Munich: Ernst Hoferichter Prize 2023 awarded – Munich

There is a lot of talk about fathers this evening. As the 94-year-old explains, Karl Stankiewitz’ father came from Poland. Deniz Aykanat reads what she experienced when she was a five-year-old blonde on vacation in her father’s hometown of Marmaris on Turkey’s Mediterranean coast. Oliver Das Gupta, who holds the eulogy for the journalist, does not fail to mention that his father originally came from India. And the cabaret artist Christian Springer, who pays tribute to Stankiewitz, weaves in his own origins, growing up in Berg am Laim, between the newspapers his father subscribed to, the SZ and the Munich Catholic church newspaper.

With which the occasion is appropriately presumptuous: the art of finding the right words and using them in such a way that they not only cheerfully describe what is, but also trace the process of becoming and unmask clichés en passant.

Since 1975, the Ernst Hoferichter Foundation has been awarding the prize, which is named after the writer, journalist and actor who was born in Munich in 1895 and died here in 1966, but who has traveled the world not only in words. The award is intended to honor writers who excel through “originality with cosmopolitanism and humor”.

This year, the board of trustees – which includes cultural advisor Anton Biebl and Arne Ackermann, the director of the Munich City Library, as well as the four literary friends Wolfgang Görl, Brigitta Rambeck, Michael Skasa and Christian Ude – chose the oldest prize winner to date: Karl Stankiewitz was a trainee at the SZlater engagements at the Evening Newsat star and mirror – and finally a long self-employment. To live without writing: Inconceivable for Stankiewitz.

He hasn’t been doing so well lately. He has processed the experience in a book, “My seven plagues” it is called. “You belong in the ranks of those who can no longer be forgotten,” said laudator Christian Springer.

“Such an eyebrow fatwa can have something unifying”

Deniz Aykanat has also published a book. “The Isartürkin. My life between Bavaria and the Bosporus” was published in 2019 and is based on the SZ column of the same name.

Aykanat said at the award ceremony in the packed hall of the House of Literature that it came about after the excitement about the attempted coup against the government of Recep Tayyip Erdoğan in July 2016 and in view of the flood of almost unbelievable news that came from Turkey afterwards; for example, that the state religious office declared eyebrow plucking to be a sin.

But such an eyebrow fatwa could certainly have something unifying, Aykanat said on stage, such a thing is also conceivable where she now lives: in the Upper Palatinate, her mother’s homeland. And that of Gloria von Thurn und Taxis.

The winners of the past ten years

2023: Deniz Aykanat and Karl Stankiewitz

2022: Fee Brembeck and Alex Rühle

2021: Wolfgang Ettlich, Jaromir Konecny ​​and Barbara Yelin

2020: Dana von Suffrin and Rudi Hurzlmeier

2019: Dieter Hanitzsch and Christine Wunnicke (rejected acceptance)

2018: Karl-Heinz Hummel

2017: Thomas Grasberger

2016: Ali Mitgutsch

2015: Christoph Suss

2014: Sarah Hakenberg and Marcus H. Rosenmuller

2013: Gerd Holzheimer and Luise Kinseher

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