Ernst Osterkamp (left), President of the Academy for Language and Poetry, presents the Georg Büchner Prize to the writer, Lutz Seiler, in the Darmstadt State Theater. Image: dpa
The poet and writer Lutz Seiler receives the Büchner Prize from the German Academy for Language and Poetry in Darmstadt.
Ernst Osterkamp, the outgoing President of the German Academy for Language and Poetry, indicated in his welcome that the awarding of the Academy Prizes to Jutta Person, Matthias Glaubrecht and Lutz Seiler would be strongly influenced by current world events. The motto of the autumn conference, “Farewell and Renewal”, is about “core themes of human existence” and the Academy must “despite all commitment to topicality” always “remember fundamental human themes”. Unfortunately, the hope for a peaceful end to his term in office was not fulfilled; he wished his successor Ingo Schulze “all the best.”
In fact, the look back predominated in the speeches of the prize winners and laudators during the ceremony in the Darmstadt State Theater, although this makes the present understandable by recognizing the past. Above all, Büchner Prize winner Lutz Seiler, who developed his very personal poetology in his acceptance speech and, repeatedly referring to Büchner’s “Woyzeck”, derived his novels and poems from his origins. “Everything is hollow down there,” Woyzeck once said, and this was quite literally true of the dump landscape near Seiler’s hometown of Gera, where rock containing uranium was mined until 2021.
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