D.he winner of the Michael Althen Prize for Criticism has been determined – but the award ceremony, the beautiful celebration with all the speeches, readings, flowers and drinks that followed, is unfortunately canceled for the second time in a row because it is so simple it would be too dangerous to get as close to each other as, fortunately, always happened before Corona. And how it would actually be necessary.
Because someone was in quarantine, the jury was also unable to come together to reach a verdict. So it was pleaded in writing, justified, celebrated and rejected – and as a journalist who was allowed to read along, one would of course find it appealing to publish this correspondence; unfortunately it would be far too indiscreet. The jury is the actress Claudia Michelsen, the film director and author Dominik Graf, the writer Daniel Kehlmann and the film director and author Tom Tykwer: artists who are used to their work being criticized and judged. This reversal of perspective, calling on those who have been criticized to criticize those who criticize, is owed, on the one hand, to the memory of Michael Althen, the FAZ critic and editor who died in 2011 and whose film reviews were read so carefully by the filmmakers himself when he came to a rather skeptical judgment: Because he could feel an intellectual and emotional integrity, an impressive concentration on the part of the observer while observing himself.
And on the other hand, this reversal of perspective has a truth-creating power, which is why one wishes again and again that the jury met in public: namely, they all read the submitted texts with the care, accuracy and fundamental sympathy for the work of the authors that they actually do desire of those who look at and evaluate their works.
Pure luck
It was not easy for them to find a winner. There were nine serious texts up for discussion, including, to name just a few, an anthemic film review, a precise essay on the question of how freely literature can appropriate the lives of real people as material; an angry speech against the Humboldt Forum or the sensitive reference to an almost forgotten writer and reporter. The fact that Ulrich Gutmair, editor of the Berlin daily newspaper, deserved the award for his essay “Kebab Dreams in the Walled City” does not mean that a few others did not deserve it too – although it would be entirely in the spirit of Michael Althen if one were to speak of Merit would not even speak. Just from the luck that one succeeds in such an article. That the readers see it that way too. And that there is also this award (which is endowed with five thousand euros).
“Kebab Dreams in the Walled City”, published in the April issue of Merkurs, is an attempt to unearth the history of migration in recent cultural and musical history – and vice versa. Gutmair tells how Gabi Delgado-López, son of a Spanish philosophy teacher, who fled Franco and was allowed to join the guest workers in Germany, how this Gabi Delgado-López joined the legendary paranoid-Dadaist in 1978 during a visit to Kreuzberg Inspired by verses of the song that was then called “Militürk” and became one of the greatest hits of the Neue Deutsche Welle: “Kebab dreams in the walled city / Türk-Kültür behind barbed wire”. And how in the same year the Turkish-born singer Ozan Ata Canani wrote the song “German Friends”, inspired by Max Frisch’s sentence that we called workers but people came – a song with German lyrics and an Anatolian melody. Gutmair writes that “Foreigners out!” Was a popular slogan even then. While the migrant artists were always looking for the specifically German, for German words, German poetry, German feelings.
And that was probably what the jury won for him: that Gutmair is doing pioneering work, so to speak. And that he approaches the songs with empathy and curiosity, without the detour via taste judgments.
It is the tenth year that the prize has been awarded: Congratulations, Ulrich Gutmair!
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