Urs Allemann

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Urs Allemann (born April 1, 1948 in Schlieren ) is a Swiss writer and journalist.

Life

Allemann was born in Schlieren near Zurich in 1948 , but grew up in Bonn and Berlin . He studied German and English at the University of Marburg and sociology and social psychology at the University of Hanover . From 1975 to 1976 he was editor of Theater heute magazine . From 1986 to 2005 he was an editor for literature at the features section of the Basler Zeitung .

He lives in Goslar ( Lower Saxony ) and works as a freelance writer and poetry performer and reciter of his own works, such as works by others. a. by Wilhelm Busch , Robert Gernhardt , Erich Kästner , Christian Morgenstern and Robert Walser . 2005 he was u. a. to the International Poetry Festival Medellin invited.

Awards

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Scandal writer

Urs Allemann, who had already participated in the 1987 Ingeborg Bachmann Prize in Klagenfurt , caused a scandal in the 1991 reading competition with his prose text Babyficker : After his reading, the author was accused of cynically presenting the dream of a pedophile in this text . In a never-ending litany , a first-person narrator locked in an attic , surrounded by babies in washing baskets, varies the sentence I fuck babies. So maybe I am.

Despite the severe criticism of his text, Allemann won the State of Carinthia Prize. The FPÖ culture spokeswoman and second president of the Carinthian state parliament then publicly attacked the jury of the competition, called Allemann's text the biggest prize-winning mess and said:

The text is so bad that you don't know whether to attribute it to the madness, the provocation or the maddened depravity of the author.

Hellmuth Karasek , one of the jurors of the competition, defended the text:

Do you have to have a text like Urs Allemann's, can you praise a text with the title Babyficker ? I was one of the jurors in Klagenfurt who voted for Allemann's text from the start. I confess that I would have liked the text to win first prize, the Bachmann Prize. Why? First, because there was no stronger text in Klagenfurt. If there had been a similarly artistically convincing text about a field with poppies or a young couple at the wedding in a pilgrimage church, I would have happily preferred it to the baby fucker . Art is great beyond any content, says Rilke . Nevertheless, it is inextricably linked with its content. Allemann's text is conceived as a provocation, conceived consequently and written in the same way. Literature has to look again and again for the limit at which it comes up with its fantasies and experiences, it cannot stop where it is already at home.

The Literaturhaus Bremen also came to a more positive interpretation, understanding the text as role prose :

Presumably the work must be understood [...] as an attempt by Allemann to express his personal, linguistic obsessions with which he encounters a personal feeling of unreality in relation to everyday language.

Lyric poet

Since 2001 Allemann has published volumes of poetry in which he revived traditional forms of poetry in an idiosyncratic manner: Although he strictly adhered to the specifications of the poem forms, he deconstructed them at the same time and described diffuse fantasies of violence and destruction in them, which ultimately also turn against the language itself . He applied this technique in 2001 in Holder die Polder to the ancient, Klopstockschen and Hölderlinschen odes and elegies and in 2003 in schœn! beautiful! on the sonnet .

His third volume of poems, Im Kinde zirren die Ahnen (2008), is also an experiment with forms: The first letters of the 52 poems are strictly ordered from A to Z. The title of the volume is an alienated quote from Holderlin's poem Half of Life ( flags rattle in the wind ); This technique, often used by Allemann, is what the author calls overwriting :

Overwriting is an extreme method of dealing with ancestral texts: It enables you to create the closest and greatest distance to the original at the same time. Syllable for syllable, the overwriting overwrites what has been overwritten with a rhyme and thus creates something new and inconsistent.

Allemann again deals with the poetic genres and their history, but concentrates even more than in his previous volumes of poetry on breaking down traditional texts into individual phonetic and semantic parts.

Quotes

  • Allemann's poems are events and in his own recitation (not only, but also) of dazzling entertainment value. Like almost no other poet, he understood that the poem is mouth in the literal sense: it is created in the throat. There hissing and chattering, there is hammering and gurgling. Because is it! Sometimes one sees then a word - but the stories are by the speech and gesture -duktus always evident: hades in orkus gräkröm styx dust euphrates versieg o . As musical as this poetry is, it would be wrong to understand it as music or pure onomatopoeia . Allemann works with words and words have meaning. Even and precisely where he pulls the conventional from under their feet, he quotes them through the language game in which he uses them. - Samuel Moser

Works

  • Fuzzhase. Poems. Ammann, Zurich 1988.
  • Öz & Kco. Seven delirium over the phone. Ammann, Zurich 1990.
  • Baby fucker. Narrative. Deuticke, Vienna. 1992.
  • The old man and the bank. A five Monday chatter. Deuticke, Vienna 1993.
  • Holder the polders. Odes, elegies, others. Engeler, Basel, Weil am Rhein and Vienna 2001.
  • beautiful! beautiful! Poems. Engeler, Basel and Weil am Rhein 2003.
  • Ancestors buzz in the child. 52 poems with CD (poems read by the author). Engeler, Basel and Weil am Rhein 2008.
  • In Sepp's world. Poems and things like that . Klever, Vienna 2013.

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Urs Engeler: Urs Allemann. Urs Engeler Editor
  2. ↑ Heimrad Bäcker Prize 2012 ( Memento from June 6, 2014 in the Internet Archive ) Main Association of the Austrian Book Trade , June 5, 2012.
  3. ↑ literatur.ch ( memento of February 3, 2014 in the Internet Archive ) at www.literatur.ch, accessed on January 19, 2014.
  4. ↑ Claus Ulrich Bielefeld: “The Pleasure of Telling” - 25 years of the Ingeborg Bachmann Prize. ORF, July 7, 1991.
  5. ↑ Hellmuth Karasek: Crimes of the imagination. In: Der Spiegel . 28/1991, July 8, 1991.
  6. ↑ Allemann, Urs. ( Memento from January 4, 2011 in the Internet Archive ) Literaturhaus Bremen
  7. ↑ Ancestors buzz in children: 52 poems / by Urs Allemann. German National Library (from the publisher's report)
  8. ↑ Samuel Moser: Word twisters and word worshipers. NZZ, June 12, 2008.

Web links
personal data
SURNAME Allemann, Urs
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Swiss writer
DATE OF BIRTH April 1, 1948
PLACE OF BIRTH Streaks