From the start of the awards ceremony at the Römer in Frankfurt, as every year, the usual German gospel of the diversity of literature was sung before the chorus of the gathered literary industry: “Literature has different voices” – “and that’s a good thing,” “Becoming more and more diverse authors, identities too, and that’s a good thing” – “Yes, it’s a good thing, but it’s not only a question of identity, it’s a question of quality.”
Oh yeah! Anyone who has been there for a few years knows the tune and could easily get to it before the Frankfurt Book Fair even starts. Everything is important, everything is right – but is this really all that is associated with literature and literary prizes today? The German Book Prize, awarded for the first time in 2005, modeled on the Booker Prize and the Prix Goncourt, rewards the best German-language novel of the year with 25,000 euros.
Ina Hartwig, director of the cultural department of the city of Frankfurt, made it clear from the start that the demands placed on literature have not changed, but that the world surrounding this literature has changed. If this historical-critical and, yes, moral, claim is to be valid, if a novel perhaps even follows its own aesthetic principles and perpetuates a literary tradition: then the book prize should have gone to Clemens Meyer for his novel ” The Projectors”.
Not because Meyer, born in 1977, worked on this novel for almost a decade or, a writer writer but precisely because the thousand-page novel contrasts with contemporary German novels which now often take place in the small world of private and family life: Meyer’s view is a merciless look at a world as a whole threatened with regression towards the the most brutal world. barbarism – and his novel a novel which believes that literature is the only art form to banish them.
This year’s jury awarded the book prize to the novel “Hey, Hello, How Are You” by Martina Hefter: a novel devoted to the theme of love in times of uncertainty, from the point of view of a woman middle-aged woman who, alongside her wheelchair-bound husband, discovered herself and her power as a woman – often in a laconic and funny way, at least in a very unique tone that makes the writer and performer born in 1965 accessible to a wide audience.
The twentieth year of the German Book Prize – a year that appears to be more politically turbulent than any other in recent years – would have been an opportunity to celebrate the novel as a truly great form of literature.
