2023-10-16 23:14:52
Opinion German Book Prize
Not every good book is the right one for every moment
As of: 11:14 p.m. | Reading time: 3 minutes
Mara Delius, editor of the Literary World
Source: Martin UK Lengemann/WELT
The German Book Prize goes to the Austrian Tonio Schachinger and his novel “Echtzeitalter”, which tells the story of a young man caught between tradition and rebellion. The jury’s decision is sovereign – and yet seems problematic today because it ignores two more political voices.
The awarding of the German Book Prize on Monday evening in the Frankfurter Römer is the unofficial start of the Frankfurt Book Fair: everyone who will see each other in the next few days will see each other, just for the first time. So the evening is often a measure of the mood that carries through the subsequent book fair days, sometimes more of a prologue of self-assurance, in which sometimes combative, sometimes sanctimonious emphasis is placed on how important the book is “especially today”, that books are “something cause”.
Last year, Kim de l’Horizon became the first non-binary person in the history of the prize to receive the award, and for one evening at least, one could argue whether someone here embodied a completely new literary concept, whether a “star” had been born or whether a nonchalant millennial-narcissistic performance met the naive, enthusiastic amazement at what was supposedly new in a particularly unusual way. In any case, the novel “Blood Book” was honored for its “urgency” because it creates “narratives” for a body that evades “conventional ideas of gender,” according to the jury last year, which then also served as a political signal should be understood.
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This year the Austrian writer Tonio Schachinger will receive the German Book Prize. The novel “Echtzeitalter” (Rowohlt) tells a coming-of-age story between tradition and rebellion, the Ibiza affair and pandemic, which is also a clever and funny social novel: The novel deals with “the Question about the social place of literature,” said the jury.
Now the times outside the wood-panelled Frankfurter Römer are completely different than they were a year ago, particularly hard, rough, brutal, confusing – a “upheaval” was often pointed out during the speech and celebration hour, which otherwise took place almost like every year, without explaining in more detail how this finding relates to what this was actually about: literature.
Tonio Schachinger (31)
Source: dpa/Christian Charisius
Now it would be unfair to pit current reality against the novel as such. The jury had to select the best literary novel from 172 submitted novels, not the one that seemed particularly contemporary. At the same time, a jury decision is also a comment. And so you have to ask: Even if “Real Age” is an outstanding novel, Necati Öziri’s “Fathermark” would not have been an interesting choice today, and Anne Rabe’s “The Possibility of Happiness” would have been the best choice – and not from a non-literary perspective, but from a literary one Found? “The Possibility of Happiness” has sparked a debate about how to talk and write about the survival of fascism and violence in Germany – as sharp as the debate surrounding this extraordinary debut was at times, some established voices were irritated by the young author seemed to show that it wasn’t just a nerve that was hit.
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Not every good book is the right one for every moment. As if he himself sensed the latent discrepancy between the world and literature that accompanied the award on Monday evening, Tonio Schachinger ended his pleasant, semi-spontaneous acceptance speech with the words: “We all know that this is not the most important thing.” It is so unbearable to see what is happening in this world that it is difficult to talk about it if you are not affected, but it is also wrong if only those affected have to speak. In any case, he hopes that Jews will soon be able to feel safe again. Things didn’t get more political that evening.
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