In recent decades, interest in hunger artists has declined significantly. We no longer think that livelihoods are at stake when writing a novel or a song, when casting or deciding on a film project. In the mirror of Instagram, art looks so glamorous and everyone is successful.
But in her novel “Hey, good morning, how are you?” Martina Hefter talks with a light hand, touching, melancholic and funny about the precarious life as an author who also has to care for her husband who suffers from MS. As (almost) everyone thought, she deservedly received the German Book Prize for this.
However, Clemens Meyer, who was also nominated, saw it differently. It is a “disgrace for literature” that his novel “The Projectors” was not honored. He had worked for seven years on this wild and stormy epic, which runs to over a thousand pages and focuses on a man who, as a boy, saw his mother die during the major German attack on Belgrade in 1941, joined the partisans, was banished to a convict island and, after the end of the war, found himself Film extras made it through, among other things, in Karl May film adaptations.
Sympathetic openness or narcissistic bluster?
When this masterful exploration of human depths, which at the same time hints at a history of violence in the 20th century, came away empty-handed for the book prize, Meyer left the award ceremony fuming. He later explained in an interview with “Spiegel” that he never wanted to experience something like that again and spoke openly about his hardships: He currently has to finance a divorce and has accumulated 35,000 euros in tax debts – “if I were at number one on the bestseller list now, then I would have 100,000 new readers and be able to pay off my debts. I would be free of my financial worries for a while.”
Somehow it was endearing in its openness. But at the same time he was very uncollegial, because with this action he had taken the attention he deserved from those who were also writing about their own needs and drawn it to himself. Of course, that was also a form of violence.