2023-06-28 20:21:18
Opening speech for the Bachmann Prize 2023: Why a prizewinner is afraid of the language.
In 2018 she was chosen as the winner by the jury of the Bachmann Prize. Five years later, Ukrainian writer Tanya Malyartschuk said on Wednesday evening in Klagenfurt: “I consider myself a broken author, a former author, an author who has lost her faith in literature and – even worse – in language.”
Maljartschuk began her opening speech at the 47th Days of German-language Literature with a look at Russia’s war of aggression once morest Ukraine. You are becoming more and more afraid of a language that, on the one hand, can produce “the most beautiful poems” and, at the same time, carry orders to kill: “Language is therefore never innocent.”
As with every war that “hurts and makes you dumb,” the question arises as to whether “literature can hide in the ambiguity of metaphors from hundreds of thousands of victims, destroyed cities and families torn apart,” said the Bachmann Prize winner and reported on her unfinished novel project regarding the Holocaust in Ukraine, which was also repressed in her own family.
Literature loses in the face of reality, “because it offers salvation for individuals, but never for everyone together,” concluded Malyarchuk. “What she can perhaps do: give the victims in dark valleys a voice (…) so that the killers, eradicators, criminals and crooks (…) finally no longer have the upper hand.”
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