Judith Zander (D)

The second afternoon of readings continued with Judith Zander’s text “Dinge, die wir heute sagten” [things we said today]. Zander had been invited by Hildegard Elisabeth Keller, whose colleagues were a little bored by her selection initially but found some words of praise eventually.

Zander’s novel manuscript tells the story of a 16-year-old girl from the GDR whose attitude to life is completely apathetic and who fell pregnant as the result being raped.

Author portrait
Reading
Discussion

Sulzer is "grateful" that the GDR no longer exists

A story that he quite liked reading, Alain Claude Sulzer said. But the delivery bored him a great deal. “I am thus grateful that the GDR no longer exists – it puts you to sleep, even when you are expecting a child.” To him, the text appeared “like a lullaby for the horrific grey of that country.”

Judith Zander (Bild: Johannes Puch)

Feßmann: “Great narrative calm”

Meike Feßmann received the character and the text “entirely differently”. According to her, Zander’s prose radiates “great narrative calm”. The character of the girls is created as very apathetic and therefore has almost no inner life. Feßmann believes that the “you” chosen by the author creates proximity and distance at the same time and thus pushes the story forward. The text also has wonderful images (“blooming perms”), said the juror, full of praise.

Fleischanderl: “There is no fire burning anywhere”

Karin Fleischanderl used her time to speak to draw a general summary of the style and quality of this year’s Klagenfurt texts while characterising Zander’s text at the same time: although all of this year’s authors are able to “tell stories” and have “learnt how to create literature”, there is no “fire” burning anywhere: the predominant tone is situated at the literary centre, “a little tepid”.

Winkels: “Steady, elegiac, measured”

Juror Hubert Winkels – in the past a fervent critic of the competition – believed he recognised in Zander’s text a general “symptom” of the Klagenfurt texts: “If you want to use apathy and lethargy to portray something, then you mustn’t do it in a boring way.”

The “you” chosen by the author does not create a decline, which means the text is “without tension”. This “steady level” is retained until the end, which makes the texts “steady, elegiac and measured”. Ultimately, however, Winkels believes that the text does have a few “fine miniatures”.

Alain Claude Sulzer (Bild: Johannes Puch)

Feßmann: "Boring delivery"

“You have to shelter the text a bit from the monotonous delivery” was Meike Feßmann’s defence. The character is not described in a boring way, the text has an exciting narrative construction and is “flexible” within itself, which is something “I haven’t read like that many times before”, said Feßmann.

“It could not have happened like that”

“It couldn’t have happened like that in 1970 in the Lower Rhine region”, was Burkhard Spinnen’s criticism, but he admitted that he “never loved the word Mutterpass [maternity log]”. But anyway, this is not a text about the GDR, but rather about the peculiar “lack of fate” of those 99.9 percent of people who are “no heroes” and just live their lives “in an entirely undramatic way”..

This “chronicle of unventfulness” uses up its own potential. The “you” chosen by the author (“an aesthetic guide dog”) ennobles the character, but there has to be a conflict somewhere, “or else that’s it”.

Meike Feßmann (Bild: Johannes Puch)

Keller: “Story of an alienation”

“I got stuck with the horrific image with the knickers”, Hildegard Elisabeth Keller explained, who had received the text by post in the United States, as she explained. This is the story of an “alienation”, where the character “slowly finds herself again”. This may be “long-winded, the steps may be tiny”, said Keller, but it does correspond to how people understand things. The style of the story, she believes, is “reconstructive”: the character should first “learn to walk again – but doesn’t want to”.

“Successful text full of crude realism”

Finally, Paul Jandl took the floor and made a little dig against Alain Claude Sulzer: “I find it quite interesting that a Swiss person like Alain Claude Sulzer finds the GDR boring.” He was “full of empathy” for the text. “A successful text full of crude realism, and done well” – whereupon his colleagues also praised the text’s “skillful details”.

TDDl 2010