Guest of ilb 2004, 2007
Katja Lange-Müller
was born in Berlin in 1951. The daughter of a delegate in the East
German Parliament, she was expelled from school at age seventeen for
»non-Socialist behaviour«. She learnt typesetting and worked, among
others, for the »Berliner Zeitung«, as a property manager for
television and as an assistant nurse in psychiatric wards before
completing her schooling, after which she began her studies at the
Literature Institute Johannes R. Becher in Leipzig. In 1982 she spent a
year studying in Mongolia, after which she worked as a reader for the
publishing house »Altberliner Verlag«. In November 1984 she left for
West Berlin. In 1986 she won the Bachmann Prize and that same year
published her first book, »Wehleid – wie im Leben« (t: Ache affliction
– as in life), a collection of short stories which reveals surrealist
and playfully linguistic influences. Further tales contain
autobiographical moments – some from her job as a nurse and from her
stay in Mongolia. Her depictions of the stolid daily reality of life in
the GDR are interrupted by grotesque and satirical elements. In her
next book, the story »Kasper Mauser – die Feigheit vorm Freund« (1998;
t: Kasper Mauser – The cowardice towards friends), the central theme is
the division of Germany: the main characters live on both sides of the
Wall and pick away at this monstrous barrier. As F.C. Delius said in
his laudatory speech for the Writer in Residence's Award in Mainz, the
essence of the depths of everyday life in the GDR and the »mockery and
brooding about Germany and about borders« had never been »so comically
and wittily described«. »Verfrühte Tierliebe« (1995; t: Premature love
of animals) and »Die Enten, die Frauen und die Wahrheit« (2003; t:
Ducks, women and truth) also combine highly comical passages with a
latently melancholy tone, comprising an idiosyncratic humour which is
unequalled in German contemporary literature. In 2000 Lange-Müller
published the novel »Die Letzten. Aufzeichnungen aus Udo Posbichs
Druckerei« (t: The last ones. Chronicles from Udo Posbich’s print
shop), for which she was awarded the SWR Best List Prize in 2001. »The
last ones« – in more ways than one – are typesetters stranded at
Posbich’s private print shop. On the one hand, they are the last of
their kind in the Gutenberg Galaxy, and on the other hand, their work
is the least appreciated. With her empathetic description of these
social outsiders Lange-Müller accurately displays alienation from the
political system and daily reality within this microcosmos in 1970’s
East Berlin.
Acknowledged and appreciated
from early on in her career by both the literary scene and the reading
public, Katja Lange-Müller has been awarded numerous prizes: she was
the Writer in Residence of Bergen-Enkheim (1989), was awarded the
Alfred Döblin Prize (1995), the Berliner Literature Prize (1996), and
the Roswitha Memorial Medallion from the city of Gandersheim (2002). In
2005 she received the Literature Prize for grotesque humour by the city
of Kassel and was a co-founder of the Lübeck »Group 05«. The author is
a member of the German Academy for Language and Literature in Darmstadt
and the Academy of the Arts in Berlin. Her most recent published work
is the novel »Böse Schafe« (2007; t: Evil sheep), which tells a story
of love and suffering between Soja and Harry in West Berlin in the
eighties: »We have each other and we have time; nothing else: we have
lots of time, even though it seemed as if it didn’t exist anymore.«
Katja Müller-Lange lives in Berlin.
© international literature festival berlin | 
poklekowski.jpg)