2024-07-19 13:25:42
Dhe Georg Büchner Prize is Germany’s most prestigious award for literature and has a prize of 50,000 euros. All major German-language authors have adopted it since 1950; famous names such as Gottfried Benn, Max Frisch, Erich Kästner, Christa Wolf and Thomas Bernhard can be found on the list, recently Clemens J. Setz and Lutz Seiler. Every few years, the award also honors the life work of writers who are not yet considered great by the public, and Oswald Egger belongs to this category.
The South Tyrolean, born in Lana near Meran in 1963, is not one of the authors who dominates the sales lists or debates with modern history books. “His prose poems and essays that defy quick reading, invite us to interpret meanings through association and play against the ways we think we know,” University German for Language and Poetry said, which presented the award on November 2nd of this year. left Darmstadt.
Egger, who has been awarded the Georg Trakl prize for poetry and the Ernst Jandl Prize, among others, enchants with a book that is difficult to describe with pure generic words such as prose, poetry or lyrical prose. In the opinion of the Darmstadt University, his poetic work, which has been seen in Austria for a long time as a continuation of famous poets such as Heinrich August Brockes (“The joy of the world is God”), continues “the great tradition of the physiognomy of forms natural , from the top of the stone to the Cloud.”
The author, who is a professor of language and form at the Muthesius Art Academy in Kiel since 2011 and has also taught at Cornell University in the American state of New York, lives in one of his favorite places most in Germany: the Hombroich rocket station near Neuss, a former NATO site. The place with its amazing lost space backgrounds is well known to book lovers because the legendary poet Thomas Kling lived here.
Egger’s lyrical speech does not seem to be intuitive at first glance, but it reveals a lot: for him, language is not only writing on paper, but also sound and art, the multilingualism of his South Tyrolean homeland also speaks , and writing and design are interactive. in Egger’s work often, for example in the volume “Val di Non” (2017) or in the most recent book entitled “Colour Compartments”. Perhaps his most original work, “Maybe I dream of the journey in Mississippi, or I dream of it now” (Suhrkamp, 2021), was published in 2021 – a prose poem supplemented with watercolors. It’s about dry tall forest and “pond swamps”, but it’s also very functional, a taste test:
Swamps and Toc-Toc-Toc
“I drew the caiman, my great enemy. I blow my nose and start crying, crying and whimpering. I started high, then things fell, they were broken, quietly whimpering and crying: He started again, shining, whimpering, moaning, howling and crying, always pinching his nose. At that time, every day he slapped his thigh with both hands, and hit his body so that it looked like a body falling into the water, like a big fish jumping and reentering the water.
Terrible noise, growl, boom, crash, that’s how I imitate the cry of the caiman. And now, eerily, the same melody comes back from the swamp. Crocodile answers! – But the puzzle repeats itself: the answer always comes back. Barbaric Evening: I feel excited about it: more breath, terrifying shadows around and around, black swamp, dry water, the cry of crocodiles, the loud toc-toc-toc in the distance.
What does the Darmstadt board want to tell us with such a Büchner Prize winner? Literature is and can be a refuge for self-reflection, for immersion in nature – especially in these highly political times? “Nature Writing” in this esoteric perfection is actually missing from the Büchner Gallery.
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