“Farewell. You’ll need it.” With these somewhat ominous but certainly humorous words, Ernst Osterkamp, outgoing President of the German Academy for Language and Poetry after a six-year term, closed the ceremony for awarding the Georg Büchner Prize. This was preceded by a two-and-a-half-hour afternoon in which, as Osterkamp aptly noted, the speeches “communicated with each other in a way that has never been seen before in the history of this award ceremony.” In fact, the speeches shared a heightened awareness of biographical connections across the centuries and, perhaps more surprisingly, an animal theme.
Georg Büchner Prize: About Woyzeck and Carp – Culture
