In order to understand how important the Days of German-language Literature in Klagenfurt still are or even more so now, in 2022 one must first remember where literary criticism in the public service media currently stands: it is constantly threatened with abolition or downsizing, sometimes distorted into parody.

For example, one could think of the May 26 episode of the "Literarisches Quartet", in which Uwe Tellkamp's controversial new novel was presented - or not presented, because the group did not even come close to getting an impression of this complex work, its narrative situation and maybe also to give his problems, based on which the viewers could have formed their own opinion.

Instead, you came across too unfounded judgments and all kinds of extra-textual things,

culminating in the almost unbelievably stupid statement that anyone who is offended cannot write good novels.

Then the time, which was far too short in almost all such programs, was already up.

Jan Wiele

Editor in the Feuilleton.

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The competition for the Bachmann Prize in Klagenfurt is the counter-concept to such mutilation of literary criticism - almost the last bastion of intensive to manic preoccupation with literary texts over several days at a time, with an almost insanely long dwell time on a text according to the laws of today's attention economy.

Each of the fourteen candidates reads for a good half hour, and the seven-strong jury of professional critics discusses the same length of time.

Fourteen hours of literature, then, interspersed with conversations in the breaks, all broadcast on television and on the Internet, accompanied by observers of the observers, who in turn publish their thoughts on it and continue to discuss them - a machine of literary criticism with many cogs.

And a concentrated load of produced content.

Anyone who binge-watches the Bachmann Prize, i.e. from Thursday morning to Saturday afternoon, can be pretty "through" afterwards, but also has a pretty good position determination of contemporary literature and its criticism every year -

for better or worse

.

Debate about the originality of literature

How exemplary the Klagenfurt machine can purr was evident this year in the discussion about the text by Behzad Karim-Kani, who was born in Tehran in 1977 and now lives in Berlin. Insa Wilke, chair of the jury, rightly classified it as a genre story as a “prison story” namely: “We have a milieu that is told homogeneously, we have a limited space, and we have the character who comes into this space as an exceptional character to make it plausible: she uses a more chosen language and is able to reflect and describe at the same time." This is a rather academic description for the narrative sentence "He was the only Iranian in prison", but such a theoretical foundation is not bad at all for a further discussion,which quickly comes to a head in a jury of seven different temperaments.

The depiction of imprisonment, meticulously described to the point of insanity, when the young man in his isolation counts everything from knee bends to pieces of vegetable, aroused all sorts of associations from Netflix series to historical novels in the critics and triggered a debate about the originality of literature as well as one about the concept of entertainment literature.

The author and critic Philipp Tingler, who had invited Karim-Kani, found that good literature does not have to be original.

Mara Delius liked the sound of the story, while some of her colleagues were bothered by it, Klaus Kastberger heard "too much testosterone", and Michael Wiederstein was confronted with a "hipster boulangerie behind Swedish curtains".

And who had followed everything

perhaps still wavered here and there between agreement and disagreement.

All in all, and that should be the point here, the reading of the largely self-explanatory text as well as the discussion was a low-threshold opportunity to think categorically about literary criteria - and thus a good one.