Ingeborg Bachmann Competition: The discovery of a liver sausage

This evening in the ORF studio in Klagenfurt, it initially seemed as if Ferdinand Schmalz wanted to simply continue the storm of sentences and flat-screen images from the previous speakers at the opening of the 48th Ingeborg Bachmann Competition. Nothing occurred to him when he sat down to write his speech on literature. He had planned a speech “in which the Karawanks sway with anger and the Wörthersee struggles for words.”

That could also have come from one of the competition’s sponsors. Or from the local ORF regional director Karin Bernard, who, despite a nice reference to the Austrian writer Walter Kappacher, who died in May, could not help but say that for her the members of the jury were “surveyors and dowsers” who “track down the veins of quality in the wide field of language.”

Schmalz continues the story of his writing crisis for a long time: the confrontation with such a crisis, how it is inscribed in the text itself, how important a writing crisis is, how important the texts are “that reveal their crises by not being clear-cut, but allowing a ‘one way or the other’, in that they have something of a garden through which the readership must find their own way.”

One might feel once again confirmed that it is perhaps not the best idea to engage former Bachmann Prize winners for these opening speeches, which are rather expectantly called “Speech on Literature”.

Praise of the writing crisis

Schmalz does at least have references to literature, and he finally gets the hang of it when he links his own writing crisis or that of others with the crises, with the ongoing crisis mode in which Western societies and democracies in particular currently find themselves.

Schmalz sings the praises of the writing crisis, because it is the ultimate one, unlike other crises, during or after which we always carry on. And he states: “But what distinguishes the current social crises from writing crises is that they are not part of a formative process, but that they leave us formless.”

Hmm, if that isn’t nonsense that Schmalz is talking about here. After all, he himself mentions the general numbness “when the news is avoided, when elections are infiltrated, when democracies are undermined.”

Of course, these results of numbness also have a certain form, even if this form is not as easily recognizable as Schmalz’s somewhat antiquated formal efforts: a bit of a Thomas Bernhard sound, with everything consistently written in lowercase for the sake of the artistic character, as you can read. And with a punch line from which the admittedly beautifully silly title of his speech is derived: “Oops, the liver sausage.”

That is what Schmalz’s children made of Paul McCartney’s song “Hope of Deliverance”, “Hoppla, die Leberwurst”, which for the blessed father, who was suffering from a writing crisis, ended up being an “insightful lack of understanding”. The jury of these Bachmann Prize days in Ingeborg Bachmann Park should be able to work with this and find their way through this one. Whether it ultimately determines the greatness of this year’s winning text remains to be seen.