal 2, the narrator, a journalist, is stuck because of a terror alert. It is the morning of 14.11.2015. She herself was supposed to fly to Paris to research the actual attack that took place there the day before. Now a man is sitting opposite her, engrossed in Wittgenstein's Tractatus logico-philosphicus. They get into a conversation about the logic of coincidence and about the reasons for terror - and this puts them in the crosshairs of the security guards at the airport, where - here the narrative becomes fiction - another assassination takes place.

Wittgenstein am Flughafen, Wittgenstein à l'aéroport is, as mentioned at the beginning, the title of the French translation of Josten's novel in January 2018. With Wittgenstein, the question is: How can one tell about terror? And the novel gives a remarkable answer to that as well. Terror can perhaps be explained from close up, but only told from a distance: with the view from London to Paris. And vice versa, the terror radiates from Paris to London, from reality into fiction, to another place, in other words: on the "reverse side of things", real terror becomes narrative. Husch Josten finds a formula for this contrat sociale between contemporary history and literary narrative: "Stories and history are about ordering time. [...] The aim of narrative is never to find a final solution to conflicts, but to make them bearable. Bearable."

The novel Land sehen (2018) is a story about the truths in religion. At the centre of the novel is a religious conversation. The narrator, a literature professor from Bonn, is at the Maria Laach monastery. In the old Jesuit library, he talks to Father Andreas about his uncle, who joined the Pius Fraternity at the age of 70. It is about faith in God and human rights, about Catholic tradition and modern life, about mission and soumission, submission. No answer is given to these questions. But the change of direction from the Enlightenment to modernity is precisely indicated: Instead of the truth of religion, it is now about the freedom of religious practice, in Father Andreas' words: an "offensive patchwork religiosity", not a fundamentalist faith state as in Michel Houllebecq's future novel Soumission (2015). 

Philosophy, chance and terror in Here Are Dragons and theology, fate and faith in Land See are two sides of the coin. However, they belong closely together. When religion appears in the name of violence, it becomes terror. Husch Josten asks where terror comes from and where it has consequences in society. But she holds back with answers. "Here are dragons": this refers to the Latin inscription "Hic sunt dracones", which was used to designate undiscovered areas on ancient maps. "Land sehen": this is an idiom of the German language for the desire for arrival and security. It comes from the vocabulary of seafarers who were happy when they saw land again. This can be known land, but also undiscovered land, where again "dragons" dwell. Husch Josten tells of these spaces between the questions of philosophy and the answers of theology, and she tells vividly, excitingly, densely. What one cannot speak of, one could paraphrase a famous sentence by Wittgenstein, one does not have to be silent about, but one can tell about it.

Author: Michael Braun

State: 2019

* 23 May 1956 in Celle

Living history

Summer 1954: Thomas Mann is in Düsseldorf for a reading. The almost eighty-year-old Nobel Prize winner is staying with his family in the best house in town, the Breidenbacher Hof. The unloved son Golo and the indispensable daughter Erika argue: "I want, Madame Révolution, credible elites and the preserved form." - "I want human rights, unrestricted." - "Style and education guarantee true freedom." - "Justice and peace are the must." Until the mother Katia intervenes and summons "dignified supervision" in the form of her husband. The little scene is in Hans Pleschinski's novel Königsallee (2013). It brings to life a true story. Mann was in Germany in 1954/55, the family ties in the double meaning of the word also existed, but the dialogue is invented for the theatre. Hans Pleschinski takes on the task of revising the history of Germany and Central Europe by evoking its positive traditions: the German and French Baroque, the reconstruction years after 1945, the time after reunification. He has succeeded in doing so in more than twenty works up to 2019, in novels, stories, essays, translations and letter editions that embark on a biographical-timeshistorical search for traces.

For Hans Pleschinski, home is an ambivalent space of origin. He describes the Lüneburg Heath, where he was born on 23 May 1956 (in Celle) and grew up, as a "barren expanse, emptiness" (Die Ostheide, das tolle Nichts, 2003), where there were more horses than farmers. Three kilometres from his parents' house ran the zone border, the "death strip between the GDR and the Federal Republic", where "the People's Army death squads took aim at refugees from the Republic". At the same time, he experienced historical places early on, Biedermeier churches, monasteries and Celle Castle. "For me," he writes, "the Ostheide exists as a spiritual way of life and as a desirable foundation." In his autobiographical book Ostsucht. Eine Jugend im deutsch-deutschen Grenzland (1993), he confesses to having spent "a happy childhood and the best early youth on NATO's western border [...]." His father, born in 1921 east of Frankfurt an der Oder, took over the blacksmith's shop of his wife's parents in the small town of Wittingen in Lower Saxony after the war.

From 1976 to 1983, Hans Pleschinski studied German, Romance and Theatre Studies at the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität in Munich. In 1984 he completed his studies with a master's thesis on Gottfried Benn. In addition to his academic training, he worked for galleries, opera and film.

Hans Pleschinski's discovery experience was his reading of Flaubert around 1980. In the work of the French classicist, he found the "struggle between the treasures of knowledge, promises of happiness on the one hand and the human being on the other, who is no longer able to live for a god and an ideology", according to the essay Die goldenen Achtziger: meine Lektüren (1995).

Hans Pleschinski made his literary debut in 1984 with no less than three books: time-critical glosses and satires appeared under the title Frühstückshörnchen. Nach Ägypten, subtitled "A Modern Novel", tells the story of a young runaway from the Lower Saxony province who becomes wiser in the European cultural metropolises, but not necessarily clever. The novel Gabi Lenz. Werden & Wollen (Becoming & Wanting), a parody of the inward-looking literature of the 1980s in the form of the biography of a fictitious social worker who makes her way to becoming a best-selling author with messed-up relationship stories. The book was so cleverly disguised as documentary fiction that some readers immediately wanted to order more books by the author "Gabi Lenz".

In 1984, Pleschinski received the Hunger Cloth Prize for the novel, a prize of 1,000 D-marks awarded by the Frankfurt Department of Culture and the Writers' Association of Hesse. It was an auspicious start, Pleschinski became an author for Gerd Haffmans' renowned publishing house and a permanent contributor to Bayerischer Rundfunk.

"Lights in the Dark": Stories from the Baroque Age

Even during his studies, Hans Pleschinski was drawn more to the neglected pre-classics of literature than to their canon saints. He was moved by the linguistic power of baroque poems and memoirs, which tell of "human glory and fate according to the so significant principle of the height of fall". Pleschinski's volume Byzantiner und andere Falschmünzer (Byzantines and Other False Coiners), published by Schöffling Verlag in 1997, brings together his revised radio essays, among others on Pierre Corneille, Voltaire, Daniel Casper von Lohenstein, Ewald Christian von Kleist. They cast "lights in the darkness" (the subtitle of the volume) of Franco-German cultural history. In the concluding essay, André Gide, who was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1947 for his novel The False Coiners, is praised as a forerunner of a postmodern narrative that can always "portray its openness along with it".

With three editions, Hans Pleschinski recalls historical figures who profiled their time, the 18th century, through letters and diaries. For Aus dem Briefwechsel Voltaire - Friedrich der Große (1992), Pleschinski newly translated almost a third of the entire correspondence from French into German and annotated it with his own intermediate texts. This was followed in 1999 by a selection of the letters of Madame de Pompadour, whom the translator and commentator Pleschinski brings out of the shadow of Louis XV's mistress and stages as the champion of a refined civilisation. The translation and commentary of large parts of the Secret Diary of the Duke of Croÿ, which immediately went into four editions in 2011, helps to rediscover an astonishingly modern European who, in late feudalism on the eve of the French Revolution, freely and cultivatedly communicated with the "monarchs, mistresses, world changers" of his time. In 2012, Hans Pleschinski was awarded the Order Chevalier des Arts et des Lettres of the Republic of France by the French ambassador.

Hans Pleschinski's closeness to the baroque age, which is so distant from us today, is best expressed in his story Der Holzvulkan. The book was first published in 1986 by Haffmans Verlag and was reprinted in Braunschweig in 1995 and - in an expanded version - by C. H. Beck Verlag in 2014. It tells the unbelievable but real-historical story of a "state ruin project": Duke Anton Ulrich of Brunswick-Wolfenbüttel (1633-1714) wanted to turn his small principality into a wonderland of the arts and had a castle built in Salzdahlum, which, however, because of lack of money, could only be built of wood, from the foundation to the gables, on which stone statues were enthroned. No wonder that the building soon fell into disrepair, that the imitation marble tiles began to swell and the plank walls became mouldy; in 1813 the castle was sold for firewood. Pleschinski tells the story of the castle that no longer exists as a timeless parable of transience and a history lesson of the decline of utopias. A "unique chapter from the process of civilisation", writes Gustav Seibt in his afterword to the new edition.

European Ensemble Novels

Alongside the historical novels and editions from the Age of Enlightenment, the European ensemble novel is a second focus of Hans Pleschinski's writing. These poles are connected by European history. In the ensemble novels, the author creates constellations of characters linked by a special idea or a special historical situation.

The novel Brabant (1995) tells of a diverse cultural community that sets out for America on an old Flemish hotel ship to protest the construction of a Disney Park in Rome. There is no anti-American impulse behind this fiction, but there is a mission to search for the roots and values common to the European nations, all of which have their emissaries on the ship. Of course, this is not without controversy. Almost all discourses on Europe have their spokespersons here, the postcolonialist and the late humanist discourse as well as the etatist, the ethical and the aesthetic.

The ensemble in the novel Ludwigshöhe (2008) is a group of people weary of life who, with the coming of spring, are able to transform their death wish and suicidal intentions into a simple lust for life - a reverse death in Venice.

The novels Königsallee (2013) and Wiesenstein (2018) tell of the last years of the lives of Nobel Prize winners Thomas Mann and Gerhart Hauptmann. Both are connected by the - basically baroque - question of fame and human transience, but rival each other for the role of Goethe's deputy, for the voice of conscience of the nation. Thomas Mann recognised Hauptmann as the "king" of the Weimar Republic, but because he remained in Germany after 1933, he became the "emperor of emigration" (Hermann Kurzke). Pleschinski sticks to the facts handed down from the biographies; he lets Thomas Mann drive a lift and give press interviews and Hauptmann reside with his wife, gardener, archivist and masseur in his villa "Wiesenstein" in the Riesengebirge mountains in 1945/46. The research is enriched by previously unpublished diary entries (by Gerhart and Margarete Hauptmann), their own comments and invented encounters, for example between Thomas Mann and his childhood sweetheart Klaus Heuser. Hans Pleschinski tells the dramatic upheavals in the mirror of two great authors, whose lives in turn document these upheavals in German history in the 20th century. Pleschinski is currently working on a third Nobel Prize-winning novel, about Paul Heyse, from which he presented a sample of his work at the Konrad Adenauer Foundation's writers' workshop in Cadenabbia in October 2019.

Values at work

Hans Pleschinski is a value-conscious author. Against the impositions that history places on man, he combines a sense of responsibility with a sense of beauty. From his childhood experience at the German-German zone border, he knows what freedom is worth and that a democracy must be defenceless. He advocates a "very traditional humanism, mixed with freedom, education and perhaps also a sense of form", he writes in the preface to the volume Byzantines. In the anthology konservativ?! (2019), alongside contributions by Monika Grütters, Wolfgang Schäuble and Uwe Tellkamp, he delivers a civic vote: Like his father, he writes, he builds "on a just state, on humane legislation [and] a relaxed but reliable order".

Author: Michael Braun

State: 2020

* 12 February 1949 in East-Berlin

(lives in Strasbourg since 1984)

Narrative Judaism

Jewish places of memory and the survival of Jewish traditions in the Occident, German history and the European present are the poles between which Barbara Honigmann's works unfold. "We cannot speak emphatically enough of the Jews as Jews when we speak of their fate among the Germans," Barbara Honigmann quotes the Jewish scholar Gershom Scholem in the preface to her volume Unverschämt jüdisch (2021). The title contains her aesthetic confession. Inspired by Jean-Paul Sartre, who speaks of the "juif inauthentique" in his Reflections on the Jewish Question (1946), she professes her Judaism, into which she was born on 12 February 1949 in East Berlin as the child of Jewish remigrants, in order to "live it unashamedly" and "also to speak, tell and write about it in this way". Honigmann's Jewishness, however, has less to do with political status and social diversity as it does for Maxim Biller and Max Czollek. Rather, her belonging to Judaism derives from "learning and knowing" about her ancestors, "as travellers, as strangers". Thus Barbara Honigmann sees herself "in the role of one of the last German Jews" who is "still German and still Jewish". "As a Jew, I left Germany, but in my work, in a very strong attachment to the German language, I always return," she confesses in her Self-Portrait as a Jew (1992).

Autobiography, family genealogy and Jewish history combine in Barbara Honigmann's works to form a German and Jewish identity narrative that claims exemplary character in Europe, currently in view of 1,700 years of Jewish life in Germany. The autobiography, the view of her own life and that of her parents and family, allows her a Jewish perspective on the great political upheavals of the 20th century: on the catastrophe of the Holocaust as well as on new promises of socialism and their disappointments; this Jewish perspective also sharpens the questions of identity and foreignness, of integration and exclusion.

From theatre to autofictional writing

And so, for Barbara Honigmann, belonging to the 'second generation' is more than just the biographical fact of being a descendant of Jewish Shoah survivors. Her family narrative is the anchor of a cultural identity in which the practice of modern Jewish Orthodoxy meets a secular non-Jewish majority society, and the experience of political dictatorship meets the reflection of home and foreignness. In Strasbourg, which as a centre of Jewish scholarship in Europe has also been called a 'Jerusalem of the West', she landed, in her own words, in 1984 "from the triple leap of death without a net: from the East to the West, from Germany to France and from assimilation right into Torah Judaism."

Barbara Honigmann's path to literature began in the 1970s with theatre work in Brandenburg and Berlin. In autumn 1986, she made her literary debut with the short stories Roman von einem Kinde. This first literary work of the second German-Jewish generation made the Südwestfunk's list of best works and was awarded the ZDF's "aspekte" prize. Her narrative art consists of "mixing" autobiographical memories with fictional mind games, wishful images and symbols - as she said in 1986 in an interview with Ariane Thomalla - and thus piercing the "shells of strangeness" that lie over the past. As an author, she does not need to hide behind invention in the novel, but - as she says in her Zurich Poetics Lectures (2002) - "fictionalises herself in autobiographical writing."

Father and mother novels

In subsequent novels and essays (Damals, dann und danach, 1999; Das Gesicht wiederfinden, 2007), Barbara Honigmann has told of her family's European fate. With critical empathy and a narrative attitude that prefers epic wit to thought when in doubt, she takes on the "sitting-between-the-chairs" legacy. She traces Jewish biographies back to their German roots and European stations. Her essay Von meinem Urgroßvater, meinem Großvater, meinem Vater und von mir (Of my great-grandfather, my grandfather, my father and me, 1995) describes the path from the emancipation of educated bourgeois Jewry in the 19th century. The book describes the path from the emancipation of educated bourgeois Jewry in the 19th century (the paternal great-grandfather was one of the pioneers of liberal Reform Judaism) through assimilation (the paternal grandfather founded the chair of medical history at the University of Giessen) and failed symbiosis (the maternal grandfather, a clerk at the Jewish Community of Vienna, was expelled from his home after the Anschluss and emigrated to London in 1939) to the detachment from Judaism in favour of the Communist Party: His father Georg Honigmann (1903-1984) found his ideological home in communism after returning from English exile and made a career in the GDR, until 1953 as editor-in-chief of the BZ am Abend, then as a DEFA producer, from 1966 as director of the politically ambitious cabaret Die Distel, later as a political non-fiction writer, a "Jew without a confession", as Honigmann writes, "too bourgeois for the comrades", "too bohemian for the real citizens".

Honigmann's second prose work Eine Liebe aus nichts (1991) and her most recent novel Georg (2020) tell of the inconsistencies in her father's life and the challenges of the second generation's culture of memory. Alongside them is her book about her mother: A Chapter from My Life (2004) tells of Alice and Lizzy Kohlmann, respectively, born in Vienna in 1909, and her temporary husband, the British-Russian double agent Kim Philby, who became a model for the James Bond character.

Chronicle of exile and emancipation

The novel Sohara's Journey (1996) is a fabulous introduction to Honigmann's narrative art and to her themes: It is about exile and emigration, about loyalty and identity, about female and secular emancipation, about synagogue and headscarf - and about writing down memories. At the centre is a Jewish mother Courage whose husband, a bigoted rabbi, disappears one day with their children. A thrilling child abduction story begins in the French province, against the background of the emigration fate of Sephardic Jews; in 1492, the Jews were expelled from Spain or forced to convert to the Catholic faith. The majority went into exile. Those who remained in Spain were known as "New Christians", but their descendants today are indistinguishable from the descendants of the Old Christians.

Honigmann also describes her roles in Jewish communities, in her own family, in Germany and in literature in her prose biographies Am Sonntag spielt der Rabbi Fußball (1998), originally columns for a newspaper in the Basel tri-border area, in the novel Chronik meiner Straße (2015) and especially in the New York novel Das überirdische Licht (2008). The epistolary novel Alles, alles Liebe! (2000) and the theatre novel Bilder von A. (2013) take us into the artistic milieu of the GDR in the 1970s, during which Barbara Honigmann worked as a dramaturge and director at the Brandenburg Theatre, the Volksbühne and the Deutsches Theater in East Berlin. Between silence and heartbreak, she has found a special path with her chapters from the history of exile, the GDR and Judaism in Germany and Europe: She portrays hauntingly and, as she says, "kosher light" a "Jewish perspective of our time" (Oliver Jahraus). On 3 July 2022, Barbara Honigmann will be awarded the Literature Prize of the Konrad Adenauer Foundation at the Weimar Musikgymnasium.

Author: Michael Braun

State: 2022

* 12 February 1949 in East-Berlin

(lives in Strasbourg since 1984)

Narrative Judaism

Jewish places of memory and the survival of Jewish traditions in the Occident, German history and the European present are the poles between which Barbara Honigmann's works unfold. "We cannot speak emphatically enough of the Jews as Jews when we speak of their fate among the Germans," Barbara Honigmann quotes the Jewish scholar Gershom Scholem in the preface to her volume Unverschämt jüdisch (2021). The title contains her aesthetic confession. Inspired by Jean-Paul Sartre, who speaks of the "juif inauthentique" in his Reflections on the Jewish Question (1946), she professes her Judaism, into which she was born on 12 February 1949 in East Berlin as the child of Jewish remigrants, in order to "live it unashamedly" and "also to speak, tell and write about it in this way". Honigmann's Jewishness, however, has less to do with political status and social diversity as it does for Maxim Biller and Max Czollek. Rather, her belonging to Judaism derives from "learning and knowing" about her ancestors, "as travellers, as strangers". Thus Barbara Honigmann sees herself "in the role of one of the last German Jews" who is "still German and still Jewish". "As a Jew, I left Germany, but in my work, in a very strong attachment to the German language, I always return," she confesses in her Self-Portrait as a Jew (1992).

Autobiography, family genealogy and Jewish history combine in Barbara Honigmann's works to form a German and Jewish identity narrative that claims exemplary character in Europe, currently in view of 1,700 years of Jewish life in Germany. The autobiography, the view of her own life and that of her parents and family, allows her a Jewish perspective on the great political upheavals of the 20th century: on the catastrophe of the Holocaust as well as on new promises of socialism and their disappointments; this Jewish perspective also sharpens the questions of identity and foreignness, of integration and exclusion.

From theatre to autofictional writing

And so, for Barbara Honigmann, belonging to the 'second generation' is more than just the biographical fact of being a descendant of Jewish Shoah survivors. Her family narrative is the anchor of a cultural identity in which the practice of modern Jewish Orthodoxy meets a secular non-Jewish majority society, and the experience of political dictatorship meets the reflection of home and foreignness. In Strasbourg, which as a centre of Jewish scholarship in Europe has also been called a 'Jerusalem of the West', she landed, in her own words, in 1984 "from the triple leap of death without a net: from the East to the West, from Germany to France and from assimilation right into Torah Judaism."

Barbara Honigmann's path to literature began in the 1970s with theatre work in Brandenburg and Berlin. In autumn 1986, she made her literary debut with the short stories Roman von einem Kinde. This first literary work of the second German-Jewish generation made the Südwestfunk's list of best works and was awarded the ZDF's "aspekte" prize. Her narrative art consists of "mixing" autobiographical memories with fictional mind games, wishful images and symbols - as she said in 1986 in an interview with Ariane Thomalla - and thus piercing the "shells of strangeness" that lie over the past. As an author, she does not need to hide behind invention in the novel, but - as she says in her Zurich Poetics Lectures (2002) - "fictionalises herself in autobiographical writing."

Father and mother novels

In subsequent novels and essays (Damals, dann und danach, 1999; Das Gesicht wiederfinden, 2007), Barbara Honigmann has told of her family's European fate. With critical empathy and a narrative attitude that prefers epic wit to thought when in doubt, she takes on the "sitting-between-the-chairs" legacy. She traces Jewish biographies back to their German roots and European stations. Her essay Von meinem Urgroßvater, meinem Großvater, meinem Vater und von mir (Of my great-grandfather, my grandfather, my father and me, 1995) describes the path from the emancipation of educated bourgeois Jewry in the 19th century. The book describes the path from the emancipation of educated bourgeois Jewry in the 19th century (the paternal great-grandfather was one of the pioneers of liberal Reform Judaism) through assimilation (the paternal grandfather founded the chair of medical history at the University of Giessen) and failed symbiosis (the maternal grandfather, a clerk at the Jewish Community of Vienna, was expelled from his home after the Anschluss and emigrated to London in 1939) to the detachment from Judaism in favour of the Communist Party: His father Georg Honigmann (1903-1984) found his ideological home in communism after returning from English exile and made a career in the GDR, until 1953 as editor-in-chief of the BZ am Abend, then as a DEFA producer, from 1966 as director of the politically ambitious cabaret Die Distel, later as a political non-fiction writer, a "Jew without a confession", as Honigmann writes, "too bourgeois for the comrades", "too bohemian for the real citizens".

Honigmann's second prose work Eine Liebe aus nichts (1991) and her most recent novel Georg (2020) tell of the inconsistencies in her father's life and the challenges of the second generation's culture of memory. Alongside them is her book about her mother: A Chapter from My Life (2004) tells of Alice and Lizzy Kohlmann, respectively, born in Vienna in 1909, and her temporary husband, the British-Russian double agent Kim Philby, who became a model for the James Bond character.

Chronicle of exile and emancipation

The novel Sohara's Journey (1996) is a fabulous introduction to Honigmann's narrative art and to her themes: It is about exile and emigration, about loyalty and identity, about female and secular emancipation, about synagogue and headscarf - and about writing down memories. At the centre is a Jewish mother Courage whose husband, a bigoted rabbi, disappears one day with their children. A thrilling child abduction story begins in the French province, against the background of the emigration fate of Sephardic Jews; in 1492, the Jews were expelled from Spain or forced to convert to the Catholic faith. The majority went into exile. Those who remained in Spain were known as "New Christians", but their descendants today are indistinguishable from the descendants of the Old Christians.

Honigmann also describes her roles in Jewish communities, in her own family, in Germany and in literature in her prose biographies Am Sonntag spielt der Rabbi Fußball (1998), originally columns for a newspaper in the Basel tri-border area, in the novel Chronik meiner Straße (2015) and especially in the New York novel Das überirdische Licht (2008). The epistolary novel Alles, alles Liebe! (2000) and the theatre novel Bilder von A. (2013) take us into the artistic milieu of the GDR in the 1970s, during which Barbara Honigmann worked as a dramaturge and director at the Brandenburg Theatre, the Volksbühne and the Deutsches Theater in East Berlin. Between silence and heartbreak, she has found a special path with her chapters from the history of exile, the GDR and Judaism in Germany and Europe: She portrays hauntingly and, as she says, "kosher light" a "Jewish perspective of our time" (Oliver Jahraus). On 3 July 2022, Barbara Honigmann will be awarded the Literature Prize of the Konrad Adenauer Foundation at the Weimar Musikgymnasium.

Author: Michael Braun

State: 2022

* 8 June 1963 in Gera

How freedom becomes possible

Lutz Seiler, the Literature Prize winner of the Konrad Adenauer Foundation 2023, is praised by the jury as an all-round weighty author whose works bear witness to poetic linguistic power and contemporary political intensity. Both in his poetry, essays and above all in his larger prose works, in the two novels Kruso and Stern 111, which are set before and after the fall of the Wall, he has given new impulses to contemporary German-language literature. His literary reappraisal of the transition from the GDR to the Federal Republic is surprisingly different, politically sensitive, literarily highly innovative and familiar with the values of the Foundation.

Homelands

Lutz Seiler was born in Gera on 8 June 1963 and grew up in the East Thuringian province around Ronneburg, a former spa town whose healing springs owe their fame to radium. Seiler's grandfather worked in the underground uranium mine of the Soviet-German AG Wismar, which extracted fissile material for Russian atomic bombs from the earth. Seiler's father was originally a weaver and then worked as a computer language teacher. In the course of uranium mining, Seiler's home village of Culmitzsch was razed in 1968. "Absence, fatigue and heaviness" characterised his youth, he confessed in his essay Heimaten (2001).

After his military service, Lutz Seiler worked as a construction worker, carpenter and bricklayer, in the summer of 1989 he worked as a dishwasher on Hiddensee, and from 1991 to 1994 in a Berlin basement pub on Oranienburger Straße. Until the beginning of 1990, he studied history and German at the Martin Luther University in Halle (Saale).

Since 1997 he has been in charge of the literary programme at the Peter Huchel House near Potsdam. Seiler lives as a freelance writer with his wife, a Swedish Germanist and translator, in Wilhelmshorst and Stockholm. Lutz Seiler was a guest at the Villa Aurora in Los Angeles (2003) and the Villa Massimo in Rome (2011). He was a visiting professor at the Literature Institute in Leipzig (2005/06), and held the Mainz and Heidelberg Poetry Lectureships (2014 and 2015). He is a member of the German Academy for Language and Poetry (since 2012), the Academy of Arts in Berlin, the Saxon Academy of Arts and the Mainz Academy of Sciences and Literature, as well as PEN Germany.

From poetry to the novel

Seiler's writing began late, in the military. In the beginning there was poetry, followed later by essays, stories and novels. He attracted the attention of the poetry scene with his debut volume berührt/geführt (1995) and through the literary magazine moosbrand (1994-1999), which he co-edited. His breakthrough came with his second collection of poems pech & blende (2000). The title is a writing programme: the poet splits an element - "pitchblende", the mineral from which black powder, initially thought to be uranium, was isolated in 1789 - and equips it poetically for the "whole political world [...] of uranium, pitchblende, isotope 235" (as it says in Gottfried Benn's Berlin novella Der Ptolemäer, 1947). Seiler's book condenses images and scenes from the former GDR, without any Ostalgie. Seiler countered the "euphoria" of the Wende era with a concise description of a turning point in time. This earned him numerous prizes, among them the Kranichsteiner Literature Prize (1999), the Dresden Poetry Prize (2000), the Merano Poetry Prize (2000), the Ernst Meister Prize (2003), the Literature Prize of the Free Hanseatic City of Bremen (2004), most recently the Fontane Prize (2010), the Uwe Johnson Prize (2014), the Marie Luise Kaschnitz Literature Prize (2015), the Thuringia Literature Prize (2017), the Leipzig Book Fair Prize and the Kakehashi Literature Prize (both 2020).

Thorough reflection on language, "Heimat als Gangart" (homeland as a gait) and a feel for contemporary historical deposits can also be found in the following volumes of poetry vierzig kilometre nacht (2003), felderlatein (2010) and schrift für blinde riesen (2021). The consistent use of lower case in the poetry pays tribute to the poet's respect for small things, his attention is to the tone of the experienced history of which the poem 'tells'.

From 2003 onwards, Seiler turned to prose. In 2007, he received the main prize of the Ingeborg Bachmann Prize, worth 25,000 euros, and the acclaim of the press for Turksib. The story, published in 2008, tells of the bizarre encounter between a Russian stoker and an East German writer on a train journey to the radioactively contaminated Kazakh plain. The Rheinische Merkur (5.7.2007) attested to Seiler's prose "a stylistically haunting, quiet tone", the Süddeutsche Zeitung (3.7.2007) found in it the "tone of his poetry". Critics were equally unanimous in celebrating the volume Die Zeitwaage, which contains 14 stories about childhood in Thuringia.

Seiler became known to a large audience through his novels Kruso (2014) and Stern 111 (2020). Kruso was awarded the German Book Prize, adapted for the stage (2015) and for film (2018) and translated into 25 languages; Stern 111 was on the SWR bestseller list and the Spiegel bestseller list in April 2020. Kruso was written after a failed attempt at a novel at Villa Massimo; it is not an adventure novel or a novel about turning the tide, rather it tells a story of the path to freedom. It is the Robinsonade, anchored in the turning point of 1989/90, of a washer on Hiddensee who has "left his country without crossing the border" and is searching for his place between utopia and melancholy, between Stasi and subversion in the round table of an island pub. Critics have praised the novel as a model for a different literary historiography of the times, as well as the follow-up novel Stern 111, which owes its title to the transistor radio that Seiler's father bought in 1964 for what was then 380 marks and passed on to his son. This medium not only carries the tone of the story of the globetrotting parents and their Berlin-fixated son, the "heritage refusenik" Carl, this time set after the fall of the Berlin Wall, but also the tone of the storytelling, which has been compared to Uwe Johnson and Wolfgang Hilbig.

A lyricist who writes novels

In this way, Lutz Seiler renews the Homeric connection between the epic and the lyric. "Every good poem could thus be the metaphorical, rhythmic or gestural core of a novel. The narrative gesture creates the link to the origin of the genre, to the epic and its singers," he writes in Sonntags dachte ich an Gott, which concludes the essay collection of the same name (2004). The author has confessed to also speaking each of his texts: "The ear is the censor. Also for the choice of words," he explained in an interview (Die Welt, 8.10.2014).

Lutz Seiler writes close to contemporary witness history, vividly, with few but richly varied and multi-layered images and motifs. Like a linguistic geologist, he explores the sentence structure of his Thuringian landscape of origin in his poetry and prose, examines the dummies of GDR history and questions the role of East Germans as the "avant-garde of sustainability" (author interview with Jan Wiele, faz-online, 21.09.2020). His subject is the narrative reorganisation of people in a turning point in time. Lutz Seiler talks about the degree to which a society can tolerate leadership and allegiance and how freedom is possible in the face of great political norm change. He has been a participant in the Foundation's Authors' Workshop in Cadenabbia four times (2001, 2004, 2006, 2007) and has read several times at KAS events, including the Berlin Academy Readings (2015).

Author: Michael Braun

State: 2023

* 1973 in München

Ulrike Draesner, geboren 1962 in München, beschreibt sich auf ihrer Website so: „[…] neugierig, Kindheit unterm Tisch: beobachten! […] Lebt seit 1996 in Berlin, erzieht ein Kind, schreibt Romane, Erzählungen, Gedichte, Essays. Liebt Naturwissenschaften, führt Hund aus, damit sie sich bewegt. Liebt: Menschenkunde. Betreibt draesner.de“.

Biographie

Ulrike Draesners Großeltern kamen nach 1945 „flüchtlingsfremd“ aus Schlesien in Bayern an. Nach dem Studium der Rechtswissenschaft, Anglistik und Germanistik in München, u.a. bei dem ehemaligen Vertrauensdozenten und ersten Literaturpreis­laudator der Konrad-Adenauer-Stiftung, dem Germanisten Prof. Dr. Wolfgang Frühwald, und in Oxford hat Ulrike Draesner 1992 eine mediävistische Doktorarbeit geschrieben.
Sie hatte mehrere Poetik- und Gastdozenturen inne, in Birmingham und Oxford, Bamberg, Wiesbaden, Heidelberg und Frankfurt am Main (2017). Sie ist Mitglied der Berliner Akademie der Künste, der Nordrhein-Westfälischen-Akademie der Wissenschaften und Künste und der Darmstädter Akademie für Sprache und Dichtung. Seit 2018 ist sie Professorin für deutsche Literatur und literarisches Schreiben an der Universität Leipzig und Erasmus-Koordinatorin am dortigen Deutschen Literaturinstitut.
 

Literarisches Werk

Ulrike Draesner hat ein außerordentlich vielseitiges literarisches Werk vorgelegt. Es besteht vor allem aus Romanen und Erzählungen, zuletzt aus der fast zweitausendseitigen Trilogie von europäischer Flucht und Vertreibung (Sieben Sprünge vom Rand der Welt, Schwitters, Die Verwandelten). Aus der Essayistik ragen ihre Bände über weibliche und männliche Schriftsteller hervor: Schöne Frauen lesen (2013) u.a. über Bachmann und Woolf, Heimliche Helden (2013), u.a. über Kleist und Benn; sowie der autobiographische Essay Eine Frau wird älter (2018), der Defizitzuschreibungen des Alterns in Frage stellt. Ihre Lyrikbände aus 25 Jahren sind gesammelt in dem Band hell & hörig (2022). Einige von Draesners Texten sind im Besitz der National­bibliothek der Schwedischen Akademie und stehen neben denen der Nobelpreis­trägerin Louise Glück, deren Gedichte Ulrike Draesner aus dem amerikanischen Englisch ins Deutsche übersetzt hat. Auch hat sich Ulrike Draesner unter die Shake­speare-Übersetzer eingereiht (mit den Sonetten Twin Spin, 2000).

Unter ihren multimedialen und interdisziplinären Projekten sind das space poem (ein begehbares Gedicht) mit dem land art-Künstler Andreas Schmitt in Calcutta und Hongkong (2002), das Libretto für die Musiktheaterproduktion Tre Volti für die Schwetzinger Festspiele (2017) sowie ihr und Stefan Harders Videoexperiment aus dem Jahr 2019 mit dem Titel Exit Erdbeerklee aus dem Jahr 2019 hervorhebenswert. Dieses Filmgedicht zeigt Ansichten eines Leipziger Auwaldes. Derweil hören wir die Autorin mehrfach ein Gedicht lesen, aus dem aber bei jeder Wiederholung Buchstaben und Laute verschwinden, so dass das Sprechen immer fremdartiger und unverständlicher klingt. Artensterben und Sprachverkümmerung werden so auf irritierende Weise zusammengeschaltet. Auf die Gemeinschaft der Wörter zu achten, bedeutet auch, sich um die Vielfalt der Arten zu kümmern.

In der Kritik gilt Ulrike Draesner als eine der vielseitigsten und sprachbewusstesten Autorinnen der Gegenwartsliteratur. Die schwedische Germanistin Elisabeth Wåghäll Nivre rühmt Draesners Sprachfertigkeit, ihr analytisches Vermögen und ihre rhetorischen Fähigkeiten. Jüngste Konferenzen in Oxford und in Breslau haben ihrem Werk eine außerordentlich große kulturwissenschaftliche Beachtung geschenkt.
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Auszeichnungen und Gastspiele in der Adenauer-Stiftung

Ulrike Draesner hat regelmäßig literarische Auszeichnungen erhalten, jedoch bis auf den Großen Preis des Deutschen Literaturfonds (2021) noch keinen der renom­mierteren deutschen Literaturpreise: 2013 Roswitha-Literaturpreis der Stadt Bad Gandersheim, 2014 Joachim-Ringelnatz-Preis für Lyrik, 2015 Usedomer Literaturpreis, 2016 Nicolas-Born-Preis, 2016 Lyrikpreis Orphil, 2019 Gertrud Kolmar Preis, 2020 Bayerischer Buchpreis, 2020 Preis der LiteraTour Nord, 2020 Deutscher Preis für Nature Writing, 2020 Ida Dehmel-Literaturpreis. Im September 2023 erhielt sie den Spycher: Literaturpreis Leuk.

​​​​​​​Ihre Romane wurden mehrfach für Buchpreise nominiert, zuletzt Die Verwandelten (2023) für den Preis der Leipziger Buchmesse 2023. Ihr Roman Sieben Sprünge (2014) stand auf der Longlist für den Deutschen Buchpreis 2014. Am 23. Juni 2024 erhält sie den Literaturpreis der Konrad-Adenauer-Stiftung.

Ulrike Draesner hat mehrfach an Lesungen und Europa-Konferenzen der Konrad-Adenauer-Stiftungen mitgewirkt, zuletzt im November 2023 bei den Schweriner Literaturtagen (mit dem dortigen Landesforum der KAS) und im studio online der Kulturabteilung im März 2023.
 

Begründung

Ulrike Draesner hat ein außerordentlich vielfältiges prosapoetisches und multimediales Werk vorgelegt. Es besteht aus Romanen und Erzählungen, Essays und Reiseberichten, Lyrik und Libretti, Rundfunkarbeiten und Kurzvideos. 
Ihre literarischen Leitthemen reflektieren aktuelle politische Diskurse der Zeitgeschichte: das transnationale Gedächtnis von Flucht, Vertreibung und Exil (in der Trilogie); das soziale Wechselspiel der Geschlechterrollen und die Frage nach der eigenen Identität (in den Erzählungen Hot Dogs, 2004, und Richtig liegen, 2011); die Rolle von Sprache und Liebe im Anthropozän (in den Romanen Vorliebe, 2010, und Mitgift, 2002); die Auseinandersetzung mit Reproduktionstechniken (Organverpflanzung, Genbiologie, Datenspeicherung) und mit dem Menschenbild der Hirnforschung und der Transplantationsmedizin (in Essays und Gedichten); das Herausschreiben der Kunst aus der Tradition (in ihrer Migration und Populismus verarbeitenden Nachdichtung Nibelungen. Heimsuchung, 2016); die Verantwortung des Menschen für die Natur im Anthropozän (Der Kanalschwimmer, 2019).

Aus Ulrike Draesners Werk ragt die oben schon genannte Romantrilogie über die europäische Gewaltgeschichte heraus. Sie zieht darin eine nachhaltige Summe aus der Trauer- und Trauma-Geschichte von Flucht und Vertreibung im 20. Jahrhundert. Sie selbst zählt sich, im Anschluss an Sabine Bodes Kriegsenkel (2009), zu den „Nebelkindern“, die im Schweigen der Kriegskinder und Kriegs-Zeitzeugen groß wurden. Die Verwandelten wurde in der Kritik als Roman gewürdigt, der das Gedächtnis der Generationen erneuert: über Mütter im Krieg, verwandelte Töchter und aufklärende „Nebelkinder“, eine Geschichte über starke weibliche Biographien und über die Gewalt, die ihnen in der europäischen Zeitgeschichte angetan worden ist. Draesners Spiele (2005) ist der erste Roman der deutschen Literatur über das Terrorattentat in München 1972, den globalen Terrorismus und Verschwörungs­theorien nach 9/11.

In formaler Virtuosität, nach intensiver biographischer Recherche und mit enormer poetischer Imagination zeugt Ulrike Draesners Schreiben von der Freiheit der Kunst. In ihrem Roman Schwitters setzt sie mit Schwitters‘ Merz-Bau jener Freiheit der Kunst in der Weimarer Republik ein Denkmal, die durch die antisemitische Eliminierung jüdischen Lebens abgebrochen wurde. Zu ihrem Schreiben sagte sie in den Bamberger Vorlesungen Zauber im Zoo (2007): „Das Recherchierte, das bereits Fiktion ist (Auswahl, Bericht, Konstruktion einer Geschichte) muss über-erfunden werden in Atmosphäre und inneres Verstehen. Gedächtnis und Wahrnehmung, Zeugenschaft und das Zielen auf Wirklichkeiten rücken – uns – in den Blick“.

Ulrike Draesners Werke halten – mit hochentwickeltem Sprachbewusstsein – die literarischen Signale politischer Vorgänge in Zeitenwenden fest und bestärken die Erneuerungskraft der Literatur: „Wir sind hineingeflogen worden in eine Zeit, in der das Beharren auf Kultur wieder nötig sein wird“, schreibt sie in ihrem Essay über Thomas Mann, 2002). Und in dem Gespräch über Deutschland (2024) das sie mit dem New Yorker Übersetzer und Philosophen Michael Eskin geführt hat, plädiert sie für eine „critical Germanness“. Das meint für sie aber kein kritisches, sondern ein kundiges „Deutschsein, das erlaubt, Geschichten zu erzählen statt Etiketten zu verteilen“, „ein Deutsch mit Zusätzen, mit Geschichte, mit Verantwortung, Anerkennung von Differenz – und mit Humor statt Reinheitsgebot“, auch und besonders sprachlich.

Autor: Michael Braun

Stand: 2024