Michael Althen Prize for Criticism

Here is a thing I think is wonderful: a prize for criticism not divorced from emotion, awarded by the otherwise often po-faced FAZ: the Michael Althen Prize (named for the newspaper's former film critic). Claudius Seidl writes:

It's not solely about film criticism. But it is about criticism that doesn't necessarily want to be right, about criticism that doesn't keep personal feelings off its back with watertight phrasing, about criticism that thrives on the awareness that analytical acuity and genuine emotion are not mutually exclusive.

I love that description; it's what I want from criticism. And the entry conditions:

Anyone can apply who has published a piece of criticism between 15 August 2012 and 15 August 2013 (or who considers a piece of criticism published in this period worthy of the award and would like to submit it) – whereby we hope you understand we find it easier to judge the quality of texts written in German.

I don't know quite what that means - I don't know how they define publication or whether they're just being polite about non-German-language writing. The judges are film people and the writer Daniel Kehlmann. Last year's inaugural award went to Sarah Khan; you can read her story "Séance with the Stasi" in Jane Yager's translation at Asymptote. The award-winning text about the TV series House was published in Cargo magazine.

Bachmann Twitter Party

People! It might be the last ever Ingeborg Bachmann Prize (but I wouldn't bet on it)! So we're having a party to dance on the volcano. Saturday 6 July, from 9.30 a.m. at Glas + Bild, Stresemannstraße 23. We'll be watching the third day of the competition on a huge screen and generally enjoying ourselves - do come along! All you need to do is contact info at glasundbild.com and bring something to eat or drink.

I've taken the plunge and set up a Twitter account. The plan is, you see, to tweet about it at the same time. There's an official hashtag, as I believe these things are called: #tddl. So you can watch it on TV or via livestream and "join in the conversation" (how I hate that cliché) wherever you are! Although obviously if you're in Berlin you should pop round. We might also have the twitter stream projected onto the wall at the same time for added brain-exploding input. I'm a little bit scared of picking up a new addiction, so I might just delete my account afterwards.

On Atheism and Literary Reception

I am an atheist. However, it's not quite as simple as that. My mother tells me she's agnostic, although she was raised as a Christian; my father, grandfather and great-grandfather define or defined themselves as atheists. That means I was brought up without God, albeit with respect for other people's beliefs. I never made a conscious decision to reject religion and the existence of God, but rather never believed there was a God in the first place. I think this is a fairly unusual experience in many places, although it may be becoming more common and I've met many people from the former GDR with a similar story. I've talked to people who say we need a new term because atheism is a negation in itself. I think it's perfectly adequate though.

What being a fourth-generation atheist means, though, is that I automatically take a fairly rational approach to life. I'm not the kind of person who believes in fate, or horoscopes, or even certain aspects of alternative medicine that rely on us believing they work (I don't want to convert anybody; please do me the courtesy of not trying to convert me back). If I don't like a situation I'm in, I'll try to get out of it or change it. Of course, I'm aware that I grew up in a country with a long history of Christianity, which has soaked into all aspects of its culture and can't have left me untouched either. Earlier this year, I read Alain de Botton's Religion for Atheists, but it struck me that the author's apparent craving for organised ritual seemed like a way of replacing religion with something else, and that's not something I personally feel a need to do. I have attended about four religious rituals in my life, three Christian weddings and a Sufi Muslim shrine offering. So another thing I don't know how to do is worship – which, again, is not something I would consider rational.

However, there is at least one area of my life that isn't rational: emotions. Fear, sadness, guilt, and that one I'm prone to overusing the name of: love. I don't know whether I fear and love differently to someone who fears and loves God as well as other objects. But I do know I have these unruly forces in my life, no matter how hard I try to blame them on chemicals. I remember as a teenager reading a quote attributed to Fay Weldon, which I can't find online: Love is just your hormones trying to get you pregnant. It's nonsense, of course, at the very latest when we apply the word to objects other than persons (or to men, or to lesbians, or to post-menopausal women as subjects, all of whom feel love, right?).

As you know, I love German books. Obviously I don't love all of them, unconditionally or indeed exclusively. That would be akin to worship, and anyway I don't think anyone would be capable of such a thing, not even people who work for the Goethe Institut. I don't even love everything one particular writer has ever written. There are people who do that though, I believe: idolise particular writers. As the word suggests, it's a religious kind of behaviour. So perhaps an atheist book-lover loves books differently to a religious book-lover.

And here's another word I overuse: magic. I don't believe it exists in a literal sense. I don't believe a man in a sixth-floor flat can shake bones over you and help you find a husband, or contact the spirits (which, obviously, I don't believe exist either). But I find it's a useful term for describing the way a spark of enthusiasm leaps from one person to another – say from a writer to a reader. I'd say there's a pinch of magic in publishing. I recently used the word to describe what foreign rights people do: they second-guess which books will work in different countries, and it seems like more than good luck when it works. Of course, my rational mind insists, we only hear the success stories. But still, there are magical phenomena where pure enthusiasm – and yes, that's love too – spreads.

I've been talking to people about what happens when you read books for a living. In a way, of course, I'm a prime example, if we consider translation as extremely close reading involving interpretation and reproduction. But reading and analysing isn't my main occupation. The examples I've been thinking about are professional literary critics and literary scholars. Last night I spoke to a scholar who said she'd never want to write about the writer she adored (idolised) as a teenager. I know I don't even want to re-read the writer I put up on a pubescent pedestal – she can never be as good as I imagined she was. And a friend told me about meeting a bunch of critics at a party, who were very jaded and spent the evening moaning about books and literary events. Is it that being paid to take literature apart on a regular basis robs it of its (God-like) mystery and allure? Like finding out the Wizard of Oz is a small man with a smoke machine behind a curtain?

It seems to me, although I could be wrong, that professionals lose sight of the magic and the love that makes literature exciting. Scholars are expected to take a Mr Spock-like perspective of writing, at least in their professional lives. Mr Spock being the proto-atheist in popular culture, perhaps, unable to understand even emotions because they're not logical, captain. Love is out of the question under the circumstances, I assume. And some critics must become immune to the magic, I suppose, and the love fades and fades as they become more and more, well, critical. Except for those exceptional critics who can still feel it or at least express it convincingly. There are people who say love feels stronger when you're younger, first cut is the deepest and all that, although I don't agree.

Are you wondering how I'm going to tie this all up? So am I; this is one of those Kleistian ideas-in-progress posts. I suppose I take a non-religious approach towards books, often a blunt one, but not actually a rational one. I'm happy enough with that for the time being.

Bachmann on the Brink?

Regular readers - and anyone interested in literature who lives in a German-speaking country - will be familiar with the Ingeborg Bachmann Prize. In a nutshell, it's Austria, Switzerland & Germany's Got Literary Talent. Four days of readings by mostly emerging writers and discussion by critics, broadcast live on Austrian TV. Only now Austrian TV seems to have got cold feet, after twenty-five years.

Various reports explain that the national Director General of ORF made a brash statement that they would no longer broadcast the competition next year, before actually informing the regional director in Carinthia, where the Bachmann Prize event takes place. ORF spends €350,000 on it, while the city of Klagenfurt donates €60,000. The mayor has said Klagenfurt can't afford to step in either. Apparently, the public broadcaster is having to implement major cuts because of a change to the funding process, and look what goes first - the arts.

There have been various enraged reactions. As previous winners point out in Focus magazine, the competition has made many a literary career. One of the critics judging in Klagenfurt for the past few years, Hubert Winkels, has written a hyperbolic defence of the competition in Volltext magazine. It's essential to broadcast it live, he says, because of the tension that creates and the attention it commands, spreading the prize's fame to all corners of the German-speaking world (you can watch ORF in Germany and Switzerland as well as Austria). What he doesn't mention is that it used to have an even further reach, with the entries and the website translated into seven European languages. When the sponsor jumped ship last year, the translation programme was abandoned. The longstanding organiser also moved on to a different position at ORF last year, although she was tight-lipped about the reasons. Winkels is a great one for exaggerating literature's importance; last year he claimed at an event that arts criticism is just as important to Western civilisation as representative democracy. Here again, he overstates his case: the competition should be put under United Nations protection, he says. I'm not at all sure he's joking.

I've never attended the competition in person, although many people do - giving the city a large influx of visitors and also showing a different side to a place rather tainted, let's say, by its association with right-wing populism. I'd also say this kind of culture tourism is a major boon for Klagenfurt and ought to be worth more than €60,000 (I wonder, for example, how much funding Berlin's international literary festival gets from the city). But of course the TV broadcast is nothing less than essential for the prize's prestige. Fourteen people reading in front of an audience of a couple of hundred is kind of lame in comparison. Over the past few years people have had a lot of fun with social media around the Bachmann Prize, commenting on Twitter, Facebook, blogs, etc. But even if the competition were to continue with a livestream, not being on TV would lose it a huge audience.

Let's hope they get the situation sorted out somehow. As Winkels says, it is a unique event and it would be sad to see it fade into obscurity.

Women on Lists

I've recently been asked to come up with a couple of lists, first a list of recommended German books available in translation in the UK for Litro magazine, and then a list of "five books that mean so much to me I wouldn't part with them" for fuenfbuecher.de. It's not all that easy coming up with these things, because in a way the categories are fairly random. Especially isolating five books I wouldn't part with, if you've ever been round my flat. I mean, like someone's going to come along and say, It's the end of the world as we know it, quick, choose five books to rescue! But OK, they're calling attention to reading and donating money to some good cause or other.

And then I got in an argument with a complete stranger on Facebook, as you do. I can't remember her name, but it was a woman. A friend flagged up Deborah Kogan's piece in The Nation about the humiliations women writers still suffer, which was recently translated in Die Welt. And the friend pointed out the usual statistical imbalances, making a particular example of fuenfbuecher. The people they ask for lists, she said, often name five men and not a single woman writer. In fact they have a list of frequently named writers, twenty of them, including only four women. But you can hardly blame the website people - they do ask plenty of women for their lists, and the choice is up to the individual. It was at this point that a couple of people said, What, we're supposed to introduce quotas in our own taste? And I said, essentially, yes.

Which is of course overly simplified. So I'd like to elaborate my thoughts here. I shall attempt not to generalise.

When people I draw up these lists, we are I am never entirely honest. There are a number of things at the back of my mind: what's the purpose of the list, who is the audience, what am I trying to achieve? And, always: how will it make me look? I would assert that most people asked to list five books that are important to them will choose books that make them look good, as they understand it. So the list of frequently named books includes Ulysses, the Bible, Wuthering Heights, that type of thing, interspersed with a number of children's books and "difficult" works of foreign literature (mostly American). I can imagine a person might want to create a rounded picture of herself by not actually listing what's on her bedside table right this minute.

And that's what I do too: I want any list I make to include women as well as men. Because women are at a disadvantage in the literary world, despite making up the bulk of the readership. It doesn't have to be absolute parity, partly because there are limits to what's available to choose from in some cases (I wrote about women in translation some time ago here). I would like professional critics to do the same - to have an eye, at least, on making sure books pages aren't entirely dominated by reviews of books by men, with the odd photo of a young woman writer. My blog is a kind of list, in a sense, and I try, but don't always manage, to write about books by women as much as about books by men. I don't think that's too much to ask. Do you?

The fuenfbuecher phenomenon is interesting. The only theory I can come up with is that the choices reflect the higher prestige that male writers still have, in the canon and in literary fiction. I think that explanation applies to the gender disparity in translation, too; at least into English.

Learn to Write this Summer in Berlin

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Summer in Berlin - it's hot and steamy and you'd only overheat if you just lounged around in the park, right? And you've always wanted to do a week's intensive writing course in a chilled location. The Reader are offering that in three different flavours. Like ice cream. Travel writing and memoir with the excellent Rory MacLean and Kimberly Bradley (whom I don't actually know) plus a reading by top talented writer Greg Baxter once it cools down in the evening. Imaginative writing with Tod "very good, also very funny" Wodicka and super fiction babe Clare Wigfall, with that mild evening event featuring Julian Gough, who's also pretty impressive. Or scriptwriting with Donna Sharpe and CJ Hopkins. I don't know either of them though, sorry.

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It's very hot here today and all of my flat gets full-on afternoon sun (apart from the bathroom). If I was interested in writing I would gladly pay €350 to spend a week elsewhere.

Berlin bei Nacht. Neue Geschichten - ed. Susanne Gretter

Berlin has a certain reputation as a city of vibrant nightlife. So when a friend recommended this anthology of Berlin stories, I was expecting tales of lost weekends in techno palaces, riding trains with Iggy Pop, and perhaps an imaginative dash of Josephine Baker. Actually, all three of those legends are present here, but in unexpected forms. And there's much more besides: foxes, hospitals, kitchens, taxi drivers, liars, and yes, bars, bars and more bars. Drinking with German writers - the fiction edition. In fact, the authors even include two of my previous drinking partners, Inka Parei and David Wagner.

Some of the stories seem to be straight-forward reports of a particular night: Klaus Bittermann darts amusingly from kindergarten to "discourse pop" to disappointing rock 'n' roll; Marc Fischer describes a group of Spanish tourists queuing up outside the inevitable Berghain in a text I'd read before. But ho hum, it worked just as well the second time. Critic Dirk Knipphals has a charming journalistic piece about patchwork nights then and now, and Bernd Cailloux has a wonderful, wonderful portrait of one night in the life of a taxi driver.

What stood out most for me, however, were the texts that were easier to classify as fiction. Anna Katharina Hahn opens the anthology with an astounding story about a man who pretends to come from Berlin and gets a spectacular comeuppance. Marica Bodrozic has a dreamlike night with William Blake behind a green door. Sarah Khan made me laugh with a story about clashing stereotypes and voodoo. Inka Parei does what she's so incredibly good at, writing a precise story that all ties together about ten minutes after you finish reading it. Kathrin Schmidt sends a missive from the very edge of town, where the lives might seem less gaudy but make for excellent fiction. Annett Gröschner's heroine trawls a Prenzlauer Berg bar for the gentrifying men she abhors, sharing a mini-history of the borough's past forty years as she goes along but never falling into the trap of spitting vitriol on the newcomers in general.

And then there's Christian Ruzicska's beautiful, confusing, breathless story, told at third hand and filtered through alcohol, of a Jewish woman who returns to Berlin. I'm not at all sure what happens here but I do know I love it.

Another thing I appreciated about the anthology was that it includes a wide range of voices, not just people who write fiction for a living. So we get a few slightly rough-and-ready texts, some of which were great fun, like Kerstin and Sandra Grether's account of an evening as DJs (although it does include a particular bugbear of mine: the German neologism DJane. There's no need, to my mind, to create a feminine version of Disk Jockey because a jockey can be male or female, as Elizabeth Taylor gamely proved in National Velvet. So we can abandon the unwieldy formulations "DJs und DJanes" or, as here, the pronounceable "DJ_anes" AND mentally celebrate a diva at the same time.)

The collection closes with a piece by indie publisher and unlikely-but-true man-about-town Jörg Sundermeier, which I suppose sums up what's good about these pieces. He begins with one of those familiar reminiscences of post-89 nightlife in Mitte - wasn't it great, and weren't we young and wild, and wasn't it all so alternative. And then the text slips, and we're not quite sure where we are, and at the very moment when the veteran's lament of "it's all different nowadays" might be due, Sundermeier takes a different tack.

And it's snowing and snowing, and snow falls, snow, upon the living and the dead.