Max Goldt honored with German Language Culture Prize

Writer and musician Max Goldt was awarded the Jacob Grimm Prize for the German language, which is worth 30 thousand euros. According to the Eberhard Schöck Foundation, which awards the award, more than 200 guests attended the 21st gala in Baden-Baden yesterday.

The jury decided that Goldt was “an expert in small forms, a strict stylist, but at the same time open to very free poetic forms.” He is also “a strong critic of dirty language that reveals dirty thinking.”

Goldt himself reported his early astonishment at the language: “I must have been about nine years old when I noticed that the word ‘stop’ had a meaning that included its very opposite,” Goldt, who was born in Göttingen in 1958, told Enterprise Information. “A car that stops is a car that stops moving. On the other hand, a continuous rain is a rain that never stops falling from the sky.”

The Foundation has been awarding the German Language Culture Award since 2001 for special services to the German language. The Jacob Grimm Prize winners are Udo Lindenberg, Cornelia Funk, Frank Schermacher, Loriott, Ulrich Tukur, Katharina Talbach, Fantastic Four and Herta Müller.