Autumn conference of the Academy for Language and Poetry – Culture

That virtue is only the heel under the shoes of the virtuous is an eternally valid image that Georg Büchner brought into the world with his revolutionary drama “Danton’s Death”. In Darmstadt, where Büchner was born in 1813, the year of the battle of the nations, and where the Georg Büchner Prize, the most prestigious German literary award, is presented year after year, the young student Büchner was not happy. He felt freer in Strasbourg, where he was studying, he wrote in his letters to his parents. In the local Grand Duchy of Hesse he was considered an oppositionist with a tendency towards revolutionary activities. Not without reason: he wrote the in 1834 Hessian country messengers, a pamphlet accusing the social injustices with the often-quoted appeal “Peace to the huts, war to the palaces”, which the students are discussing in German class today as if it were the original code for Büchner’s covert poetology.

But is that literature at all? Isn’t that politics? Moral at all? The Darmstadt German Academy for Language and Poetry, which is awarding the Büchner Prize to Clemens Setz this Saturday, has accepted this apparent contradiction in the slipstream of the grand award ceremony. The topic of “Literature & Morals” caused a lot of excitement in advance, so the President of the Academy, Ernst Osterkamp, ​​opened the conversation with his two top-class guests, Terézia Mora and Arnold Stadler, who have already been awarded the Büchner Prize. Osterkamp also tells his guests that the “autonomy of art is a relatively recent achievement”, since art was only able to break free from its religious and, yes, moral entanglements late. Recently, however, according to Osterkamp’s cautiously expressed feeling, an “increase in sensitivity” towards literature has been observed.

Terézia Mora had to break herself to endure the violence in her narrative

But anyone who wanted to perceive signs of a more general decline in this undisputedly more sensitive public debate about trigger warnings, cultural appropriation or “sensitivity reading” did not find any pillar saints in Mora and Stadler. What could have become a tough debate about the ethics of literary writing, took an interesting turn for the two of them towards critical reflection on their own writing.

Terézia Mora, who quoted her Frankfurt poetics lecture “Not Die” from 2013/2014, was interested in how violence can be countered with literary means. She laconically enumerates the physical and psychological horrors that she causes her protagonists to experience in her four novels. She “had to break herself” in order to describe these atrocities in a literary way, she says, which is why she would not read some of the passages publicly – more for reasons of self-protection.

But Terézia Mora is also a translator, transporting and vouching for stories that are not her own. She once transcribed a novel from Hungarian that centered on a misogynist. The steepest, but undisputed thesis of Mora that evening is that the male author of this misogynist story should have distanced himself from his protagonist “at least in a half-sentence”. In any case, the translator felt repulsed, would have gladly given in the assignment, but then finished it.

The end of art, as the literary scholar Eva Geulen once described, has been talked about since art has existed at all. At the Deutsche Akademie, too, the question “Does the German language have a gender?” Was discussed in a two-day seminar as early as 1991. In these 30 years the complexity of the moral demands on literature may have increased. In addition to the dimension of gender equality, there were others, such as the ecological one. Ernst Osterkamp fears that there could be an “ethical overstrain” in view of this complex world and its numerous moral pitfalls.

However, Arnold Stadler does not seem to feel very overwhelmed. Morality as such does not exist at all, because “the world is always changing”. Only Georg Büchner himself pointed this observation to a more admirable level. In “Woyzeck” it is wonderfully tautological: “Morality is when one is moral.” It is more the complexity of Terézia Mora’s anecdotes, from which one could learn something about the connection between literature and morality that evening. Above all, that there is no space free of ambivalence, neither in writing nor in reading, but certainly an ethical imperative, a claim to “truthfulness”.