Literature - Barbara Honigmann receives Friedrich Schiller Prize
In the past year, a prize in honor of Goethe, in this year the Friedrich-Schiller-Prize of the state Baden-Württemberg: The author Barbara Honigmann receives the award endowed with 40,000 Euro, which is considered the most significant literature prize of the state.
According to the statements of the Science Ministry in Stuttgart, the 75-year-old is to be honored in the fall at the German Literature Archive in Marbach. State Secretary Arne Braun (Greens) honored Honigmann as "a chronicler of her time and a poet of freedom". She paints a very personal and moving picture of German-Jewish life between exile, espionage, and DDR cultural elite in subtle language.
Honigmann was born in 1949 in East Berlin. Honigmann's Jewish parents survived the Nazi era in exile in London. Convinced by the ideas of communism, they moved to the eastern part of Berlin after World War II, where Barbara was born. Honigmann worked in the GDR as a dramaturg and director, and in 1984 she finally emigrated from the GDR and has lived in Strasbourg ever since, where there is still an active Jewish life. Among her most important works are "Roman von einem Kind. Erzählungen" (1986), "Soharas Reise" (1996), "Ein Kapitel aus meinem Leben" (2004), and "Georg" from the year 2019, a book about her father who was formative for her.
For her books, Honigmann was awarded, among other things, the Jakob-Wassermann-Literature Prize, the Kleist Prize, and the Elisabeth-Langgässer-Literature Prize, as well as last year with the Goethe Prize of the city of Frankfurt. In 2008, she was admitted to the German Academy for Language and Poetry - with the justification that her writing is always autobiographical, her ongoing family research is a reconstruction of her Jewish roots.
Marbach is not foreign to Honigmann: Last year, she donated a large part of her literary work and private correspondence to the Literature Archive as a so-called bequest. This is made available to the public differently than an estate while she is still alive.
Barbara Honigmann, the recipient of the prestigious Friedrich-Schiller-Prize from Baden-Württemberg, has also been honored with other notable awards in the past, such as the Goethe Prize in Frankfurt and the Jakob-Wassermann-Literature Prize. Born in East Berlin during the GDR era, Honigmann spent her formative years in Marbach, where she recently donated a significant portion of her literary work and personal correspondence as a bequest to the Literature Archive.
