At Büchnerpreisrede de Terézia Mora

UIn addition to the German literary award ceremonies, the awarding of the Büchner Prize is one of the most idiosyncratic aesthetics, and not just because it takes place in Darmstadt.

At the Staatstheater, at the bottom of a brutalist polygon, members of the Academy of Language and Poetry sit in the front row and look at a shimmering blue wall behind a bleached scene, right on an arrangement Floral in ambitious cream tones, left on a versatile table the certificates of the most important awards in the country: the Johann Heinrich Merck Prize for literary criticism and dissertation, which will be awarded this year to Martin Pollack, the Sigmund Freud prose prize Wolfgang Kemp, and the Büchner Prize for German literature at the highest price of 50,000 euros, awarded to Terézia Mora.

Political dimension

If he saw only this scene of still life, the spectator, sitting a few rows away, would come to the conclusion that what the Academy is often accused of must be true: be dusty and stand a little away from his own veneration.

The ritual ritual of two and a half hours, which is still readable as a psychobarometer of the academy founded in 1949, is all the more significant. on the other hand, open poetically what language really means for one's own writing and what political dimension it opens up; The speech of the laureate actually certifies the decision of the academy in which he shows it in a powerful way.

The writer Terézia Mora spoke in terms of form, presenting a speech in the form of a letter, between report and confession. The press articles about her admitted she was "a stranger and a woman", and the attribution of a signal. She understands "why it must be told to women and strangers, and that those who say they want good," but with that also a "strange light" falls on the handsome free people: "He sees differently – no one who is categorized does feels beautiful or free ".

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However, in the era of MeToo and MeTwo, it is a remarkable recognition of the artist as an individualist – that of Mora – that the individual case must determine the verdict and not Membership in a group, especially that of the double minority "woman and foreign" The story of life is only emphasized.

Terézia Mora was born in 1971, near the Austrian border in Hungary, where she grew up bilingual as a member of the German-speaking minority before settling in Berlin in 1990. In Germany, one of the first texts she read in the original was the "Woyzeck" of Büchner: she had touched and absorbed this German Büchner when, 154 years after she was writing, she was hesitant to enter the European reopening of Berlin ran (about in a newly founded video store in Berlin-Pankow, where you did not come very far with Büchner German, though). Terézia Mora said that "to carry a stranger with her, it is an almost incessant indulgence of irritation, understanding and non-understanding and recognized or conscious misunderstandings". The "language in search of guidance" was the material from which she would make her literature.

But what follows from an interpretation of language as a source of harmless irritation – beyond the principle of language as a paradise non-place?

"Compulsive Fusion"

Writing was nothing more than a defenseless defense exercise, Marcel Beyer said in his Büchner Award speech two years ago and had become a future political speech for the German, which would include "meat from German sheep "as well as" German Leoprint "and" steamed ", Terézia Mora, on the contrary, realized the motive of self-proclamation in a language less directly turned towards the future; it was rather a slightly melancholy rejection of the unification of the world and of a "compulsive fusion" (which, in turn, corresponded to the characters in their literature, who seemed to dream stories of life and, even though they seemed to have an outward appearance, remained somewhat alien to themselves.)

Nevertheless, this speech of the Büchner Prize has also become political – less in the author's poetology than in his statements: in a very short time, "both public and private speech" has been radicalized in Germany – which is actually a good thing, said Mora: "That confuses the reality while you are creating a fiction means that you both do your work." She was just "a little carried away by the quality of the work." ;irritation".

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In the past, it could have been said: "The speech hussy does not take place in Germany, at least at the governmental level", today we can not say that anymore. The comparison with Hungary Mora was made rather indirectly. Against Péter Esterházy and his works, of which Mora translated several languages ​​into German, would lead in Hungary "a campaign against any form of intellectuality".

Terézia Mora left open what had to be done against one and the other – perhaps the expression of the knowledge that "we Europeans" share, according to which, that we do something or not, in any case a price that we consider too high ". Does this mean lethargy? We did not want to hope for it and we thought about the phrase with which Mora initially quoted Péter Esterházy: "If joining does not help anymore, dismount it."