Literary Awards: Screwed, spread, swollen | nd-aktuell.de

I’m not sure whether, in a better future, the awarding of literary prizes should be completely abandoned.

In this country, prizes are awarded almost exclusively to literature that has an unctuous, pompous tone. Traditionally, what is popular is the screwed, spread and swollen. Something like this, for example: “I grow lightness like other corn and fertilize it with light from heaven” (Martin Walser). Which is why the local features section particularly celebrates hot air containers and great thinker actors of this ilk. A small text sample from the prose volume “Der Fortführer” (Rowohlt, hardcover, 208 pages, 20 euros): “In the unpaved track, sand track for the winners, the steaming shoe of the fastest person on earth got stuck.” Yes, nothing, really nothing reads as much like a successful Botho Strauss parody as a sentence from Botho Strauss himself.

But the German feature section can hardly cope with such nonsense prose shimmering in the evening sky, so that even the review headlines seem as if they had been received from the lips of the master himself: “Food for thought from an untimely person” (Deutschlandfunk), “Do you hear the sound of sleep ?” (“Time”), “Farewell to the present” (“Friday”).

Even the young, generally illiterate and mostly narcissistic young literary talents, for whom the techniques of residue-free self-marketing and exploitation have long since become second nature, successfully imitate the mannered and darkly whispering non-style of the older ones, which has proven itself in the company and write the same boring thing in their Suhrkamp and Hanser volumes because that’s just how they were taught in their “creative writing” workshops.

Such literature is published and reviewed primarily for teachers who are always willing to ennoble the numerous crooked and garbled metaphors as “poetry” and misunderstand the penetrating blare of meaning and importance that this prose mainly consists of as depth or fullness of thought. You are dealing with trivial literature that is sometimes more, sometimes less cleverly disguised as top-checker art, which successfully gives the appearance of being profound and thus cleverly fools the target group.

The language critic Stefan Gärtner once aptly characterized contemporary German-language literature as follows: “tailor-made consensus prose for feature articles and literary prize juries, a bit of avant-garde, a bit of education, a bit of humor, and precisely so neatly defined that ‘Zeit’ readers don’t spill their tea while smiling.” .

Until now, only people who want to recharge their healing stones on the coming full moon night or who put all their trust in Volker Wissing’s clever transport policy believed that “literary quality” plays a role in the awarding of literary prizes to the commercially available consensus prose producers. All the more surprising was the brief excitement in the features section recently about the fact that literary quality counts for nothing at such award ceremonies, but in the end the whole Zinnober is nothing other than an inauspicious mixture of advertising, cultural lobbying, corporate hubris and vain self-dramatization of the currently ruling literary bureaucracy and its lackeys. If “literary criteria” had ever had any relevance in this miserable circus, 98.7 percent of Nobel Prize winners for literature would have to return their award (and donate the sum of money that once came with it to readers bored and traumatized by bad books. I suggest Herta Müller do that Beginning.)

However, most Germans are not interested in literature in the slightest; if they read anything at all besides tabloid press headlines and “funny sayings with pictures,” they read the carelessly put together bundles of letters by people like Fitzek or Zeh (31 awards so far, 24 of which are literary prizes). .

A few years ago I came across a range of wall paints in the hardware store that had been given product names – marketing is the be-all and end-all – such as “Liberated Firebird”, “Ivory Rebel”, “Time of the Frost Flowers”, “Verse in Pastel” or “Spring Awakening.” And I thought to myself: Yes, these could all be the titles of novels that are found in large quantities on the tables of bookstores in this country: Edelkitsch sells well in this country, regardless of whether it is used as wall paint or in book form.

One thing is certain: the most reliable way to determine the quality of literature is to ask me.