Martin Mosebach

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Martin Mosebach, 2014
Martin Mosebach 2017 as laudator of the Thomas Mann Prize

Martin Mosebach (* 31 July 1951 in Frankfurt am Main ) is a German writer , who in the genres of novel , film - script , theater , radio drama , opera libretto , reportage , feature pages and narrative works.

Life and writing

Martin Mosebach was born in Frankfurt-Sachsenhausen and spent the first years of his life in Königstein im Taunus . He is the son of a Catholic mother and a Protestant medic who practiced as a doctor and psychotherapist. When he was five years old, the family returned to Frankfurt in the Westend . Mosebach studied in Frankfurt and Bonn law . In 1979 he passed the second state examination.

Towards the end of his legal clerkship, Mosebach began to write narrative and therefore describes himself as a “late developer”. Discovered by Golo Mann , he received the Jürgen Ponto Foundation's Literature Prize in 1980 . The writer Horst Krüger finally recommended the Hoffmann und Campe Verlag the unabridged publication of Mosebach's 1,000-page manuscript of his first work Das Bett (1983). In the work - in addition to the question of who confesses and who not - "the description of a gender competition and at the same time a denominational contrast in the conquest of the word" is in the foreground. In addition, the novel shows the influence of parents on the author.

Since 1980 Mosebach has lived as a freelance writer in Frankfurt am Main. The author feels connected to his hometown (see also Frankfurt am Main in the literature ) in a kind of love-hate relationship, which can be seen in features, reports, speeches, but also in novels (e.g. Westend , Eine Lange Nacht , Der Moon and the girl ) and stories: “It is part of my special relationship to the city of my birth Frankfurt am Main that I experience it as one of the most depraved and ugliest cities in Germany and in my imagination and in my inner image of the city of it as one of the most beautiful cities I know. ”The reason why Mosebach often settles his novels in Frankfurt is, according to him, a purely practical one: because he knows the area, the research has already been done. Often, however, he is also inspired by his numerous trips abroad, such as in Die Türkin , which takes place in Lycia , Turkey . The quake, in turn, paints the image of a king deposed by the English in a rural area in India .

Martin Mosebach is a member of the German Academy for Language and Poetry , the Bavarian Academy of Fine Arts , the Berlin Academy of the Arts , the Administrative Committee of the Free German College , in the PEN Center Germany and was also a fellow of the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin from 2009-2010 . His work has received several awards, most recently in October 2007 with the Georg Büchner Prize , the most prestigious literary prize in the German language, and in 2013 with the Konrad Adenauer Foundation's Literature Prize. In 2012/13 Mosebach was a Fellow of the International Morphomata College at the University of Cologne . His oeuvre includes film scripts, radio plays and poetry. He also published numerous essays and articles in newspapers and magazines such as the Süddeutsche Zeitung , Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung and the magazine Sinn und Form .

Mosebach also published with the Viennese Karolinger Verlag of the publisher Peter Weiß .

Büchner Prize 2007

In 2007, Martin Mosebach received the Georg Büchner Prize from the German Academy for Language and Poetry . The academy explained the reasons: “The award goes to a writer who combines stylistic splendor with unspoilt narrative joy and at the same time demonstrates a humorous historical awareness that extends far beyond European cultural borders; an ingenious player in form in all fields of literature and, last but not least, a time critic of incorruptible independence. "

Hubert Spiegel wrote about the “great storytelling talent” in the FAZ : “Martin Mosebach, the narrator, novelist and essayist, the grand seigneur in the cider bar, the Orthodox Catholic and unorthodox connoisseur of the arts, the conservative anarch and unrestrained keeper of style and form, is a brilliant Büchner Prize winner ”, and described him as a“ genuine narrator and [...] essayist of unusual stylistic and intellectual brilliance. ”At the same time, he characterized him as a“ Büchner Prize winner whose possibilities are as little exhausted as his merits can be disputed . "Ulrich Greiner spoke of Mosebach's" penetrating view of the ugly "; Uwe Wittstock pointed to the decades-long unity among German scholars and literary critics that the social novel is now a thing of the past, and called the awarding of the prize to Mosebach “another indication of how much literary evaluations have changed in recent years, and that those doctrinal ideas were pushed aside. "

At the Büchner Prize award ceremony on October 28, 2007, the German- Iranian writer colleague and laudator Navid Kermani portrayed Martin Mosebach as a “singular Catholic voice” in German literature dominated by “Protestant Bildungsroman” and as a “great novelist whose access to the world of the sick bourgeoisie “ Breathe the spirit of Cervantes . “Modern about Don Quixote is not his conception of the world, but his failure” - this also applies to Mosebach's characters in the novel.

In his acceptance speech ultima ratio regis on the occasion of the award of this prize, Mosebach compared a speech by Heinrich Himmler from 1943 with one by the Jacobin Saint-Just in Georg Büchner's drama Dantons Tod , towards the end of the French Revolution . This comparison in particular was discussed controversially in the German media. Parts of the press have accused of relativizing National Socialism . The historian Heinrich August Winkler called the comparison a distortion of history and a turning away from the goals of the Enlightenment and democracy .

Self-description and criticism

Mosebach described himself as a reactionary in his volume of essays Schöne Literatur (2006) . On the one hand, the term was widely criticized, on the other hand, it was adopted by prominent voices such as Harald Schmidt or the conservative journalist Jan Fleischhauer .

One reason for criticism was his book Heresy of Formlessness , in which he strongly criticized the liturgical results of the Second Vatican Council and called for a return to the Tridentine Mass .

"We believe with our knees or we don't believe at all."

"It's just strange that with so much archaeological-philological expertise, the result is a Jesus who could have been an honorary member of the SPD, just as women-friendly as Willy Brandt and just as little resurrected."

"Even if we are Catholics, we come from a country with a long period of militant predominance of Protestant culture."

In an interview with Deutschlandradio , the literary critic Sigrid Löffler said that Mosebach wrote “in a very adorned and splayed pompous style” with “affected vocabulary and their twisted phrases from the middle-class moth box of the 19th century”. He kept falling into the ridiculous while writing and received the Georg Büchner Prize 2007 not for his work, but because of his reactionary sentiments. She had already criticized the awarding of the prize in an article in the magazine Literaturen , which she edited . Löffler's criticism was rejected by Michael Klonovsky . Klonovsky accused Löffler in Focus of judging Mosebach not on his quality as a writer, but solely on his convictions.

A criticism of Mosebach's language that contradicts Klonovsky's defense can be found in a text by Peter Dierlich in the left-wing magazine Jungle World in 2008 , which begins with the words: “Martin Mosebach was awarded the Büchner Prize last year, although he was the worst novel wrote to the world. It's called Ruppertshain , and Peter Dierlich had to read it. ”Dierlich's conclusion is:“ Even if you couldn't determine exactly what good style actually is, you at least suspected that it was due to grammatical errors, senseless alliterations, ugly assonances and Repetitions of words and ignorance of reality do not arise and that he needs an author who maintains an intimate relationship with language and knows what he is doing at every moment. "This criticism was rated by Sibylle Berg in the Spiegel as follows:" There has rarely been one more thorough and deeply dislike text like that of Peter Dierlich […]. ”Mosebach dreams of a world in which there is a clear good and bad, in which discipline and order would prevail. Whether you like the author and “divine warrior” or not - in a democracy there is room for everyone.

Dramatic works, collaboration

Mosebach also made a name for himself as a librettist with his adaptation of Fidelio , which was performed with great success in 2008, and as a playwright. His drama Little Red Riding Hood and the Wolf follows on from Grimm's fairy tale and surpasses it. "Mosebach turned the folk tale into a magic game for very adult children, the reason for which is the sometimes cynical, sometimes lustful, pure greed for life." Mosebach also edited the book Manners for his friend Asfa-Wossen Asserate .

Contributions to the debate

In June 2012, Mosebach called for a strict application of the ban on blasphemy in his essay Art and Religion: On the Value of Prohibition . In doing so, he took the view that even in a completely secular, religiously neutral state, it might be necessary to forbid and punish blasphemy if it were to endanger the “state order”. He referred to an increasing number of devout Muslims in Germany and the danger that “a larger group of believers [could] feel so offended by the blasphemy in their religious convictions” “that their outrage becomes a public problem”. He declared that the Basic Law was founded religiously in Christianity.

In May 2015, he caused a sensation with his sharp criticism of Pope Francis . In an interview in April 2019, he compared the staging of Pope Francis' appearances with those of Adolf Hitler and Josef Stalin : While the papal appearance in earlier times was old-fashioned and “touching in its yesteryear”, the “strong men of modern times , a Stalin, a Hitler, used completely different stylistic devices to put oneself in the right light, and this is how today's Pope thinks ”; large events in which "tens of thousands are aligned with a single white figure in the middle" would have a much more totalitarian language than the earlier papal court ceremony.

Awards

Works

Martin Mosebach's oeuvre includes extensive prose production as well as libretti, film scripts, radio plays, theater plays and poetry; however, the focus is on novels and short stories as well as numerous essays and feature sections.

literature

  • Susanne Kaul, Friedmar Apel: Martin Mosebach - A portrait (PDF; 91 kB). In: Critical lexicon for contemporary German literature. (KLG), edition text + criticism. Richard Boorberg Verlag, Munich 1999ff., ISBN 3-88377-693-9 .
  • Franz Josef Czernin: On Martin Mosebach's story "Stilleben mit Wildem Tier". Laudation on the occasion of the award of the Heimito von Doderer Literature Prize. In: Gerald Sommer, Kai Luehrs-Kaiser (ed.): Shots into the dark. To Heimito von Doderer's short prose. Königshausen & Neumann, Würzburg 2001, ISBN 3-8260-2076-6 .
  • Bernd Eilert : Society novel - but how? In: New Rundschau. 104 (1993), No. 3, pp. 59-68.
  • Jürgen Engler: Repertory of Life. In: ndl 49 (2001), No. 536, pp. 163-170.
  • About law and literature. A conversation with Juli Zeh and Martin Mosebach , led by Britta Lange and Hermann Weber. In: Hermann Weber (Hrsg.): Literature, law and music. Conference at Nordkolleg Rendsburg from September 16 to 18, 2005. Berliner Wissenschafts-Verlag, Berlin 2007, ISBN 978-3-8305-1339-1 , pp. 183-204.
  • Jens Jessen : The gentle reactionary. In: Die Zeit , No. 44, October 25, 2007, pp. 61f.
  • Lorenz Jäger : Martin Mosebach. In: Hans-Rüdiger Schwab (Ed.): Stubbornness and attachment: Catholic German intellectuals in the 20th century; 39 portraits. Butzon & Bercker, Kevelaer 2009, pp. 697-709.
  • Köhler Steffen: The I at Martin Mosebach: A Comment, JH Röll, Dettelbach 2019, ISBN 978-3-89754-548-9
  • Kirsten Rathjen: On the sense and nonsense of all allegory: The game of hide and seek with the reader in Martin Mosebach's novels. Königshausen & Neumann, Würzburg 2013, ISBN 978-3-8260-5031-2 .
  • Georg Büchner: Danton's death. Reclam, Darmstadt 2002, pp. 47-49. The text of the present edition follows the edition:
    Georg Büchner: Complete works and writings. Hist.crit. Edition with source documentation and commentary (Marburg edition). On behalf of the Academy of Scientists and Literature, Mainz, ed. by Burghard Dedner and Thomas Michael Mayer. Volume 3.2: Danton's death. Text, edition report. Arranged by Burghard Dedner and Thomas Michael Mayer. Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, Darmstadt 2000. Emendierter Text, pp. 3–81.

Web links

Commons : Martin Mosebach  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b About law and literature. A conversation with Juli Zeh and Martin Mosebach , led by Britta Lange and Hermann Weber, printed in: Hermann Weber (Ed.): Literature, Law and Music. Conference at the Nordkolleg Rendsburg from September 16 to 18, 2005 . Berliner Wissenschafts-Verlag, Berlin 2007, pp. 183–204, here p. 187, ISBN 978-3-8305-1339-1 .
  2. ↑ Cf. Martin Mosebach: No youth work. In: Renatus Deckert (ed.): The first book. Writer on her literary debut. Suhrkamp Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 2007, pp. 225-229, here p. 229, ISBN 978-3-518-45864-8 .
  3. ↑ See Lorenz Jäger: Martin Mosebach. In: Hans-Rüdiger Schwab (Ed.): Stubbornness and attachment: Catholic German intellectuals in the 20th century; 39 portraits. Butzon & Bercker, Kevelaer 2009, pp. 697–709, here p. 698.
  4. ^ Martin Mosebach: My Frankfurt . Insel-Verlag, Frankfurt 2002.
  5. ↑ a b Sigrid Löffler : When people said "Horreur" about kitsch . ( Memento of October 30, 2013 in the Internet Archive ) Cicero, July 7, 2009 (Retrieved September 2, 2012)
  6. ^ The German Academy for Language and Poetry, October 27, 2007.
  7. ^ Spiegel online , June 6, 2007: "Martin Mosebach receives Büchner Prize"
  8. ↑ Hubert Spiegel: Truths from the Palace of Fiction: Martin Mosebach receives the Georg Büchner Prize , FAZ from June 8, 2007.
  9. ↑ Ulrich Greiner, in: Die Zeit, June 8, 2007: Piercing view of the ugly
  10. ↑ Uwe Wittstock in: Die Welt , June 7, 2007: "Martin Mosebuch, the master of old forms"
  11. ↑ NZZ : Antipodes in Darmstadt October 29, 2007.
  12. ↑ Georg Büchner: Danton's death. Stuttgart: Reclam, 2002, pp. 47-49. The text of the present edition follows the edition: Georg Büchner: Complete works and writings. Hist.crit. Edition with source documentation and commentary (Marburg edition). On behalf of the Academy of Scientists and Literature, Mainz, ed. by Burghard Dedner and Thomas Michael Mayer. Volume 3.2: Danton's death. Text, edition report. Arranged by Burghard Dedner and Thomas Michael Mayer. Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 2000. Emended text, pp. 3–81.
  13. ^ Pamphlet against enlightenment. Historians criticize Martin Mosebach's Büchner Prize speech . Conversation between Kathrin Fischer and Heinrich August Winkler. In: Culture Today; Deutschlandfunk of October 30, 2007: “For him, the decisive factor is, I believe, the quote 'Long live the King' by Lucile Desmoulins , which was pronounced at the time as an expression of extreme protest. And I believe that the real message of the speech is hidden behind it, the Enlightenment and the French Revolution mark a wrong path. The time before that was the good time. And this point of view is simply reactionary. I would be confused by history, because the Ancien Régime , against which the French Revolution revolted, trampled on human rights. And that's why I think this image of history, if it should be the basis of the speech, is something that has to be dealt with very critically. "
  14. ↑ faz.net
  15. ↑ zeit.de
  16. ↑ Harald Schmidt on the limits of joke-making and his role as a father of five. Retrieved July 21, 2019 .
  17. ↑ Jan Fleischhauer: Below left . Reinbek near Hamburg 2009.
  18. ↑ Quotations from Heresy of Formlessness , partly available on pro-missa-tridentina.de under [1] and [2] .
  19. ↑ a b Deutschlandradio Kultur : “That has something perverse” , October 5, 2007.
  20. ↑ Michael Klonovsky: Ugh on the pocket square! , Focus from October 15, 2007.
  21. ↑ Peter Dierlich: Between the Walls of Hiccups , Jungle World 2008/5, January 31, 2008 ( online ; accessed January 22, 2018).
  22. ↑ Sibylle Berg: Gotteskrieger im Tweedjacket , Spiegel online , June 23, 2012
  23. ↑ See Lorenz Jäger: Martin Mosebach. In: Hans-Rüdiger Schwab (Ed.): Stubbornness and attachment: Catholic German intellectuals in the 20th century; 39 portraits. Butzon & Bercker, Kevelaer 2009, pp. 697–709, here p. 705.
  24. ↑ See Lorenz Jäger: Martin Mosebach. In: Hans-Rüdiger Schwab (Ed.): Stubbornness and attachment: Catholic German intellectuals in the 20th century; 39 portraits. Butzon & Bercker, Kevelaer 2009, pp. 697–709, here p. 706.
  25. ↑ Manners. Eichborn-Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 2003, ISBN 3-8218-4739-5 .
  26. ^ Art and Religion: Vom Wert des Verbietens , Berliner Zeitung , accessed on August 2, 2012.
  27. ↑ Catholics Call for Stricter Ban on Blasphemy , Telepolis , July 28, 2012, accessed on August 2, 2012.
  28. ↑ Martin Mosebach: Theology just doesn't interest him , kathisch.de .
  29. ↑ domradio.de: Author Mosebach compares Pope appearances with Hitler and Stalin , April 8, 2019.
  30. ^ The preference of hollow houses , in Süddeutsche Zeitung of December 6, 2011, page V2 / 2.
personal data
SURNAME Mosebach, Martin
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German writer
DATE OF BIRTH July 31, 1951
PLACE OF BIRTH Frankfurt am Main