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After Josef Winkler received the Georg Büchner Prize in Darmstadt on 1 November 2008, he gave a speech that forms the basis of this book. It answers a few questions: Josef Winkler, who is he? Where is he from? What has shaped him? How did he become a writer? Why has he recently stopped feeling ashamed when he doesn’t think about suicide every day?
Josef Winkler, who grew up on a farm in a small Catholic village in Carinthia, where there were no books...
After Josef Winkler received the Georg Büchner Prize in Darmstadt on 1 November 2008, he gave a speech that forms the basis of this book. It answers a few questions: Josef Winkler, who is he? Where is he from? What has shaped him? How did he become a writer? Why has he recently stopped feeling ashamed when he doesn’t think about suicide every day?
Josef Winkler, who grew up on a farm in a small Catholic village in Carinthia, where there were no books – apart from the old worn black prayer books engraved with a golden cross, deeply anchored in the souls of children, touchable and tangible with fingertips – not even the Bible, tells of his early longing for language and images. With stolen money he bought books by Camus, Hemingway, Sartre, Peter Weiss and Jean Genet. He read these books as if he had written them himself, and no sooner had he taken off his altar boy coat than he said to himself, »One day I’ll write a book!«
Digressing and digressing, Winkler sketches a self-portrait – which also includes two of his patron saints, the painter Chaim Soutine and the writer and thief Jean Genet.
It is fuelled by life and death in his native Kamering, by the bustle of Italian markets – by the turbulence between the pyres in Varanasi, India. But it can also be fuelled by books, paintings and sculptures, as this collection shows. And sometimes it ignites itself, the zest for language simply starts to burn – when the author sweeps together what needs to be sung of. Then he...
»On New Market two white roosters with sickle-shaped tails and red, jagged, translucent, upright combs that keep flapping to one side like rubber with every movement are standing in a basket. All around the shining light bulbs are coated in silver foil, so that the light falls focused on the piles of papayas, mangos and the fruits of the pineapples from Kerala.« This is one of the chapter...
It was only a few years ago that Josef Winkler learned about the fact that his fellow Carinthian Odilo Globocnik, who had headed the »Aktion Reinhardt« and boasted about the mass...
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In Josef Winkler’s native village there used to be a »bone-cooker«, who would collect the bones of the animals from slaughterhouses, put them in a clay jug and let them simmer on...
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