Sibylle Lewitscharoff, writer, Büchner Prize winner and clever inventor of people is dead.
The career of the writer Sibylle Lewitscharoff was not long. She began in the late 1990s with the story “Pong”, for which she received the Bachmann Prize: a half-mad man spoke from the depths of a Berlin underground station and explained the world, eloquently and in a carefully archaic, quirky way. Middle The author was forty at the time, and what distinguished her was not only an almost childlike joy in the playful and precise use of the language, but also a great literary education and a high degree of life experience: from a Trotskyist cadre group in Stuttgart to the Accounting for a Berlin advertising agency, her life had led her through stations in Buenos Aires and Paris, from the seminars of the religious philosopher Jacob Taubes, she had gotten into a poetic art that owed as much to Jean Paul’s aeronaut Giannozzo as to the lyrics of the door. Where there is literature, she taught, there is also delusion, suffering and many, more or less helpless attempts to come to terms with it.