Maternal death
Muttersterben is a prose text for which the writer Michael Lentz was awarded the Ingeborg Bachmann Prize in 2001. It appeared in 2002 in a volume of the same name with additional texts.
content
The text deals with a biographical borderline situation: the death of one's own mother. The first-person narrator goes mentally into the past: what changes he perceived in the woman who had been suffering from an illness for a long time and how these changes and illness also changed the mother-son relationship.
meaning
The Bachmann jury spoke of a unique combination of "sensation and language artistry" in the text. According to the jury, the discreet, yet precise description, Lentz penetrates into an existential mental situation that is difficult to grasp linguistically.
Together with the composer Josef Anton Riedl , Lentz also created a "radiophonic version" of his excellent text, which was originally broadcast on BR in 2002.
The reading and the audio piece were published as audio books.