Helga Schubert about Ingeborg Bachmann: “I am interested in her poems – and you are only interested in her hunger for love”

A few years later, from 1987 to 1990, she was finally allowed to serve as a juror for the Bachmann Prize. Together with an editor from a GDR literary magazine, she was allowed to invite two writers from the GDR each year. They won the competition three years in a row: Uwe Saeger in 1987, Angela Krauß in 1988 and Wolfgang Hilbig in 1989, who, however, had already left the GDR a few years earlier.

In 2020, Helga Schubert won the Ingeborg Bachmann Prize

In 2020, Helga Schubert changed sides for a second time. She was invited as a writer and participant in the Bachmann reading and won the prize with her story “On Getting Up”; a great comeback that made her a best-selling author, right up to the honor of being able to give the Schiller speech in Marbach at the beginning of November this year.

But you also have to scold those responsible for the Ingeborg Bachmann competition. Because as good as the Klagenfurt speech on Helga Schubert’s literature was, as beautifully as she parallels her life with that of Ingeborg Bachmann, you could hear little about it at the opening on this hot Wednesday evening in the now so-called Ingeborg Bachmann Park, the ORF studio area where the readings take place. Of the twenty minutes Schubert was allotted, she spoke for perhaps only half.

Shortened speech by Schubert

Time was of the essence, in this case the broadcast time: Because of the double anniversary (50 years of the competition, 100th birthday of Ingeborg Bachmann this Thursday), 3sat decided to show the opening live in the linear program, from 7 p.m. to 8:15 p.m.

This led to a pleasant streamlining of all the other opening rituals, which had previously been painfully long: the drawing for the reading order had taken place the day before, and this time those responsible for the sponsors only had to say greetings for a small film. And you didn’t have to spend long with ORF country director Karin Bernhard’s slip of the tongue, who described the Ukrainian Serhij Zhadan as a “Hungarian writer”, or jury chairman Klaus Kastberger’s tired joke that everything that was currently happening in German cultural policy was “weird”.

But then there was this short, fragmented version of Schubert’s speech, the entire length of which only the accredited guests knew because they received it as a booklet in their Bachmann Prize advertising bag.

In any case, it is nice how Helga Schubert tries to get a clear view of the prose and poetry of Ingeborg Bachmann.

She admits that when she was invited to speak, she also first thought about “her nightgown and the cigarette,” and that she first read Bachmann’s correspondence with Max Frisch and Paul Celan, before getting to the essence of it, embedded in an accusation: “I am interested in her poems – and you all are only interested in her hunger for love.”

Schubert’s memory of being in Klagenfurt for the first time in 1987 and being impressed by the blue of Lake Wörthersee, which was so distracting from the people and literature, is also nice: “Be outraged, the sky is blue,” she quotes Alfred Andersch. In addition to Bachmann, Schubert also remembers other dead people who helped determine this competition: Marcel Reich-Ranicki, who later handed over the chairmanship of the jury to Peter Demetz, who in turn invited her.

And above all, Helga Schubert remembers another colleague, whose name she did not mention in her speech. Gisela Lindemann was the name of the literary critic who died while hiking in the Alps in the summer of 1989. Schubert sat with her on the jury, two of them men, by the way.

With Lindemann she went to Bachmann’s grave to come to the realization that Bachmann was a tormented person, but: “I don’t necessarily have to be a tormented person just to become a good writer.” Schubert became exactly that. The Ingeborg Bachmann Competition made a decisive contribution to ensuring that this did not remain hidden from the world.