2023-11-05 18:24:13
The German Academy for Language and Poetry is time-honored, and perhaps, if the superlative doesn’t sound a little too new-fangled, it is even the country’s most time-honored academy. It is made up of around one hundred and ninety writers, essayists, translators and scientists from home and abroad. Members are appointed in an arcane process and then introduce themselves to the old members at the annual meetings, where members who have died are also remembered. There are significantly more men than women, and significantly more are over sixty than under fifty. There has not been a woman among the presidents of the academy since it was re-founded after the Second World War, on Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s bicentenary birthday, August 28, 1949.
Anyone who takes the trouble to look for the good old German spirit in these gloomy days must travel to Darmstadt: that is where the academy is based, where it meets every autumn, on the one hand to ensure its institutional self-image and on the other hand to award the the most important German literary prize, the Georg Büchner Prize, whose winner is chosen every year by its executive board, and also the prizes for literary criticism and scientific prose, which this year are awarded to Jutta Person and Matthias Glaubrecht.
Last weekend the annual conference took place under the somewhat spherical heading “No more – not yet. Farewell and Renewal”. This also seemed dazzlingly self-referential in that the previous academy president, the German scholar Ernst Osterkamp, was resigning from his office after six years in office, which, as many of those present emphasized, he carried out with an efficient, light-handed and dignified manner.
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How much “renewal” his departure will bring remains to be seen. The writer Ingo Schulze, born in 1962, was elected as the new Academy President – although the word “election” has its own connotation in Darmstadt. A multi-member search committee made up of members of the extended executive committee had tried for months to bring a woman to the top of the academy, but all potential candidates had declined. One reason for the latent unattractiveness of the high office is that it only comes with meager remuneration – which freelance writer can afford that? Ingo Schulze was ultimately nominated and was then elected (the vice-presidium is made up of the literary scholar and essayist Lothar Müller, the linguist Rita Franceschini and the writer Olga Martynova).
Schulze was recently criticized because he had created a document in which he wanted to prove inaccuracies in her debut novel “Gittersee” to his younger publishing colleague Charlotte Gneuss and sent it to the publisher; To some it seemed like a paternalistic act by the older East Germans who wanted to accuse the young West Germans of a false representation of the GDR, to others it seemed like the creation of an unpleasantly denunciatory list of defects. Finally, the document was forwarded to the jury of the German Book Prize, which had nominated Gneuss for the longlist – by whom and with what intention is still unclear.
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In Darmstadt, the incident that caused a stir in the literary world shortly before the Frankfurt Book Fair apparently did not seem irritating enough; Schulze himself reportedly did not address the topic in his short inaugural remarks. He said that as president he wanted to enable “fear-free spaces” for conversation. It remains to be seen what these will look like in concrete terms – and also how political they can be. In a serious last speech as president, Ernst Osterkamp spoke of a “political plague period” that was looming. Science and art as languages of a humane universalism, as they have been understood since Goethe, are not playgrounds of the “absolute spirit”, but have always been applied by the academy to the current situation in the world since 1949. And so it is also important to him to emphasize that anti-Semitism must be combated and that Israel’s right to exist should not be questioned, with all compassion also for victims on the Palestinian side. Applause in the Darmstadt State Theater.
“Everything is hollow down there,” is how Lutz Seiler, born in Gera in 1963, began his acceptance speech for the Büchner Prize. This is a sentence he often heard as a child, long before he discovered it at the beginning of Büchner’s “Woyzeck”. . The sentence was said after the water from the pond in front of the parents’ house suddenly disappeared because of the eastern Thuringian dump landscape that had been undermined by uranium mining, from which Wismut AG supplied the Soviet Union with material for the production of atomic bombs.
“None of us knew Oppenheimer, but we did know Beria and Molotov, the names of those ghost generals who commanded the Wismut secret society like an underground army in which the word uranium was neither allowed to be written nor spoken.” Seiler draws from a scene in which he visits the now-vanished home village of Culmitzsch with his almost blind father, his poetics of acoustics, “of whispers and murmurs, as laudator Lothar Müller puts it. Father and son listen to the strange pipes that protrude rigidly from the earth and into the past: “Everything is hollow down there”.
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Opinion Büchner Prize for Lutz Seiler
This creates a “history of the least,” as Seiler calls it, the Woyzeck principle, that is: to the story of the knowing destruction of the body comes the story of the humiliation, which the writer traces in relation to his family up to the grandfather, the part the “radiation brigade”. It is a custom that the Büchner Prize winners continue to use Büchner’s metaphors in their acceptance speeches. Lutz Seiler literally brought her back to the ground – knowing the depths that lay beneath him.
We wish the academy to make similar essentialist gestures in the future.
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