Monday 23 October, 2006

Poet Oskar Pastior postumhously awarded Georg Büchner prize for literature

This weekend poet Oskar Pastior, who died on October 4, would have received Germany's most prestigious literary award, the Georg Büchner Prize. Die Welt publishes a short interview where Pastior explains to Tanya Lieske why he became a language experimenter: "It has to do with growing up and learning to think in Transylvania, which was relatively multilingual. We thought in our mother tongue, and in the other languages as well. What do Romanians, Hungarians or Ideologians - they are a different type of people - hear when I speak? (See our feature on Pastior, "The spell of a tender eel")

On the literature page, the Süddeutsche Zeitung prints the acceptance speech that Pastior was to give at the Büchner Prize award ceremony. "Digging around in the sludge again, secreting poetry again. And then people talk about game playing. They know nothing of speech trouble, thought exasperation or even perception distress."


Die Tageszeitung 23.10.2006

Dorothea Hahn presents the 21-year-old Faiza Guene, a French writer of Algerian origin, who has been hailed the "Francoise Sagan of the banlieus": "Her first novel, 'Kiffe kiffe demain' ('Kiffe Kiffe Tomorrow') sold more than 230,000 copies in France and has been translated into 20 languages. This year it is on the curriculum of French high schools. Her second novel appeared in August. 'Du reve pour les oufs' ('Dreams for the Crazy' to be published by Harcourt) is more political than her first book. But once more it revolves around a young woman in the suburbs who tells of her life in the first person: of job counsellors and temping, of her delinquent younger brother; of her father who's been disabled since falling at his construction site, and of pubescent cousins who are already planning the details of their weddings."


Saturday 21 October, 2006

The feuilletons remember the Hungarian Uprising

Neue Zürcher Zeitung 21.10.2006

The weekend Literature and Art section of the paper is dedicated to the Hungarian Uprising of October 23, 1956. At the forefront is György Konrad (more) who looks back over a full two pages. "Suddenly I found myself in the midst of the demonstration, and stepping down from the pavement I joined the protesting youth. Some of them had linked arms and were waiting on every street corner for the onslaught of the army and the marching columns that would drive them apart. Miraculous how one hour can turn a population into a people. Torpor no more, we have every right to take to the street. Strange that they are scared of us now, not the other way round. You can write what you like on a piece of paper and nail it to a tree. A rhetoric has collapsed. A riot of language, every wall of the city a newspaper. A people's festival of insubordination."


Die Welt 21.10.2006

In a highly informative article, Krisztina Koenen looks into what moved Janos Kadar, then head of the Hungarian Workers' Party, to leave his country to the mercy of the Soviet tanks. "This was not the first time that Kadar was willing to let blood flow for the Party. As minister of the interior he had prepared the show trial against Laszlo Rajk (1948-1950), always in the knowledge that he could well be the next. And he was. In 1952 he was sentenced to life imprisonment for treason and counter-revolutionary activity, before being rehabilitated and set free in 1954. But historian Tibor Huszar is sure: in November 1956 Kadar had to fear that his old sins would be held against him once more should he fail to submit to the Russian comrades. What followed is common knowledge."


Berliner Zeitung 21.10.2006

Hungarian author George Hodos looks back on 1956: "For me, the Hungarian Revolution began on October 6, 1956. That was almost exactly seven years after Laszlo Rajk, then second in command in the Party, together with three of his colleagues, among them my friend Tibor Szönyi, were executed and buried in unmarked graves. Szönyi had previously headed the Personnel Division of the Central Committee, and had been a communist since 1930. I met him in Switzerland during my period of emigration prior to 1944. The Hungarian show trial against 'Rajk and consorts' was construed out of this 'Swiss Group' including the US citizen Noel Field. It ended with five death sentences in the main trial and 40 more in related trials, to count just those hanged. We survivors undertook the reburial of the hanged, together with Rajk's widow Julia and the directors of the writer's union. The news spread around Budapest like wildfire, and 100,000 people assembled on October 6. That was the first spontaneous mass demonstration against tyranny and Stalinism since 1949."