The Ingeborg-Bachmann-prize in the year 2020, the eighty-year-old writer Helga Schubert receives for her story “The get Up”. This was to be expected in a Vintage with more contentious Jury, but otherwise weak texts on Friday. Now it has been confirmed in the election on Sunday morning.
Jan Wiele
editor in the features section.
F. A. Z.
Helga Schubert, born in 1940 in Berlin, price shares a special history with the Bach man. In 1980 she was invited there as a writer in the competition, was not allowed to leave the German democratic Republic for this, as you told in 2019, at a meeting over the brook man price and the GDR. After 1990 you could see your acts of the Ministry for state security of that time, and learned why she was not allowed to travel: is Not a member of the writers ‘ Union of the GDR, of which she was at that time, you have to read in Klagenfurt, because the GDR authors were tampered with, allegedly, “” and also “not the impression of a total German literature” should arise. In addition, the Stasi saw in the then jury Chairman Marcel Reich-Ranicki Communists a “notorious anti -“. Helga Schubert, then was allowed to travel but later on as a critic to Klagenfurt: From 1987 to 1990 she was a jury member at the Bach man.
this summer she returned on the invitation of the judge Insa Wilke as a writer once again back to Klagenfurt – if not physically, because of the “competition”, as one says in Austria, this time known to be primarily virtually was discharged. So Helga Schubert read your Text “The get Up” from the home garden in Mecklenburg, which made the event a special atmosphere: very peaceful for a story which contains some nasty.
The Text blends with situations in and around the bed, To 1946, a child lies in bed in the morning, and describes the singing of his mother; in the presence of the child adult woman sitting companions on his death-bed this mother, as well as on the bed of life. The autobiographical marked narrative spans, therefore, a century of German history, with national socialism, the war, the fallen father, to escape from Silesia, from German division and reunification and negotiated the depth of alienation between the child and the mother along the core question of whether one must love his parents. At a key point in the over a hundred-year-old mother explains why she holds her daughter for a “Sunday child”:
“I spent three heroic deeds that you were. First of all, I didn’t abort you, even though your father wanted to. And for me, you did actually undesirable. We got married because of you, in the fifth month. Secondly: I pushed you to escape from behind the Pomeranian to the point of exhaustion in a three-wheeled stroller in the trek to Greifswald, and thirdly, I have not poisoned you or shot, as the Russians in Greifswald marched in. Your grandfather demanded of me that I was poisoning me or shoot. Poison and a gun he put in front of me on the table. Greifswald should be passed as the first city to the Russians without a fight, which had banned Hitler Yes. You were sitting next to me and were five years old, just back on the legs after the flight, after typhoid fever and middle ear suppuration. Then I have to kill my child before, I said to him, I can’t. Since I have let you live. You were your whole life is a Sunday child.“
The conflict with the war-wounded mother, whose estate, through the Narrator, and with your quarrels, ends with the ambiguous phrase “all is well” – you can see Accept that as a “” as Insa Wilke in her speech on Helga Schubert. “Eighty years of life into twenty minutes of reading time” between deal, the author, says Wilke, “with fine irony, in the space of literature ,Des Knaben wunderhorn’ about Christian songs to Proust’s ,in search of lost time'”.