“Your German is getting better, is that a problem for your art?” asked a spectator at the premiere of Tomer Gardi’s new novel “A Round Case” last autumn in Berlin’s Brecht House. Such a question to a writer writing in German is not only extremely unusual, it also leads directly to a phenomenon to which Tomer Gardi’s work cannot be reduced, but which is the first thing that strikes you when you read it: his German.
More precisely: his “Broken German”, as the English-language title of his first novel written in German was. Tomer Gardi is now receiving one of the most important awards in the German literary world, namely the Leipzig Book Fair Prize. Not totally surprising, but totally deserved. And for a novel that any German teacher with deep red correction notes would have failed. The beginning: “I am a greedy person, a person with strong needs, and after the opening night of the Theater Festival I wanted the following: beer, bread, cigarette. I was one of the first to come out of the theater hall, and the first at the buffet.” A nightmare for senior teachers and other people who carry their pride in this country’s poets and thinkers without ever having read them.
In 2016, when Gardi, who was still largely unknown in this country at the time, won the Ingeborg Bachmann Prize, a mixture of literature and reading competition his German recited a text, this had caused heated discussions: could a text that didn’t care a bit about the rules of grammar be awarded a literary prize? Was it a mistake to even allow him? Some critics found Gardi’s entry the most interesting of the competition. Not so the jury. Gardi’s lecture was remembered, but he did not receive a prize.
What may also have played a role: Tomer Gardi not only breaks with linguistic conventions. Even with his brightly colored, wide-open shirts, which reveal his luxuriant chest hair and which he really always wears, whether privately or at public appearances, he doesn’t come across as the average high school teacher might imagine a writer to be. He is also not one of those figures that progressive high school teachers can still accept, he likes to laugh, often and broadly – he is neither a melancholy poet suffering from world pain, nor an angry rebel, but one who one can see the pleasure in the text.
Tomer Gardi was born in Israel in 1974. As a child he lived with his parents in Vienna for a while, in 2012 he came to Berlin with his German partner. He wrote his first book, the essay “Stein, Papier” in Hebrew, and it was only with “Broken German” that he began to write in his own German. High school teachers and other guardians of virtue may see this as an attack on the language itself, but in fact Gardi explores what can be done with this language if it is freed from the overly rigid formal corset.
The German of the others
A hundred years before him, Hugo Ball had demonstrated with his poem “Caravan” (“wulubu ssubudu uluw ssubudu / tumba ba-umf / kusagauma ba-umf”) that literature does not adhere to any conventions of language – not even to the elementary context bound between signifier and signified.
From the second half of the 20th century, authors with their own history of migration began to expand the formal and thematic canon of German literature in a different and less radical way than Dadaist artists like Ball. The 1973 short story “What does Niyazi want in Naunynstrasse?” by the German-Turkish author Aras Ören was the first literary echo of the immigration society. Ören’s books were first published in German, but he wrote them in Turkish. Next came the German-Syrian Rafik Schami, the German-Turkish Emine Sevgi Özdamar (both born in 1946) and later the German-Iraqi Abbas Khider (born in 1973). These authors, who immigrated to Germany as young adults and represented a type of literature known as “hybrid”, were also looking for their own German without messing with the dictionary.
Still others, such as the German-Brazilian writer Zé do Rock, and the German-Turkish author Feridun Zaimoglu in the mid-1990s, tried to make an art form out of “Ausländerdeutsch”. Tomer Gardi, on the other hand, also does without it. He simply writes as he speaks – just like many people in Berlin today, the only international city in Germany where Tomer Gardi feels so at home.
But Gardi is clever enough not to let himself be reduced to the role of language guerrilla and senior lecturer scare. “Broken German” was followed in 2019 by his novel “Otherwise you get your money back”, which he wrote in Hebrew and had translated into standard German.
social fringe figures
In his now award-winning novel, Eine Runde Sache, he does both – which is why this book could have won not only the Fiction category, but also, in a very rare, if not unprecedented, case, also the Translation category (this category then went to Anne Weber for the translation from French of “Nevermore” by Cécile Wajsbrot).
Because the first part of “A Round Thing” consists of a wild and entertaining first-person narrative from contemporary Berlin artist milieu in Gardi German, the second part of a story about a historical figure, translated from Hebrew into German by Anne Birkenhauer , namely the Indonesian painter Raden Saleh, one of the most interesting figures in 19th century painting and the founder of modern Indonesian painting.
The winners of the Leipzig Book Fair Prize 2022: Anne Weber (translation), Tomer Gardi (fiction) and Uljana Wolf (non-fiction/essay) (from left to right)
Source: dpa
Packing two stories that are neither formally nor linguistically related into one book and calling it a “novel” is also a break with literary conventions. But whoever gets involved recognizes the deep current in which both stories are connected across all boundaries of time, space and form. Two stories about social fringe figures, about artists and their play with assigned identities.
But what about the problem that his German is getting better? “It can be,” Gardi said a few hours before the price was announced in an interview with WELT. “But even if I use the accusative and dative correctly, I will always write from an outsider role.” But as of today, from an excellent outsider role.