You often have to crouch if you want to pick out a common motive from the works and speeches of very different authors. This time it came about with seldom clarity when the three great prizes of the German Academy for Language and Poetry were awarded in the Darmstadt State Theater: All winners and their laudators (not generic, all male this year) had more or less difficulty speaking addressable instances on the topic.
The award ceremony at the Academy’s autumn conference is designed as a celebration of extraordinary elegance in texts, in criticism, science and beautiful literature. This time the Austrian author Franz Schuh received the Johann Heinrich Merck Prize for literary criticism and essay. For the fact that he promised the “tragic and the comical of human existence”, so the official reason – in his books you can find a “negative dialectic with shame” said the laudator Armin Thurnher, colleague Schuhs from the part of the Austrian journalism, which particularly appeals to “radical non-corruption”.
Schuh himself came onto the stage with a heavy step, marked by illness, in order to then easily develop an aesthetic out of ironic negativity. But it ended with the legacy that religion had left on art: the view of the last things in life and “the miracle of non-narcissistic self-reflection”.
“What language does God speak? Is it gender equitable?”
The Sigmund Freund Prize is awarded for an “outstanding style of speech” in scientific prose. Laudated by Christoph Markschies, himself a theologian and President of the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences, this prize was awarded to the church historian Hubert Wolf. “What language does God speak? What grammar does it follow? Is it gender-equitable?”, Wolf introduced his interest in knowledge: “And above all: If God is the highest thing that can be thought, this language doesn’t have to be surpassed by a language that cannot be surpassed Distinguish beauty of expression and elegance of style? ” Wolf then gave a few samples of the philological work on the often faltering communication between God and his human representatives.
When it finally came to the work of the writer Clemens J. Setz, who received the most famous, the Georg Büchner Prize, the channels of communication only got really wild: Ijoma Mangold, literary critic of the Time, deciphered in his laudation the underground connections between language, emotions and sensory impressions in the books of the synaesthetist Setz. He showed how his novels, like computer games, can encourage replay. And as in Setz’s characters, those who speak from machines, computers and robots are often the most touching. “Nothing non-human is alien to him, no deviation is inaccessible,” said Mangold, and his final turn related to Setz’s connection to the deviations, which are not deviations, but rather “emotional anguish”.
In the core of Setz’s literature: an enormous consideration
The fact that the Academy President Ernst Osterkamp, in his introductory words, calculated the clear decades that have passed since his birth (almost four, at least) for the rarely young award winner was possibly offset by the smugness with which Mangold introduced the Academy in Facebook’s Metaverse “should You missed Tiktok “.
Clemens J. Setz finally made the audience laugh a lot and touched them with his story about the animal psychologist Karl Krall, who tried to teach the horses the human alphabet. In the core of his literature, his acceptance speech reveals an enormous consideration, so comprehensive that it would even have to include beings beyond our present-day imagination, with whose messages “a probe sent on our behalf into an aphasic, inhuman beyond” could come back. According to Setz, the task of narration begins precisely where one must assume that one will not be understood. Impressively selfless poetics.
And an award year in which, despite all the joy that was asserted here and everywhere about the fact that after the last pandemic year we could physically celebrate it together again in Darmstadt, the distant connections to the very top and the very outside, the transcendent and the extra-worldly, remained open.