The Georg Büchner Prize 2023 goes to Lutz Seiler

2023-07-18 15:31:37

Opinion Büchner Prize for Lutz Seiler

The Ultimate “Wenderoman”

As of: 3:31 p.m. | Reading time: 4 minutes

Author of “Kruso” and “Stern 111”: Lutz Seiler

Source: Heike Steiweg/SV

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Lutz Seiler receives the Georg Büchner Prize 2023. The award honors a writer who has achieved a real feat. He wrote the German “Wenderoman” when nobody was expecting him anymore.

Lutz Seiler receives the Georg Büchner Prize 2023 and that is wonderful news, because anyone who started reading the novel “Stern 111” three years ago, it dawned on him more and more from page to page: This book by the author, who was born in Gera in 1963, could , no: it had to be the ultimate “Wenderoman”.

The older ones remember: The literary work, which captures the turning point like an epic for the residents of the former GDR, was notoriously demanded and invoked by German literary criticism of the 1990s and 2000s, the “Wenderoman” was almost embarrassing Phantasm and eternally insufficient: no Günter Grass wrote it with “A Wide Field” (1993), no Thomas Brussig with “Helden wie wir” (1995) and no Ingo Schulze with “Simple Stories” (1998) or “Neue Leben (2005). No, only after the feature writers had stopped looking for the Wenderoman and forgot about it did it suddenly appear. Unexpectedly it was written after all. Which shows the beautifully removed speed of the medium of literature, freed from all contemporary demands.

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Prize of the Leipzig Book Fair

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In “Stern 111” – the title of the novel refers to a legendary GDR radio manufacturer – Seiler tells the story of Carl, who grew up just as his parents moved to the West. Carl is actually supposed to look after the apartment in Gera, but he soon sets off for Berlin himself, while the parents discover West Germany (Giessen!) and finally America at the same time. The novel, which won the Leipzig Book Fair Prize, combines a personal coming-of-age story with great contemporary history and is one of the most linguistically outstanding books that have ever been read in recent decades. Seiler can tell stories vividly, sensually and with linguistic precision like no other.

This may have something to do with his poetic socialization. Seiler, who has been working as a freelance writer since 1994, appeared for two decades as a poet who dealt with themes of his GDR socialization (mining, Thuringian dumplings and NVA) and who ended up in Wilhelmshorst in the Brandenburg region in 1997 following the footsteps of Peter Huchel . That Seiler wanted and was able to tell stories was shown in 2007 when he won the Bachmann Prize with “TurkSib”, a text about a train journey through Kazakhstan. With his first novel, Seiler became an instant novelist, as he is written in the book.

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“Kruso” (2014) takes place on Hiddensee shortly before the exodus of the GDR. The main character is Edgar (“Ed”) Bendle, a dropped out student and dropout who meets the seasonal worker Krusowitsch (“Kruso”) in a run-down pub on the island. befriended. If the inner emigration of the GDR residents from their own state shortly before its death demanded and got a story, then it was through “Kruso” and its strangely remote setting on Hiddensee. “Kruso” was not only a hit for (Eastern) readers and was awarded the German Book Prize 2014; Above all, it was a sensational success, translated into 22 languages ​​and also made into a film.

Internal emigration in the GDR was told in a different way (namely in the milieu of Dresden’s educated citizens) and was also very popular in his “Turm” by Uwe Tellkamp. However, unlike Tellkamp, ​​Seiler succeeded in repeating the stroke of genius. This assessment has nothing to do with political positioning, but with sheer storytelling. With just two novels, Seiler has presented an oeuvre that will justify him in every literary history for decades to come.

The Foundation of the Academy

The Georg Büchner Prize, which is endowed with 50,000 euros, is – ahead of the German Book Prize, which honors an individual work – the most important literary award in the German-speaking world. In the ranks of the most recently chosen Büchnerians (2022: Emine Sevgi Özdamar; 2021: Clemens J. Setz; 2020: Elke Erb), it is striking that Seiler, like Marcel Beyer (Büchner Prize 2016), comes from poetry. The fact that Durs Grünbein (Büchner Prize 1995), an East German colleague of almost the same age, has already received the coveted trophy does not represent an imbalance at a distance of 28 years.

One can even speculate that Seiler would not have received Büchner as a poet only. In any case, the German Academy for Language and Poetry expressly appreciates Seiler’s career as a novelist: With “Kruso” and “Stern 111” he wrote the “epic of a sinking country”, “melancholic, urgent, sincere, full of wonderful echoes from a long literary Tradition”. That’s true, just as Seiler writes in a somewhat fairytale-like, almost old-masterly manner. Anyone who doesn’t like post-modern gimmicks, who wants to open books – some say old-fashioned, others timeless – and let themselves be drawn into it, like a good story has always done, will be seduced by Seiler’s narrative style.

Thanks to his socialization as a poet, Seiler is able – undoubtedly thanks to his socialization as a poet – to shape language into a “lanterna magica” that creates projection art in an almost archaic way and generates mental cinema in the reader. Sometimes Seiler’s prose has an almost old masterly perfection. But from this speaks the old power that does not pass away as long as people tell stories.