“Pro Meritis Scientiae et Literarum” to Eugen Gomringer – Munich

On his 97th birthday, Eugen Gomringer, the inventor of Concrete Poetry, received the “Pro Meritis Scientiae et Literarum” award. With this, the Free State of Bavaria honors the “great merits with special emphasis on building bridges between art and science, which the writer, artist, publisher, art collector, advertising copywriter, institute founder and university teacher has succeeded in a special way in the course of his life”. In his laudatory speech for Gomringer, who lives in Rehau in Franconia, Bernd Sibler, Minister of Art and Science, explained: “You have written literary history with concrete poetry. With you, language becomes an artistic building material. The special arrangement of the letters and words creates its own artistic reality .”