Ingeborg Bachmann Prize: Meta-Meta in apartment buildings – Times Online

Takes literature in television circus damage or if it sparks? The competition for the Ingeborg Bachmann Prize July is a medial stress test.

2. 2015 16:58 clock

The writer Nora Gomringer | © dpa

The question of whether literature and television are natural enemies is like repeatedly asked. Discussed in the strict sense it is less because commonly the answer seems clear: Of course they are, and of course is in the ranking of predators the newer medium that which devours the elderly.. Or at least ill dresseth.

Last but not least, therefore, the Klagenfurt Festival of German literature, such as the Bachmann Prize now officially called, a spectacle that captivates the attention of the literary industry. During the three-day readings of fourteen writers and writers of literature is placed on the medial load sample. Not only coram publico and determined before the jury in Klagenfurt Sendesaal, but precisely also in the TV broadcast that withstands the entire marathon and his production.

From this perspective one can understand the first day of the Klagenfurt betting reading well as a symptomatic. Works here literature only when the conditions of the medial subordinates itself or is even generated from these self-only? Or they keep a persistence, a stubbornness that is not damaged by the appearance in the media circus? The poet and poetry slammer Nora Gomringer delivered in a richly applauded and laughed at by the public text performance a prime example of a competitive text which, as the juror Klaus Kastberger held out to the general emphasis of his colleagues, exists only for the sake of competition.

Gomringer text Search is a compilation of votes, in the center of which ironically their writer-colleague and namesake Nora Bossong is that in a multi-family house the death – or perhaps wants to trace a thirteen-year-old boy, to turn it into a novel – suicide. Literary scene meta-meta-level is the least, and undoubtedly put forward even by fabulous Gomringer.

What are but we laugh when we watch Nora Bossong in this text, as she eagerly conducts interviews or as a front door is consternation that was her just slammed in the nose after just friendly signed a book? Or when we read: “Nora Bossong is touched by a little girl”? We laugh not at least to some extent the fact that it’s just a snap of the finger and the one that otherwise the world and its inhabitants takes the material, suddenly, even the puppet of a writer?

Effect successful, you have to Nora Gomringer certify. And though not without deeper meaning. “Much of the writing is disgusting. Because it attracts voyeurs and the Heartless,” it says at one point in Gomringer text. As Klagenfurt self-questioning that will be hard to beat yet. And as proof of how literature the media conditions in which it is located has with its own resources, if not beat, but can strike sparks out of them, no doubt also.

A completely different approach and a completely different understanding of literature revealed the fifth and final text of that first day, who decided a pleasingly strong day. The 1989-born Valerie Fritsch read with The leg a text that the autonomy and Unkorrumpierbarkeit of literature claiming with quiet pathos and visual power, which has not be addressed by the media or other contexts. Fritsch designs in their text a morbid tableau of a maimed life, only nature itself seems to be even more unstable in this world, while the people of the transience are thrown prey.

The jury seemed to affect his of this text, in which a son accompanied the old amputee father in his last days and all the time just waiting to be able to see this in your sleep, when the mask of pleasantry to has sneaked out of the face of the Father. Something quite amazing harbors Fritsch ‘text also: Without that it would be put as strenuous update on the almost magical atmosphere of the text, but you can read it as a reflection of a world of increasing technological empowerment of the people. The old father denied the prosthesis will not conceal the stump, the ugly infirmity. That he chooses suicide at the end, is his way to regain autonomy. And that the text of Fritsch even more than the also silent, atmospherically dense prelude text of Katerina Poladjan received so much hearing in Klagenfurt, all shows that the question of literature and television and production is far from answered.