Literary Industry | Attention, Book Prize Longlist: The Fear of Reading Further

The second worst are the author descriptions. They rely on overused, pompous phrases like "studied in Wuppertal and Paris." Anyone who's ever seen the inside of a university assumes the Paris study abroad experience was just a semester, but it sounds better. The CVs of the twelve female and eight male authors whose works made the German Book Prize longlist were also significantly inflated for the accompanying sample book.

One had a residency, another participated in the Bavarian Academy of Writing, one won the Klaus-Michael-Kühne Prize, another the Franz-Hessel Prize, and yet another the Kranichsteiner Literature Prize; several have been on various shortlists or reached the finals of the Open Mike. The only nominee whose short biography omits a list of such achievements is Feridun Zaimoglu. But he doesn't need it; we already know him.

The German Book Prize is awarded in October by the German Publishers and Booksellers Association, shortly before the Frankfurt Book Fair. It carries a prize of €25,000. The longlist of authors was presented at the end of August, from which the jury will narrow down the shortlist of six titles, which will be announced next week. The five that do not win will each receive €2,500.

What's not mentioned, however, are the sales figures. In the book industry, a novel is considered a success if 4,000 copies have been sold—that is, if 0.005 percent of the population was willing to spend money on it. This isn't necessarily a criterion for quality, but it's safe to assume that not every author on the longlist was so fortunate.

After reading the official excerpts, you understand why. When an author begins with the words: "Well, when I was on my own, I applied to the German department as a tutor; that was possible after you'd completed five semesters," you're inclined to put the book down after the first sentence and use your time more productively. You could defrost the freezer again or sort CDs.

But then you tell yourself, "Don't be so harsh, give them a chance!" And so you struggle through 20 reading samples to figure out what distinguishes a book deemed worthy of a longlist. What's striking is that many are written in the first person. This form of narrative works when the first person actually has something to say and emerges as a changed person. Or when—as in Heinz Strunk's case—it describes everyday madness so precisely that it begins to glow.

Katrin Bach's "Life Insurance" begins with the words: "I am thirty-four years old and I'm scared." That's quite an introduction! And because "I'm scared" already piques curiosity, she repeats this sentence in numerous variations. This creates an unbelievable monotony, which—we were paying attention in advanced German class back then—is surely meant to symbolize that life in her village is unbelievably monotonous. Since you get that message after four and a half pages, the remaining 230 pages are quite frightening.

Kaleb Erdmann's ego seems to have a tea trauma ("Drinking tea has something masochistic about it, I always thought so, I say"). So in "The Alternative School," he muses about the tea brew as a metaphor while observing a nutria , which in turn is being observed by a child. But it's actually neither about tea nor about fake beavers, but rather a novel by the first-person narrator. A case of self-referential literature, then. It was once considered ultramodern. Back in the '70s. But now we're half a century further along.

In German middle-class literature, the children of administrative employees often remember the old terraced housing estate, but from a literary perspective, this is usually unproductive. Perhaps post-migrant authors will succeed in crafting more profound stories, based on experiences of a more existential nature? Like Dmitrij Kapitelman, who was born in Kyiv; Jina Khayyer, who is of Iranian descent; and Jehona Kicaj, who was born in Kosovo in the early 1990s. That could be exciting, one thinks. But what all three deliver are accounts of their own experiences, the kind one finds in "Die Zeit." Texts of the kind that remind educated people that there is a world beyond the Federal Republic where things are less pleasant. That's journalistically interesting, but not literary.

If only they had once read the stories and novels of Maxim Biller, Germany's most renowned immigrant author. Then they would have known that autobiographically tinged texts thrive on the fact that, on the one hand, they leave open what is real and what is fictional, and, on the other hand, despite all the personal embellishments, they have a narrative core that is universal. This is missing from Dmitrij Kapitelman, Jina Khayyer, and Jehona Kicaj. What one reads doesn't resonate quickly—just as the articles in "Die Zeit" are quickly forgotten.

Uwe Kopf, who died much too early (»The Eleven Brains of the Silkworm«), once said: »One should reduce one's texts to their skeletons and omit every superfluous word. This applies especially to adjectives. Often the author simply wants to (...) force originality.« This is what comes to mind when reading a sentence like this: »The suitcase rolls obediently and without resistance beside me over the reflective stone slabs.« Many texts on the longlist suffer from the fact that the effort to be »original« shines through all too obviously.

And while you secretly declare German literature dead and wonder who's reading this (masochists? people with no sense of language?), a miracle happens. A former psychiatric nurse delivers a text that will leave you on edge after just a few sentences: "My mother teaches us daughters things. Other things than sitting with a straight back at the dinner table, other than saying 'thank you' and 'please,' other things than her son. She teaches us that schnapps means trouble. That men who drink beer are harmless." This is how "The Black on My Father's Hands" by Lena Schätte begins. And of course I'll spend the 24 euros to find out who's drinking what and why.

German Book Prize 2025: The Nominees. 128 pages, available free of charge in many bookstores.