Wilhelm Raabe Literature Prize 2024 for Saša Stanišić

We are delighted that the Wilhelm Raabe Literature Prize, endowed with 30,000 euros by Deutschlandfunk and the City of Braunschweig, has been awarded to our friend Saša Stanišić for his book “Möchte die Witwe angesprochen werden, platziert sie auf dem Grab die Gießkanne mit dem Ausguss nach vorn”.

The jury explained its decision as follows: “‘If the widow wants to be addressed, she places the watering can on the grave with the spout facing forward’, a book that can be read both as a collection of stories and as a novel, fits in with Saša Stanišić’s previous work in terms of both its content and the tones that this equally passionate and virtuoso storyteller has mastered, in the mixture of reflection and humor, of laconicism and human kindness.

Saša Stanišić tells of ruptures in the lives of young and old people, of the fates of migrants, distraught fathers or widows who have to reinvent their lives. His stories confront these characters with dreams and possibilities – and very often also with what will forever be withheld from them.

Saša Stanišić’s great gift is that he can take the existential and the supposedly trivial, the socio-politically relevant and the private equally seriously and tell the story with a very unique sense of humor: the saturated Hamburg family father who despairs of not being able to win against his young son in Memory is not played off against the hardships of young people from precarious living conditions who grow up in dreary high-rise housing estates and are exposed to everyday harassment and experiences of marginalization due to their migrant family histories.

In this book, Saša Stanišić also fuses precision in observational detail and precision in linguistic realization, depending on the milieus he illuminates, with an intensive examination of older and more recent literary references. In it, he recalls the extent to which literature itself drew him into the German language after he fled to Heidelberg with his family as a young teenager to escape the war in Bosnia. But he also merges spheres that do not naturally belong together when he interweaves the story of a Turkish cleaner with a novella by Artur Schnitzler or brings his own fictional alter ego into conversation with texts by Heinrich Heine. It’s always surprising, sometimes with an almost postmodern twist.

‘If the widow wants to be addressed, she places the watering can on the grave with the spout facing forward’ contains nothing less than the early Romantic utopia: existence can be transformed into something different and better through literature. “The world must be romanticized. That’s how you find the original meaning again”, as the early Romantic poet Friedrich von Hardenberg, better known as Novalis, once put it.

Saša Stanišić’s work, which will be awarded the Wilhelm Raabe Prize for Literature in 2024, is the enchanting proof that this credo can still be the glowing core of poetry.”