Sibylle Lewitscharoff

Sibylle Lewitscharoff at the Leipzig Book Fair 2009

Sibylle Lewitscharoff (born April 16, 1954 in Stuttgart ) is a German writer . In 2013 she was awarded the Georg Büchner Prize .

Life

Sibylle Lewitscharoff grew up in Stuttgart- Degerloch as the daughter of a Bulgarian doctor and a German. She has a younger brother. Her father, who emigrated to Germany in the 1940s and worked as a gynecologist in Stuttgart, suffered from depression and died of suicide in 1965 . She was eleven years old at the time. Lewitscharoff became interested in literature at an early age and was politically active as a teenager and high school student. In 1972 she graduated from high school. At that time she was a Trotskyist , read Karl Marx and helped found a regional branch of the Socialist Bureau .

In 1973 Lewitscharoff went to Berlin, where she has lived since then. She studied religious studies at the Free University of Berlin with Klaus Heinrich and Jacob Taubes . During her studies, she spent a long time in Buenos Aires and Paris. After completing her studies, Lewitscharoff worked from the 1980s to the early 2000s as an accountant in her brother's advertising agency in Berlin and also organized exhibitions. At the same time she began her writing activity and initially wrote radio features and radio plays . Her first novel was published in 1994 and has been a freelance writer since the early 2000s. Since then Lewitscharoff has published several prose works and essays as well as a play and has received numerous literary prizes for her literary work .

At the end of 2009 / beginning of 2010 she took part in the FLUXUS series of events organized by the German Literature Archive in Marbach in the Modern Literature Museum in Marbach am Neckar with her own exhibition of various works and an accompanying essay . In the Grimm year 2013 Lewitscharoff took over the Grimm professorship at the University of Kassel . Also in 2013 she was awarded a scholarship at the Deutsche Akademie Rome Villa Massimo .

She has been a member of the PEN Center Germany since 2005 . She has also been a member of the Bavarian Academy of Fine Arts and the German Academy for Language and Poetry since 2007 and of the Academy of Arts in Berlin since 2010 .

Sibylle Lewitscharoff lived in Berlin with her husband, the artist Friedrich Meckseper , until his death in June 2019 . Lewitscharoff is Protestant , but criticizes "wild and unsound forms of preaching and worship" in her church. The commandment to love one's neighbor plays a special role for them, as “weakening the aggression that is always ready to jump”.

plant

Sibylle Lewitscharoff made her debut in 1994 with the prose volume 36 Gerechte , which also contained some of her paper cuttings and was published in a small edition by the Steinrötter Gallery in Münster. In 1998 she published the short story Pong , for which she was awarded the Ingeborg Bachmann Prize in Klagenfurt . Pong is the story of a madman who wants to change the world and whose absurd logic determines the perspective of the narrative.

In 2003 the novel Montgomery was published , which tells the life story of a Swabian-Italian film producer named Montgomery Cassini-Stahl. He wants to make a film about Joseph Suess Oppenheimer and dies during the shooting; his death is the starting point of the novel, which depicts the life of the main character in flashbacks. In Lewitscharoff's 2006 novel Consummatus , the teacher Ralph Zimmermann sits in a café and reviews his life in a monologue, including the death of his parents and the love for a singer with whom he traveled in Europe for a few months until her death . In 2009 the autobiographical satirical novel Apostoloff appeared , in which two sisters are traveling in Bulgaria, where the remains of their Bulgarian father were transferred. The younger sister, the narrator, settles accounts both with her dead father and with his country of origin Bulgaria.

In Lewitscharoff's novel Blumenberg, published in 2011, the title character, the philosopher Hans Blumenberg , appears one night with a lion in his study. He lies on the carpet and looks at the landlord and shows himself during his lecture at the university. The lion is only perceived by him and an old nun. The author tells of Blumenberg's academic work (night work at his desk and lectures at the University of Münster) and the seemingly unrelated fate of four of his students, who all die early, suddenly or violently. The author found the inspiration for the figure of the lion in the philosophical reflections from the estate of Hans Blumenberg, published under the title Löwen 2001. The book has received many positive reviews in the feature sections of leading newspapers; On the other hand, the reviews in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung and in the cultural magazine Merkur were critical .

In 2014 Lewitscharoff's first detective novel Killmousky was published , which was received with restrained criticism.

Dresden speech

On March 2, 2014, Lewitscharoff gave a speech as part of the traditional Dresden speeches in the city's state theater , which caused a scandal . In her speech, Lewitscharoff went into the subjects of artificial insemination and surrogacy, among other things . The “drastic biblical ban on masturbation ”, according to Lewitscharoff, appears to her today “almost wise” in view of the grotesque and disgusting idea that a man would be sent into a cubicle in order to possibly be involved in procreation with the help of pornography. And further:

“With all due respect, in view of these developments, the copulation homes that the National Socialists once set up to supply blonde women with the semen of blonde blue-eyed SS men seem almost like harmless exercise games. I am exaggerating, that is clear, exaggerating, because the current reproductive cucumber seems so repulsive to me that I am even inclined to regard children who have arisen in such abnormal ways as half-beings. They are not entirely real in my eyes, but rather dubious creatures, half human, half artificial know-nothing. That is certainly unfair, because it blames the children for something for which they can absolutely nothing. But in such cases my disgust is stronger than reason. "

- Sybille Lewitscharoff : “On the feasibility. The Scientific Determination of Birth and Death "

These and other passages of the speech triggered sharp criticism. Robert Koall , the chief dramaturge at the Staatsschauspiel, wrote an open letter to the author in which he sharply condemned her attitude. In the taz , Dirk Knipphals called the speech "a terrible, inhuman tirade". Many leading media shared this view. Further criticism came u. a. from the Lesbian and Gay Association in Germany , the Dresden Bishop Heiner Koch , from Klaus Staeck , the President of the Berlin Academy of the Arts and from Gisela von Wysocki . Only a few media outlets defended the author's position, such as Alexander Kissler , the cultural director of the Cicero . Rüdiger Safranski supported the problem of artificial fertilization in the Swiss Literature Club.

The social ethicist and lawyer Oliver Tolmein accuses Lewitscharoff of “peculiarly mystical ideas of purity and fate”. Her “'disgust' in the face of 'absolutely repulsive' and 'abnormal' perceived 'reproductive cucumber' [hit] the actors and the children thus conceived”. Her criticism of modern developments in medicine is not based on analysis, but on "a mystification of what she regards as desirable normality, [namely] a state that combines the fate-driven of premodernism with the comforts of advanced civilization".

In July 2014, when Lewitscharoff took up the poetics lectureship at the University of Koblenz-Landau on the Dresden speech, on the one hand I screwed up two or three very stupid, very aggressive sentences myself, on the other hand she affirmed the somewhat old-fashioned position that that Humanum should not be touched ”. She continued to value her understanding of life, faith and the world: "Salvation should not be too easy to have, fear and horror should always be taken into account." Religiousness without the idea that the wicked are punished - for them this is a 'horror performance'.

Awards

Lewitscharoff at the Munich Literature Festival 2012

• 1998: Ingeborg Bachmann Prize
• 2006: Kranichstein Literature Prize
• 2007: Prize of the Literature Houses
• 2007: Member of the German Academy for Language and Poetry
• 2008: Marie Luise Kaschnitz Prize
• 2009: Prize of the Leipzig Book Fair , for her novel Apostoloff (Category: Fiction )
• 2009: Spycher: Leuk Literature Prize
• 2009: List of the best of the German Record Critics' Award (4th quarter) for the audio book Apostoloff , which she read herself
• 2010: Berlin Literature Prize
• 2010: Member of the Academy of Arts (Berlin)
• 2011: Frankfurt poetics lectures
• 2011: Doubts about the good, the true, the beautiful , Zurich poetry lectures
• 2011: Kleist Prize
• 2011: Ricarda Huch Prize
• 2011: Marieluise Fleißer Prize
• 2011: Wilhelm Raabe Literature Prize , for the novel Blumenberg
• 2011: Nomination for the German Book Prize (shortlist) with the novel Blumenberg
• 2011/2012: Scholarship holder of the international artist house Villa Concordia in Bamberg
• 2013: Scholarship holder of the German Academy Rome Villa Massimo
• 2013: Brothers Grimm Professorship
• 2013: Georg Büchner Prize

Publications

prose

• 36 righteous. Steinrötter, Münster 1994, ISBN 3-927024-00-7 .
• Pong. Berlin Verlag, Berlin 1998, ISBN 3-8270-0285-0 .
• The polite Harald. Berlin Verlag, Berlin 1999, ISBN 3-8270-0349-0 .
• Montgomery . Novel. DVA, Stuttgart / Munich 2003, ISBN 978-3-421-05680-1 .
• Consummatus . Novel. DVA, Stuttgart 2006, ISBN 3-421-05596-3 .
• Apostoloff . Novel. Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt am Main 2009, ISBN 3-518-42061-5 .
• Blumenberg . Novel. Suhrkamp, ​​Berlin 2011, ISBN 978-3-518-42244-1 ; as TB: Suhrkamp-Taschenbuch 4399, Berlin 2013, ISBN 978-3-518-46399-4 .
• with Friedrich Meckseper : Pong redivivus . Insel, Berlin 2013, ISBN 978-3-458-19383-8 .
• Killmousky . Novel. Suhrkamp, ​​Berlin 2014, ISBN 978-3-518-42390-5 .
• The Pentecost miracle . Novel. Suhrkamp, ​​Berlin 2016, ISBN 978-3-518-42546-6 .
• From above . Novel. Suhrkamp, ​​Berlin 2019, ISBN 978-3-518-42893-1 .

Essays and conversations

• 36 righteous. In: Renatus Deckert (ed.): The first book. Writer on her literary debut , Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt am Main 2007, ISBN 978-3-518-45864-8 .
• The poet as a child. An essay and five scenic objects. In: Marbacher Magazin 128, Deutsche Schillergesellschaft , Marbach am Neckar 2009, ISBN 978-3-937384-63-4 .
• The murderous core of the storytelling. With an afterword by Gisela Wand. Speech at the opening of the European Writers' Congress 2009 in the collegiate church St. Arnual, Saarbrücken. Gollenstein, Merzig 2010, ISBN 978-3-938823-66-8 .
• A sentence as an instrument. Michael Lentz and Sibylle Lewitscharoff in conversation. In: I love you. Marbacher Magazin 136, Deutsche Schillergesellschaft, Marbach am Neckar 2011, pp. 5–52, ISBN 978-3-937384-78-8 .
• About the defeat. Klagenfurt Speech on Literature 2011. Text (PDF; 18 kB) and video
• On the good, the true and the beautiful: Frankfurt and Zurich poetry lectures. Suhrkamp, ​​Berlin 2012, ISBN 978-3-518-12649-3 .
• I versus against me. Self-presentation in the Academy of Arts, In: Sinn und Form , 4/2012, pp. 571-574.
• From the glamorous life or was it better in the past? Lecture on June 26, 2012, Studio Eins, Saarländischer Rundfunk . Published by Ralph Schock . Gollenstein, Merzig 2012, ISBN 978-3-86390-020-5 .
• No time for redemption? Reflection on the Bach cantata “O Ewigkeit, du Donnerwort.” (BWV 20). On the occasion of the performance by the JS Bach Foundation in Trogen on June 27, 2014. St. Gallen 2014.
  • on DVD: O eternity, you thunder word. Cantata BWV 20. Gallus Media, 2015.
• Flight of the Dante researchers: Kai Nonnenmacher in conversation with Sibylle Lewitscharoff on the upcoming Dante novel 'Das Pfingstwunder' , in: Romanische Studien , Nr. 2 (2015), pp. 315–328, online
• What speaks for the Christians. In: to debate. Topics of the Catholic Academy in Bavaria, number 3, 2017, pp. 31–34. (Address at the conference Europe - Christian ?! on April 28 and 29, 2017)

Stage works

• In court. World premiere in 2012 at the Nationaltheater Mannheim , directed by Burkhard C. Kosminski

Radio plays

• 2005: 81st Director: Christiane Ohaus (DKultur / RB)
• 2014: Whitsun miracle. Director: Hans Gerd Krogmann (HR / DKultur)
• 2015: Bird migration (SWR)
• 2016: Brunnenhalle , director: Iris Drögekamp (SWR)

Exhibitions

• December 11, 2009–27. January 2010: FLUXUS 12: “Sybille Lewitscharoff: The poet as a child. Five scenic objects ” , as part of the FLUXUS event series of the German Literature Archive Marbach in the Modern Literature Museum in Marbach am Neckar (Lewitscharoff exhibited four paper theater works and two Leporellos , which, like her accompanying essay The Poet as Child, depict the pre-literary life of Goethe , Schiller , Clemens Brentano , Gottfried Keller and Karl Philipp Moritz were considered.)

Web links

Commons : Sibylle Lewitscharoff  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

• Literature by and about Sibylle Lewitscharoff in the catalog of the German National Library
• Short biography and information on the work of Sibylle Lewitscharoff at Literaturport
• Short biography and reviews of works by Sibylle Lewitscharoff at perlentaucher.de
• Excerpt from the story Pong on the Ingeborg Bachmann Prize website
• Readings with Sibylle Lewitscharoff to listen to and download at Lesungen.net
• Bulgaria, that is self-destruction  - Interview with Sybille Lewitscharoff in Tagesspiegel on February 25, 2009
• SWR broadcast “worth reading” . Thea Dorn and Denis Scheck in conversation about the “Dresdner Rede” and Sibylle Lewitscharoff's novel Killmousky .

Individual evidence

1. ↑ ^{a b} According to information on Sibylle Lewitscharoff at Suhrkamp Verlag ; accessed on March 8, 2014.
2. ↑ ^{a b} cf. demons from Degerloch . In: Stern weekly magazine of March 5, 2003, p. 208.
3. ↑ Cf. Ingrid Reichel : The foreign in us ( Memento of the original from March 8, 2014 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was automatically inserted and not yet checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. . Review of Sybille Lewitscharoff's novel Apostoloff in the Austrian literary magazine etcetera , No. 38 from November 2009, on www.litges.at; accessed on March 8, 2014. 
4. ↑ ^{a b} Cf. Sibylle Lewitscharoff: "I am an Ordnungskasper" . Interview with Sibylle Lewitscharoff by Jutta Person in the culture magazine Cicero on October 23, 2011; accessed on March 8, 2014.
5. ↑ See Uta Bitterli, Sybille Lewitscharoff, Onno Poppinga : Socialist Center Stuttgart. Attempt at regional orientation. In: left no. 39, December 1972; here after: For a new socialist left. Analyzes, strategies, models . Published by the Socialist Bureau. Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 1973, ISBN 3-436-01771-X , pp. 299-304.
6. ↑ ^{a b} cf. Sibylle Lewitscharoff. More sharpness for the literary business: the writer chooses lamb's lettuce and pikeperch . Interview with Sybille Lewitscharoff from Richard Kämmerlings in the daily newspaper Die Welt on January 22, 2011; accessed on March 8, 2014.
7. ↑ ^{a b} See exhibition opening: “The poet as a child” by Sibylle Lewitscharoff  ( page no longer available , search in web archives )  Info: The link was automatically marked as defective. Please check the link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. . Press release of the German Literature Archive Marbach from December 2009; PDF, accessed March 8, 2014.  
8. ↑ ^{a b} Cf. Kassel Grimm Professorship 2013 to Sibylle Lewitscharoff ( Memento of the original from February 13, 2013 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. . Press release from the University of Kassel on February 6, 2013; accessed on March 8, 2014. 
9. ↑ ^{a b} Cf. Minister of State for Culture Bernd Neumann awarded the Villa Massimo Rome Prizes 2013 ( Memento of the original from October 29, 2013 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. . Press release from the Federal Government's Press and Information Office dated June 1, 2012 (at www.themenportal.de); accessed on March 8, 2014. 
10. ↑ See information on Sybille Lewitscharoff ( Memento of the original from October 13, 2013 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. at the German Academy for Language and Poetry , as of June 4, 2013; accessed on March 8, 2014. 
11. ↑ Cf. Sibylle Lewitscharoff: No shallow rust, please! . Sybille Lewitscharoff in the series "What we believe - Prominent Protestants speak about God" in Chrismon (magazine) special from October 2014; accessed on December 2, 2014.
12. ↑ See the review by Ijoma Mangold in Die Zeit of September 8, 2011 [1] and the review by Patrick Bahners in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung of October 5, 2011 [2]
13. ↑ Peter Körte: Review of Blumenberg . In: FASZ of October 2, 2011.
14. ↑ Birgit Recki: Philosophy column: "Blumenberg" or the chance of literature. In: Mercury. German magazine for European thinking. No. 755, Volume 66, Issue 4, April 2012, 66. pp. 322-328.
15. ↑ Sibylle Lewitscharoff: Killmousky at perlentaucher .
16. ↑ ^{a b} Full text of the speech: Sibylle Lewitscharoff, March 2, 2014 ( Memento from September 24, 2015 in the Internet Archive )
17. ↑ ( dpa ): Dresden scandal speech. Lewitscharoff causes a scandal . News report from the German Press Agency (dpa) from March 6, here on Handelsblatt .com; Retrieved March 19, 2014.
18. ↑ Dirk Knipphals: Speech by Sibylle Lewitscharoff - A terrible tirade . In: taz, March 6, 2014
19. ↑ Lewitscharoff branded artificial insemination. At zeit.de, accessed on March 6, 2014.
20. ^ Sibylle Lewitscharoff: Hate speech against artificial fertilization. At buchreport.de, accessed on March 6, 2014.
21. ↑ zeit.de March 7th, 2014: I can't stand it.
22. ↑ http://www.morgenpost.de/berlin-aktuell/article125504114/Verlag-distanziert-sich-nach-Skandal-Rede-von-Lewitscharoff.html
23. ^ Bishop Koch criticizes Lewitscharoff ( memento from March 9, 2014 in the Internet Archive )
24. ↑ You make things unrecognizable, floating over evidence and clarification. Public letter from Gisela von Wysocki in Tagesspiegel on March 30, 2014.
25. ↑ http://www.cicero.de/salon/dresdner-rede-zur-biopolitik-lewitscharoff-trifft-den-wunden-punkt/57178
26. ↑ Scandal speech on artificial insemination: Writer Lewitscharoff apologizes for "half-beings" statements . In: Spiegel Online from March 7, 2014.
27. ^ Literature Club Plus: Is it all a scandal or what? . In: Literature Club of April 22, 2014. Contribution from minute 06:40.
28. ↑ Oliver Tolmein: On life and death . In: Jungle World , March 13, 2014.
29. ↑ sueddeutsche.de: Against the soft ice cream version of the religious. South German , July 18, 2014
30. ↑ Description of the event on the JS Bach Foundation website, accessed on July 23, 2014.
31. ↑ Charles Uzor: Masterly: Bach's cantata "O Ewigkeit, du Donnerwort". In: St. Galler Tagblatt , June 30, 2014, accessed on July 23, 2014.
32. ↑ Product information on the JS Bach Foundation website, accessed on January 18, 2016.
33. ↑ Bettina Schulte: Waiting Room to the Beyond: Sibylle Lewitscharoff's first play “Before the Court” premiered in Mannheim . In: Badische Zeitung of May 22, 2012.
34. ↑ Bird migration. Retrieved January 17, 2017 .