The writer and translator Antje Rávik Strubel was awarded the German Book Prize on Monday evening. She received the award, which is positioned as the award for the best novel of the year, for “Blue Woman”, the story of a woman who has to find her way back to thinking and language after being raped. To do this, she has withdrawn to a prefabricated building in Helsinki, on the northern edge of Europe. From there, the story feels its way back to the experiences that Adina, who comes from the Czech Republic, had as a student and intern in Berlin and in a holiday resort in the Uckermark. Her Eastern European origins are more likely to trigger images than real human interest in many people who meet her.
In this book, Rávik Strubel creates a non-linear time structure of forward and backward movements, she contrasts the legal language in which sexual assaults are negotiated with the experience of her character, who has to laboriously search for an expression for it. The eponymous “Blue Woman” is in the intermediate chapters of the novel a counterpart to the narrator, with whom she can talk about violence through writing.
With “Blue Woman” a formally and aesthetically demanding narrative has been honored, which is probably better understood in a public sensitized by the Metoo movement, although it does not come up in recent debates because of the self-reflexivity of its writing. Nevertheless, Rávik Strubel insisted on becoming political in her words of thanks. She protested against the fact that what would be taken for granted, desire for sensitivity to structural violence and self-chosen designations would be denigrated as political correctness.
“Perhaps the obvious has to become incomprehensible again in order to remain natural,” she quoted Ilse Aichinger. She also referred to Virginia Woolf and thanked her mentor Silvia Bovenschen, who died in 2017, to whom the book is dedicated. She wrote the study “Die Imaginierte Feminlichkeit” (1979), which is still relevant to this day, on the question of what could have silenced the voices of women in literary history. Rávik Strubel, which Joan Didion and Lucia Berlin translated into German, is referring to female writing that does not simply react with self-assertion, but is rather interested in uncertainties and the changeability of language and social conditions.
The German Book Prize is characterized by the fact that book retailers, literary organizers and critics should agree on a book, represented by jury members from these areas. This year Knut Cordsen, critic of the Bavarian Broadcasting Corporation, chaired it. The award is endowed with 25,000 euros, the other authors on the shortlist receive 2,500 euros, especially for their participation in the event in the run-up to and during the book fair. The award ceremony in Frankfurt’s Römer is the first major event of the trade fair week, and this year it was at least able to take place in front of a small audience. The nominated Norbert Gstrein, Monika Helfer, Christian Kracht, Thomas Kunst and Mithu Sanyal were also in the hall.
The winner in the 2020 pandemic year was Anne Weber, also a translator and writer, she too with a novel that can be attributed to women writing about women: “Annette, a heroine epic” about the resistance fighter Anne Beaumanoir.