German Book Prize goes to Anne Weber

The best German-language novel of the year is dedicated to an old lady with an eventful life. “Annette, a heroine epic” was awarded the German Book Prize 2020 in Frankfurt am Main on Monday.

“The power of Anne Weber’s story can be measured against the power of her heroine,” was the jury’s reasoning. The award is endowed with 25,000 euros.

In her short speech, the 55-year-old author thanked the 96-year-old, “who is not only the heroine of my book, but a real heroine”. Out of superstition, she hadn’t prepared an acceptance speech, said Weber, just a little consolation speech to herself, but she couldn’t give it now. “I am aware that the success of the book is not only due to my ingenuity and design, but also to the real life of this woman whose story I am telling.”

Weber met the role model for her “Annette” by chance during a panel discussion and was so impressed that she decided to write about her. The winning title from the Berlin publishing house Matthes & Seitz tells the life story of the French resistance fighter Anne Beaumanoir – in inconsistent verse.

The now 96-year-old was a member of the Communist Resistance and risked her life to save two Jewish youths. After the war she became a professor of neurophysiology and had three children. She was involved in the Algerian independence movement and was sentenced to ten years in prison. She fled to Tunisia, worked as a doctor and later helped set up the healthcare system in Algeria.

It was perhaps her credit to have given Anne Beaumanoir’s story “a rhythm,” said Anne Weber in her acceptance speech. At the beginning of the novel she writes: “They are there, yes, there are also elsewhere than these pages.” Your book shouldn’t be a biography, Weber reported in the subsequent interview, but rather her personal view of this life. Nevertheless, she tried to invent as little as possible. The old lady agreed to the publication, but said: “That’s not me!”

The jury found it to be a novel “about courage, resilience and the struggle for freedom,” a story full of hardships, but told with fine irony. “It is about nothing less than Franco-German history as one of the foundations of our Europe today.”

The literary form is particularly unusual: Weber reinvented the epic for her portrait. The time of the “heroic epic” is long gone: an always male hero whose deeds are praised in verse, the classic is the Odyssey. So now a glory text for a woman, a “heroine epic”. The jury found it “breathtaking how fresh the old form of the epic sounds”.

Anne Weber was born in Offenbach near Frankfurt. After graduating from high school, she moved to France, where she still lives today. She initially worked as a translator, and has been publishing her own texts since the late 1990s. She sometimes writes her books in German and sometimes in French and then translates them into the other language herself. Since August she has been the town clerk for Bergen in the Frankfurt district of the same name.

The award ceremony in Frankfurt’s Römer took place almost without an audience due to the corona pandemic. Viewers could follow the award on television and on the Internet.

The other five authors on the shortlist each received 2500 euros: Bov Bjerg (“Serpentinen”), Thomas Hettche (“Herzfaden”), Deniz Ohde (“Scattered Light”), Dorothee Elmiger (“From the Sugar Factory”) and Christine Wunnicke (“Die Lady with the painted hand ”). In total, the seven jury members had viewed more than 200 titles.

The German Book Prize has been awarded since 2005. Last year Sa? A Stani? Ic received the award for his novel “Origin”. In his acceptance speech, the author from Bosnia attacked the Nobel Prize winner for literature Peter Handke for his remarks about the war in Yugoslavia and thus sparked a literary debate.

© dpa-infocom, dpa: 201012-99-914514 / 11

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