Are there people who have ever become jazz fans through jazz during breaks in cultural events?

But cultural event intermission jazz is part of the rituals of cultural events in cultural stations and culture factories and at all kinds of award ceremonies.

And so, at the start of this year's Bachmann reading competition, the Jazz All Stars from the local Gustav Mahler Private University for Music will play in Klagenfurt on Wednesday evening.

Tobias Ruether

Editor in the feuilleton of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Sunday newspaper in Berlin.

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They play their standards in the ORF studio when there are no ceremonial opening speeches or the sequence of readings for the following three days has been drawn.

Klagenfurt is a capital of rituals for the German-language literary scene: but somehow this ritual cultural event break jazz doesn't really fit here this time.

Because things are supposed to be different here this June than they used to be.

In Klagenfurt, authors still read texts in German about the five prizes that are up for grabs in Klagenfurt: the most famous of these is the Ingeborg Bachmann Prize;

last year, the author Nava Ebrahimi, who is of Iranian origin and lives in Graz, received it.

A seven-person jury still takes on the competition texts as soon as they have been read.

Christian Ankowitsch is still moderating the whole thing, as he has been since 2013.

All gathered again in person

But most recently, the jury vote on the prizes has been based on an award of points that is reminiscent of the Eurovision Song Contest: no longer just one vote per jury member, but a total of nine, distributed among the candidates, which in the event of a tie leads to a runoff then the jury has to vote again on Sunday, live.

Ankowitsch promises "more excitement" during the welcome on Wednesday evening, and the moderator and his colleague Cécile Schortmann do not refrain from praising the broadcaster 3sat for giving the Bachmann Prize fifteen minutes more time.

So that is also different this year, the first since the outbreak of the Corona pandemic, when everyone is physically gathered in Klagenfurt, authors, jury, audience, Lake Wörthersee is also there: fifteen minutes more broadcasting time than before.

The Bachmann Prize is also a television show and has long since spread to social media, where comments are made on Twitter and Instagram, and every minute counts.

Very comfortable printed lounge chairs

But what is newest is the staging of these 46th Days of German-language Literature itself: The jury sits in the studio and discusses the texts there.

But the readings take place in the garden in front of the ORF-Theater, on a covered stage, planted with reeds, the audience sits around it on beer benches and in deckchairs, printed with the likeness of the Klagenfurt writer Ingeborg Bachmann and one of her famous quotes: "Had If we had the word, if we had the language, we wouldn't need the weapons."

A sentence that seems all the more difficult in this war year 2022, but which, as if it were self-explanatory, is apparently intended to release its knowledge simply by being printed somewhere: on the deckchairs (in which it is almost too comfortable to attend the readings can listen), on the program booklet.

"If we had the word, we would have the language, we wouldn't need the weapons": That is the complete opposite of a slogan.

But Klagenfurt is also the place of Bachmann confession rituals of the sponsors and local politics, that has not changed at least: Among other things, the Carinthian governor Peter Kaiser had promised a literary scholarship in the Ingeborg Bachmann House, which is currently being converted into a museum : At Henselstraße 26, the writer and her family experienced the bombing raids on Klagenfurt as a child.

The Ukraine War and the Language

Even now, in Klagenfurt 2022, there is war in Europe again.

In her welcome speech, the chair of the jury, Insa Wilke, recalled the Austria evening at the small Leipzig Book Fair in March, at which the Ukrainian Bachmann Prize winner Tanja Maljartschuk had performed - and how she almost apologized at the time for the until to interrupt the fun evening by talking about the war.