The writer and musician Max Goldt has received the Jacob Grimm Prize for the German Language, which is endowed with 30,000 euros. According to the Eberhard Schöck Foundation, which awards the prize, more than 200 guests attended the 21st ceremony in Baden-Baden today.
The jury had decided that Goldt was “a master of small forms, a strict stylist, but at the same time open to very free poetic forms”. He is also “a powerful critic of sloppy language that reveals sloppy thinking.”
Goldt himself reported his early amazement at the language: “I must have been regarding nine when I noticed that the word ‘stop’ has a meaning that includes its exact opposite,” said Goldt, who was born in Göttingen in 1958 Foundation information. “The car that stops is a car that stops moving. Persistent rain, on the other hand, is rain that does not stop falling from the sky.”
The Foundation has been awarding the German Language Culture Prize since 2001 for special services to the German language. Jacob Grimm Prize winners include Udo Lindenberg, Cornelia Funke, Frank Schirrmacher, Loriot, Ulrich Tukur, Katharina Thalbach, the Fantastic Four and Herta Müller.
