#tddl: the winner is…

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

#tddl, Day Two: The Jurypocalypse

So Day Two of the Bachmannpreis ended. Here is my summary of Day One. Here is my general post about the event. As I said yesterday, I’ll assume your German is not fluent enough to follow along, but if you want, you can read all the texts here. Today was exhausting to watch. Yesterday, we had 4 bad texts and one excellent one. Today we had 3 good texts and two awful ones. But if yesterday’s theme was the one of the adult competing with the children, today was the day of horrible jury discussions. I barely stressed the role of the jury yesterday, but each text is allotted roughly an hour: 25 minutes reading, 30 minutes discussion and a 5 minute short introductory film curated by the writers themselves. Sometimes, the jury discussions are about taste, about interpretation, issues like that. Sometimes, like today, they betray blind spots of the jury. Class and race are such blind spots. The jury, consisting of German, Swiss and Austrian critics had such a horrific performance today that I was embarrassed to be German myself (not that there isn’t recurring occasion to feel such shame). But first things first: the writers reading today were, in this order: Ferdinand Schmalz, Barbi Markovic, Verena Dürr, Jackie Thomae, Jörg-Uwe Albig.

Ferdinand Schmalz opened proceedings and it seemed like the day was going to be much better than yesterday. Schmalz is a nom de plume, and appears to be a character. The whole reading was like a performance. A little pork-pie hat, unwashed hair and an excited voice: a reading that elevated a text that was already pretty good. Everything in it worked as needed, sounds, rhythms, plot. This text wasn’t as good as Wray’s story yesterday, but it was good enough that I wouldn’t be upset if it did win the award. A fantastic, greasy, behatted, positively Bernhardian beginning to day two.

Next up was Barbi Markovic, who I had been looking forward to. Markovic, a writer from Serbia, had been doing interesting things with language and literature for a few years now and I was rooting for her. However, the text wasn’t quite as good as it could have been. It was good, it was interesting, and it was relevant, but it needed a good and gentle editor. The story itself, about a family found dead in an apartment, was clearly a metaphor. For what? Well, maybe the way nation states relate to each other or for the way smaller states are subjugated in larger, vaguely totalitarian confederation. The fact that the author is Serbian and her work circles around Serbian topics, seems relevant here. However, one of the judges, Michael Wiederstein, who comes from the area where I currently live, but lives in Switzerland now, proclaimed that texts should not be seen in any such contexts. “I don’t care that the author is Serbian!” he exclaimed, squinting with Germanic self righteousness.

Rough visual approximation of the jury discussing Verena Dürr’s text.

Lucky for him, the next writer was Verena Dürr. Dürr is, I think, an experimental poet who uses the dry and repetitive language of rules and handbooks. As it turns out, when turned into a prose narrative, this is horrifyingly dull. She offered a text about art dealers that was basically a list of expensive objects and of high culture associations. Everybody I follow on Twitter was stunned by the bland and deathly dull nature of the text. It was well made, I mean truly carefully and very precisely done. It’s just utterly uninteresting. However, the real gem was the jury discussion afterwards. Suddenly, judges who complained about a lack of relatable characters in Markovic’s story barely found enough breath to praise this shiny polished turd of a prose narrative. Michael Wiederstein exclaimed how he had so many art dealers among his friends and he was going to show them this story! Suddenly, the possibility of identifying literature and experience appeared, bright (dare I say white?) and shiny on the horizon. Everybody broke for lunch, and I hoped for a better afternoon.

In the afternoon, everything went from bad to worse and I suddenly found myself running out of white wine. Next person up was Jackie Thomae, a writer of color from East Germany. Her story was light but precisely written. It was about a young man of unnamed background who is read by his environment as a Muslim. It’s not relevant for the story which ethnicity he is, because the story’s theme is how his identity is constructed by the power relations around him. He works for a company called Cleanster that offer cleaning services. This is the seventh time working for the company; he’s got a routine, but he’s not a ‘pro’ yet. As he enters the apartment, a few things go wrong and he ends up only partially cleaning the apartment. Wracked with guilt and shame, he flees, onto the next job. The woman who contracted him to clean is unhappy and slips into a strange discourse about how of course these young Muslim men cannot expected to clean, I mean they learned a totally different set of gender roles in their culture. The text is not subtle about its topics: how whiteness and class intersects and constructs subjects in our society. Thomae is incredibly clear about it. It’s a strong story, very clear, very relevant, the writing unflashy but calibrated perfectly. Well, as it turns out that’s not how the jury saw it.

Reading some of the books by this year’s Bachmannpreis-candidates.

No. The jury collapsed in their own Germanic whiteness to an extent that should be part of a curriculum in a critical whiteness course. It was almost like a performance. Klaus Kastberger, who teaches in Graz, said: “we have to learn how to use servants again properly. They used to have rules for that and how we are lost without the rules.” He also asked to be explained the foreigner’s motivation because it wasn’t entirely clear to him. Why would he be intimidated by a washing machine (the story, again, incredibly unsubtle, says, literally: he didn’t want to break another expensive machine that he could never pay for). Meike Feßmann said we need to have a discussion about his cultural background and how it influences his actions, echoing, partially WORD FOR WORD, the statement of the white woman in the story who, in case that wasn’t clear, wasn’t supposed to provide a how-to of white behavior. The protagonist takes selfies “to impress the girls,” but somehow that didn’t reach Hubert Winkels, who thought it was a picture to impress the relatives “in Bosnia, Senegal or wherever” (IN BOSNIA, SENEGAL OR WHEREVER). TWO different judges used the phrase “clash of civilizations” to describe what happened, and Michael Wiederstein, he with the many rich art dealer friends, thought the ‘moral of the story’ was that people should clean more themselves. Kastberger repeated that this was not how you treated servants, that in the 19th century Austrian monarchy, servants were treated much better and we should learn from that and I think it was at this point that I may have lost my mind, my hearing or suffered some other collapse. As a German poet (and, I guess, critic?) I felt such intense shame for these people of similar overall background, I think I may have had an outer body experience.

Jörg-Uwe Albig then closed the day with a strange masculine fantasy, overwritten and undercooked. It is fitting after all that happened that the day ended with a writer called “Jörg-Uwe.” His story is about a man who was left by his girlfriend, has an exoticizing fantasy sequence in Ethiopia (because for Germans, somehow, going to Africa to find yourself is a thing. Yes, I know, Henderson the Rain King exists but, you know, Bellow, he of the “show me the Zulu Tolstoy” was a racist). In Africa he sexually assaults a church (yes, yes, don’t ask). I’m not sure what happens at the end because I stopped caring.

In summary: after today, I think, by rights Wray should still be leading the pack. I think Schmalz, Markovic and Thomae would all deserve one of the two other awards, but except for maybe Schmalz, they didn’t really challenge Wray’s claim to first place. And after today, I think Wray is damn lucky he’s white.