Iris Hanika

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Iris Hanika (born October 18, 1962 in Würzburg ) is a German writer .

Iris Hanika (2008)

Life

Iris Hanika grew up in Bad Königshofen in the Grabfeld . In Berlin , where she has lived since 1979, she studied general and comparative literature at the Free University in the 1980s . After graduating in the summer of 1989, she wrote her first book. In 1991 she began a Lacanian psychoanalysis with Edith Seifert , which she completed at the end of 1997. She is a staunch opponent of the spelling reform .

In the 1990s, Iris Hanika occasionally worked as a journalist for magazines (for example you , Der everyday life ) and newspapers ( taz , Frankfurter Rundschau ).

From 1998 she reviewed political books for the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung . From September 1999 to June 2002, for the entire duration of its existence, she was a permanent freelancer for the FAZ's Berlin pages

From June 2000 to August 2008 Iris Hanika kept a chronicle in the Merkur magazine .

plant

Katharina or The Obligation to Exist. Narration (1992)

The story "Katharina or The Existential Obligation", Iris Hanika's first book publication, was published in 1992 by Fannei & Walz in Berlin. It is divided into three departments. Less of a story is told, but rather a state of affairs, namely the one in which the student Katharina Kermer , who lived in Berlin-Neukölln in the 1980s, finds herself .

The hole in the bread. Chronicle (2003)

This book consists of many small, dated texts that reflect everyday observations on the one hand, but also moods and personal experiences on the other. These texts had previously appeared in Iris Hanika's chronicle in "Merkur". A few essays, for example about Aldi or lonely women, complement the volume, which the reviewer of “Die Zeit” called “an indispensable breviary of Forty Somethings”.

Music for airports. Short texts (2005)

In this book, Iris Hanika opens up everyday observation to the fictional, but the central piece of the volume consists of twenty texts about love life today. The most ruthless text, however, is about a Palestinian who was a soldier in the Lebanese civil war and who now lives in Berlin as a tolerated foreigner.

The Bet on the Unconscious or What You Always Wanted to Know About Psychoanalysis (2006)

Iris Hanika wrote this book together with Edith Seifert, her former analyst. In her introduction she seeks to allay the misgivings that such cooperation could give rise to. Edith Seifert's texts in this volume deal with the theory of psychoanalysis, always read with Lacan . However, Edith Seifert also describes how she came to psychoanalysis herself , thus providing a story of the Sigmund Freud School , which in Berlin in the 1980s mainly dealt with the work of Jacques Lacan, which was brought closer to the German public from there has been.

The volume contains a chapter in which general questions about psychoanalysis are specifically answered, and concludes with Iris Hanika's detailed description of her psychoanalysis, that is, its triggers and effects.

In the spring of 2018, a revised and expanded new edition was published by Turia + Kant .

Two meet. Novel (2008)

A romance and homeland novel at the same time, Iris Hanika's first novel is about love - rather the pleasure at first sight of two people over forty years of age. The action takes place in the part of the Berlin district of Kreuzberg, formerly known as SO 36 .

The plot is sufficiently marked with the title of the novel, even if the narrated time is about a month. The main thing is how such a happy encounter can be transformed into a lasting relationship. Although this encounter is solely due to sexual desire, the novel does not contain any “passages”, that is, sexual acts are not specifically described, only their effects on those involved.

The novel often changes form; Newspaper reports, drama, speeches and scientific portrayals are embedded in the literary storytelling. What is striking are the many quotes, each identified by italics, from songs of popular music (jazz, pop, rock, Schlager), but also from various works by Heinrich von Kleist .

The novel was nominated for the German Book Prize in its year of publication (shortlist). In 2015, the film was made to meet two .

The real thing. Novel (2010)

This novel is about how Germans deal with their Nazi past today . His theme is helplessness in the face of the crimes that happened at the time.

The main character of the novel, Hans Frambach, is an archivist at the Institute for the Management of the Past . For him, his misfortune is the real thing. He is joined by his best friend Graziela Schönbluhm, who shared his suffering from the Nazi past for a long time, but now considers the relationship with her lover to be the real thing. For the state, however, the remembrance of the Nazi crimes, which has been declared its permanent task, is the real thing.

As in her first novel, Hanika changes the form again and again in “The Actual” in order to shed light on all aspects of personal as well as professionalized remembrance.

Dancing on concrete. Another report from the infinite analysis (2012)

“The novel of infinite analysis, the novel of life. At the same time essay, report, feature section and chronicle ”, is how Iris Hanika names this book on her website. The core of this very heterogeneous book is the mastering of a bizarre love story with the help of the psychoanalytic method, tells of a woman who remains nameless in the first person. In addition to the passages relating to this love story, there are essayistic on music (including an essay on heavy metal ), language and the intolerance of the present.

This book is the first literary book by Iris Hanika that is divided into chapters. The last chapter is a chronicle, a return to the form already tried out in “The Hole in the Bread”.

How the garbage is sorted. Novel (2015)

The three parts of this novel are headed “Mess (present)”, “Note (past)”, “End (future)”. The first part in particular is constructed in a complicated way, there is a male figure, Antonius, who only wants to do senseless things, and a female figure, Renate, who would like to disappear. In the second, comparatively conventionally narrated part of the book, Antonius is only a minor character. This part is reminiscent of a campus novel , because it partly takes place in an academic setting, and a work by the baroque poet Johann Christian Hallmann that has disappeared plays a central role.

Echoes chambers. Novel (2020)

The first part of this novel takes place in New York , the second in Berlin . The action takes place in the present, so the gentrification of both cities is always present. The myth of Narcissus , told by Ovid in his Metamorphoses , plays a role (updated feministically), with the nymph Echo in the foreground - hence the title of the novel. The New York part of the novel is sometimes told in an artificial language . The plot of the novel is difficult to retell.

The work was awarded the Leipzig Book Fair Prize in the fiction category in 2021 .

Editing

Berlin in the light. 24 hour webcam (2003)

This book, published together with Stefanie Flamm, is based on the daily column "Webcam" of the Berlin pages of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung. Above the short texts is the exact time of the described observation, and in the book the texts are not arranged according to the chronology of their appearance, but according to these dates. This is how a fictional day in Berlin is portrayed. The book has over fifty authors and can be seen as a kind of collective novel.

Awards

Web links

Databases
Content

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Can our litter be recycled? in FAZ of March 11, 2015, page 10
  2. ↑ Stefan Kister: Book tip: Iris Hanika, “Echos Kammern”: Old myths, high rents. Many people have written about New York, but modern city life and myth have seldom entwined as beautifully as in Iris Hanika's new novel “Echos Kammern”. In: Stuttgarter Zeitung . June 20, 2020, accessed June 27, 2020 .
  3. ↑ Prize winners: inside 2021 , preis-der-leipziger-buchmesse.de, published and accessed on May 28, 2021.
personal data
SURNAME Hanika, Iris
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German writer
DATE OF BIRTH October 18, 1962
PLACE OF BIRTH Wurzburg