Guest of the ilb 2007
Katharina Hacker was born in
Frankfurt am Main in 1967. Her interest in modern Jewish thinkers such
as Gershom Scholem and Theodor W. Adorno led her to study Judaism,
philosophy and history. She studied at the University of Freiburg and
continued at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. She spent six years in
Israel, as a tutor in German and teaching at the School for Cultural
Studies in Tel Aviv. Her first literary work was »Tel Aviv« (1997), a
description of the city in prose sketches which she started writing
there. It was published one year after Hacker moved back to Berlin,
establishing herself as a freelance writer and translator from Hebrew.
After two further collections
of short stories and two novels, Hacker reached a larger audience with
the publication of »Die Habenichtse« (2006; t: The have-nots), which
won the German Book Prize. The novel tells of a young married couple
that lead a tepid, dissatisfying life despite being free of financial
concerns. While they both feel threatened by the abstract danger of
Islamic terrorism after 9/11 and at the same time become enmeshed in
their own personal obsessions, they are not able, out of their own
inept helplessness, to deal with the misery of their neighbours, a
socially week family. Not until their actual living conditions spiral
into disaster does the new order of a life together seem possible.
As the plot unfolds from a
certain authoritative distance, Hacker’s meticulously chosen language
builds up a tension saturated with fear of threatening catastrophes and
overwhelming feelings which is maintained, unabated, throughout the
narrative. The jury of the German Book Prize commented: »In frenetic,
atmospherically dense language Katharina Hacker leads her heroes
through the spaces of history and the main problem areas of the
immediate present.« The presentation of history and a contemporary
update pervade the author’s work. The stories in »Morpheus oder Der
Schnabelschuh« (1998; t: Morpheus or The beaked shoe) depict mythical
figures from Greek antiquity in contemporary surroundings. The novel
»Der Bademeister« (2000; t: The pool attendant) depicts, using
explosive monologue, a character who lives under two dictatorships and
gradually becomes numb before finally cracking. In »Eine Art Liebe«
(2003; t: A kind of love) Hacker develops a story inspired by Saul
Friedländer’s memories. The novel tells of an unbreakable friendship
burdened by feelings of guilt between a Jew who survived the Holocaust
by hiding in a French convent and a fellow student. Hacker's most
recent publication was the collection of prose poems »Überlandleitung«
(2007; t: Land line).
The author was Writer in
Residence in Bergen-Enkheim in 2005 and in 2006 was awarded the d.lit
Literature Prize. The mother of a daughter she lives in Berlin.
© international literature festival berlin
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