The second day of the Ingeborg Bachmann Competition: Floating over the thresholds

It was acceptably hot in Klagenfurt on Friday, with a consistently changeable mix of sun and clouds, and together with the coincidences of the draw, this did the 48th Ingeborg Bachmann Competition good and gave it momentum. The texts were consistently more interesting, the discussions more lively. In addition, Tijan Sila, who was born in Sarajevo in 1981 and lives in Kaiserslautern, was joined by two other favorites: Henrik Szanto and Dennis Pfabe.

Szanto, who was born in Frankfurt am Main in 1988 and has a Hungarian-Finnish family background, read a formally interesting text because it uses a house as the narrator and begins with a list that is gradually brought to life with characters from the house, across the floors and a century.

“We are a mass of pipes, we are stacked stones, plastered walls,…” he begins. “Our fate is that of the observer,” he says in between, and finally at some point, suddenly addressing a “you”: “Only when you are no longer here will you be with us. Then we will prepare a resting place for you in the walls, lead you from floor to floor and point to the carpets, tables and cushions and say: Good grief, what a life you have lived.”

Szanto’s text, entitled “A Staircase Made of Paper,” is an unusual one about memory, forgetting, and the monster of time, but it is still a smart and cuddly story. The jury was enthusiastic, with only a few minor criticisms here and there. Dennis Pfabe’s beautifully self-contained text about a man in a hardware store, “The Possibility of Order,” received a similarly positive rating.

From hardware store to hardware store

The man wanders from department to department because he and his wife are working on a house. Pfabe keeps hinting that there is something wrong with the man: sometimes he cries to an employee, sometimes he confesses to a hardware store employee that he was “incapable of feeling anything.” But does he really do that?

After Pfabe and the lunch break, the Berlin writer Olivia Wenzel, born in Weimar in 1985, appeared. The evaluation of her text demonstrated that literary criticism is also sometimes guided by (socio)political motives and that aesthetic criteria can become a matter of interpretation.

In “High Performance, Baby”, Wenzel tells the story of a group of nameless women who are on holiday with two children. One of them wants to interview and portray a famous footballer who later failed. But this attempt remains as he refuses. Afterwards, she dreams of how they become physically close and how he sucks on her breasts, which are full of breast milk.

There is a lot in Wenzel’s text. It is about motherhood, sexuality and desire, about racism, class and gender, and yet the many topics sometimes seem forced in and the text overloaded. For example, when one of the women mentions a podcast called “Naughty by Nature – Race, Class, Gender and the Architecture of Desire”; the footballer is also a very cliched one.

In any case, Mithu Sanyal felt “overwhelmed” – “my absolute favorite text,” although she had not even invited Wenzel; it was new juror Laura de Weck who expressed her “pride” in “having brought this text with her,” which she considers to be one of the texts “that really deals with contemporary debates.”

Mara Delius, on the other hand, read a single “thesis text” (which is already supported by the fact that, apart from the footballer, all the characters have no name and only call their children “child”), and even a formally “conservative” one. And Philipp Tingler, Sanyal’s opponent since she joined the jury and no friend of identity-political activism, said that “the text works with fashionable concepts of identity that are derived from affiliations.”

From Schachinger to Schnitzler

Conservative literary criticism versus activist literary criticism in Klagenfurt? And in between, Klaus Kastberger, who strangely thought he had recognized a novella and even mentioned Schnitzler’s “Dream Novel” (and, in passing, quickly, as a true Austrian patriot, mistakenly named Tonio Schachinger’s football novel “Not Like You” the winner of the German Book Prize and not “Real Age”), as well as the always text-exegetical literary scholar Thomas Strässle and the solid Brigitte Schwens-Harrant.

Or was it all irony in the end that nobody understood or that was neglected in the discussion? “Hey, is there anything private for you that is just private?” a woman once asked Wenzel. “No, not really, why?” was the answer. Irony, that’s just how it is, has probably never been over.

Olivia Wenzel then explained herself what the jury had already worked out and caused Mara Delius to falter because she could not really explain the conservative aspect of “High Performance, Baby” and then brought up the not so great images, from “blue voice” to “crabs wriggling in the stomach”.

In any case, you can guess who will definitely vote for Olivia Wenzel on Sunday and who won’t.

Szanto, Pfabe and Wenzel were framed by readings by the Berlin writer Sophie Stein and the Polish-born Viennese author Kaska Bryla.

Their texts caused the jury a lot of interpretation work, Stein’s more than enough: after hearing and reading it for the first time, one was amazed at what was in it despite all the linguistic simplicity. The other, which mainly tells of a woman suffering from Corona and the past of her parents, and does so without full stops, in just three sentences, offers his interpretations less obviously, but seems old-school and diligent with many and meaningless references to Martin Pollack or Paul Celan.