Europe - My Neurosis

Honorauble Ladies and Gentlemen,
This speech should be, first and foremost, an expression of gratitude. This is probably the main reason that literary prizes exist: to increase this noble feeling in this world, if only by a small amount. Thus I would like to use this wonderful occasion and your presence in this hall to voice once more my deep gratitude, first of all to those who made the publication of my novel "Twelve Rings" in German translation a reality. I sincerely thank my publisher and my translator. It is only with their help that this encounter between you and me was possible. Secondly, I thank those who took notice of this book, who wrote about it, thus contributing to its fairly wide recognition in the world of German-language publishing. I am deeply grateful to all the reviewers of this novel without exception.

Thirdly, I am exceedingly grateful to ordinary readers (although in reality no reader is ever ordinary, thus I beg your indulgence for resorting to this abstract generalization). In sum, I am grateful to all those people who I met and saw over the course of my numerous readings in cities large and small across this part of Europe, to all those who filled the halls where these events took place, and reacted as attentive and sensitive listeners, who laughed, posed questions, and made pencil notes in the margins. And I would also like to thank those readers - far more numerous in number - who I did not have a chance to meet and see with my own eyes, although, I hope, I was able to sense, atmospherically, their emotions and experiences provoked by my text - I am tremendously grateful to all of them.

Of course, I would like to thank the city of Leipzig and the organizers of this prize, which is all the more valuable to me because its title combines two notions that have always been and remain crucial for me: the first of them Europe, the second, understanding. I should also thank the Jury of this prize for judging my efforts so positively, and paradoxically deciding to award this prize of understanding to a work in which one of the key themes is the impossibility of this very understanding.

I am grateful to you, Ingo Schulze, for agreeing to travel with me, for describing this trip, and for turning my attention to things I had never noticed, although I had been looking at them all the time.

I could continue the list of those to whom I am immeasurably grateful for a very long time, for today I am absolutely filled with gratitude.

But my gratitude was recently dealt a serious blow. On February 20, 2006, an interview with Mr. Verheugen was published in the newspaper Die Welt. Mr. Verheugen - let me remind those of you who might not know - is one of the Commissioners of the European Union.


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