Today, in an unusually brief voting round, the winners of the four prizes plus the audience award were announced. If you feel you need to catch up with what’s happened in the past 3 days: I did a bit of daydrinking, I have a horrible sunburn from today’s Pride, my cat doesn’t like her new food, and, oh, yeah, three days of the Tage der deutschsprachigen Literatur (TDDL). Here is my summary of Day One. Here is my summary of Day Two. Here is my summary of Day Three and if you’re completely lost as to what the hell is going on, here is my general post about the event. If you want, you can read all the texts here, though you should hurry, they won’t be online forever.
That said: only TWO of these texts are worth keeping around (though some of the lesser texts will become parts of novels and collections): the stories by John Wray and Jackie Thomae. They are not equally good, but both are complex and interesting on the page and are worth rereading. John Wray’s story in particular is excellent. It is by far the best piece of prose in this year’s competition. But, as I said in my commentary on Day One:
Based on the text alone, he should win the whole competition, easily, but with the insurrection of the small minds and literature gatekeepers, one never knows.
And indeed, they picked Ferdinand Schmalz to win the big prize. Schmalz is part of the German literature business, he gives off, as we say in German, the right smell (der richtige Stallgeruch). He is a playwright, he knows all of these critics, if not directly then by a degree of separation no higher than two. And his native language is German. Klaus Kastberger’s huffing and puffing about not getting enough respect from these foreigners on day one truly showed the way. Wray won second place almost unanimously, which almost read like an admittance of guilt by the jury, who was really pulling for an insider but couldn’t credibly have placed Wray worse than second.
Which also explains why Eckhart Nickel won third place. His text is not, by any honest measure, the third best text. At least Schmalz’s text-cum-performance was really something, almost flawless for what it was. Nickel’s story was well made, but uninteresting au fond. Nickels biggest advantage was the fact that he is German literature royalty, a founding member of the Popliteratur scene, some of whose members went on to become influential titans of German literature. He definitely has the right smell. I suggested yesterday he might have a chance at getting one of the awards, but that’s because a similar writer had won a third award before, and because this resentment towards upstarts and foreigners had been in the air since day one. The reactions to the (much better) texts by Jackie Thomae and Barbi Markovic were sad and an indictment of the jury.
As was the fact that it took until the fourth and last award for a woman to win something. The field is split 50/50 between men and women, and on my score board, the four best writers were also similarly split 50/50. In a way, we were lucky Gianna Molinari won that fourth award because on the shortlist was, inexplicably, the unspeakable text by Urs Mannhart. Mannhart and Nickel were both nominated by Michael Wiederstein, who is exactly the worst person you want to be influential in judging literature: well off, white, male, and unaware of his privilege to a pathological degree.
There was also an audience award, but I’m not discussing it. A bad text won it, but the real issue was that Barbi Marcovic’s text, one of the three or four best ones in the competition, was temporarily blocked from public voting due to ‘technical’ issues. Icing on a very unpleasant cake.
And you know what? I have a pile of books by writers from the competition, and am slowly sobering up, and next year, you know where I’ll be? Right here: in front of the livestream, following the next, 42nd, Tage der deutschsprachigen Literatur. Did I get upset at this year’s awards? Sure. But you don’t stop watching basketball just because the fucking Warriors won the Finals like of fucking course they did.
Below is my list of posts about this year’s award:
#tddl: Germany’s Next Literary Idol
#tddl, Day One: the Wraypocalypse
#tddl, Day Two: The Jurypocalypse
#tddl, Day Three: The Nopocalypse
