Laudatory speech for the award of the International Stefan Heym Prize 2026

Dear ladies and gentlemen, dear Juri,

Never heard words or names can open up a world - open sesame, we knew that as children. For me, one such primal scene of the explosive power of poetic language is associated with the word Dsyndsul.

Dsyndsul - a high mountain pasture in the Carpathians, the scene of a bloody World War II battle in 1915. Later a weather station of the Warsaw Meteorological Society. British listening station until 1939. In the 1960s it was a Soviet ski school, in the 1990s it was converted into a hotel by a resourceful Ukrainian businessman. 

Dsyndsul is the setting for the novel Twelve Rings, with which Yuri Andrukhovych enthralled his Ukrainian audience in 2003 and his German audience in 2005.

The hotel was called - in allusion to the "cursed poet" Bohdan-Ihor Antonych - "Inn on the Moon". My eyes opened up there. That is, no, my head was spinning from the wealth of unknown details, half historical, half fictional. Did this poet even exist? Or was I looking into the abyss of my literary ignorance? Without the protagonist Karl-Joseph Zumbrunnen, who wandered around up there and understood as little Ukrainian as I did, I would have been lost.

However, the gaze of this Zumbrunnen - a half-found Austrian photographer, travelling in Ukraine, i.e. in its western part, in Galicia, since the early nineties - enchanted this place, awakened it to a life teeming with words. This gaze - interpreted by the poet Andrukhovych - created a sui generis poetry of rhythmised, resounding lists of words and laughter-inducing enumerations that produced unheard-of combinations of meaning and elements of reality.

"Everything that Zumbrunnen saw," I quote Sabine Stöhr's translation, "everything that Zumbrunnen saw as he wandered around the house, from floor to floor, from wing to wing, through large halls and small chambers, left him with the impression of a strange blending of times, as if entire pieces of past existence were constantly trying to draw attention to themselves by wedging themselves expressively into the present - be it an unplastered piece of wall made of pre-war SERAFINI bricks, be it a large mosaic panel showing Soviet cosmonauts and artificial satellites." Not far away, a "shameless Austrian cast-iron bathtub with taps that had turned a noble green colour" and a "phosphorescent stag" on its pedestal made of "polished river pebbles."

"A strange blending of the ages" - our cue.

The collection of essays The Last Territory published in 2003 and the book My Europe written with Andrzej Stasiuk were eye-openers, and not just for me: Ukraine, independent since 1991, the largest of the Soviet successor states, a huge, heterogeneous country full of corruption, kleptocracy and clan crime, rich in historical legacies from three empires, in languages and ethnicities, marked by the Holocaust, mass murders, expulsions, now, it was hoped, entrusted to a generation that was ready to set out into the future, to bring up taboo issues, to tie together torn Central European threads, to update traditions. These essays, which ended up in the luggage and on the desks of foreign policy advisors, ensured that a European region ignored during the Wall era returned to the mental map. 

The Last Territory, My Europe, Twelve Rings - these books were a sensation: met with euphoric reviews, they put not only the author but also his country in the spotlight. Could there have been a better ambassador than Yuri Andrukhovych? He spoke crisp German, was charming and funny. From then on, whenever something happened in Ukraine, he was responsible for explaining it. A tiresome duty - a popular figure, but not a businessman, please. Nevertheless, he never refused. Did he suspect that he, or rather Ukrainian society, might one day need our sympathy and participation?

While the translation of the Twelve Rings was being edited in Berlin in autumn 2004, a dirty election campaign was brewing in Ukraine. With active interference from Moscow, or rather Putin's government, everything was done to prevent the opposition candidate from running, right up to the dioxin attack - his destroyed face, you remember.

"We are aware that we still have two weeks of freedom left," Andrukhovych told me on the phone. How he managed to patiently answer our questions about bandit slang and disguised Antonych quotes in this atmosphere, during his many trips and appearances in the country, I don't know. "Tomorrow," he said in an open letter he had written with colleagues for the foreign press, "tomorrow Ukraine will turn into a black hole in the centre of Europe, where a presidential candidate can be poisoned with impunity, journalists murdered and the entire people kept in oppression, apathy and hopelessness."

He asked Europeans to look - to understand that Ukrainian society was fighting for its freedom. And at the end of November: "Now only the revolution can help."


Ladies and gentlemen,

A writer who wants to intervene effectively needs authority - the media must offer him a space or the stages, preferably the parliaments, so that his words reach the public. As with Stefan Heym, for example, whose speech on Alexanderplatz in November 1989 or as President of the Bundestag in 1994 we remember. Or ten years later, Yuri Andrukhovych, who spoke to the European Parliament in Strasbourg in mid-December 2004 about the "clash between a society striving for democracy and the rule of law and a state power that is trying with all its might to preserve an authoritarian, neo-totalitarian form of government".

Although younger than Stefan Heym, Yuri Andrukhovych was already considered a "patriarch" when I got to know him at the end of the 1990s. Patriarch of the performance group BuBaBu. Under the slogan Burlesk-Balagan-Buffonade, the legendary troupe took to the stage in 1985, at the same time as Gorbachev. In the legendary happenings from the mid-1980s to the early 1990s, the new era seemed to have already dawned or the old one seemed to be going to hell amid huge laughter. Andrukhovych commuted between his home town of "Franyk" (Ivano-Frankivsk) and the metropolis of Moscow, where he studied at the Gorky Literary Institute, and found himself in the middle of "the festival phase of our latest history".

Within a few weeks, in autumn 1990, at the age of thirty, he wrote his first novel and the poetry cycles Letters to Ukraine" and India. Shortly afterwards, in Bavaria, at Villa Waldberta on Lake Starnberg, he wrote Moscoviada, his furious swan song to the Soviet capital. In the visionary finale, Schwarzstrumpf, chairman of the presidium and commander of an army of rats, launches into an obsessive speech in defence of the empire from disintegration and impending chaos. "We are ready to rush to the aid of the Russian-speaking population there", he snarls when someone enquires about Alaska.

When this passage was recited at solidarity readings for Ukraine, it took one's breath away.

He wrote all this thirty years ago? When Putin had just returned from Dresden to Leningrad, which had recently been renamed St Petersburg?

You see: In Yuri Andrukhovych's biography, political and aesthetic opposition are not only intertwined - his life (and survival) is inextricably interwoven with that of his country at all stages, whether he likes it or not.

In this country, there was no inkling of this performative, poetic-carnivalesque interference in the epochal upheavals, of his personal participation in the turbulence of the birth of an independent Ukraine. The Germans were preoccupied with themselves at the time, as Péter Esterházy wrote, Andrukhovych's kindred Hungarian colleague. There the separation from the multinational Soviet empire - here the unification of two German states, the eastern one of which lay in the zone of influence of that disintegrating empire.

Who cared that a new state was emerging there, far behind Poland? Who had ever read a Ukrainian book? Let alone any idea that the language was in the process of reinventing itself, like the entire country, with the help of young psychedelic poets who not only turned their noses up at socialist realism, but also at Ukrainian national literature, which had been guarded and canonised in emigration?

In any case, the aforementioned "festival phase" had entered the next stage with the Orange Revolution in 2004.

It had been a "mega work of art", Andrukhovych said six months later, when it was all over. Its creator, he said in 2005 on receiving the Erich Maria Remarque Prize, "must have been a particularly sensitive reader of Ukrainian literature of the past decade and absorbed all its hope and all its despair". The laughter, the hope, where do they come from? From the fact that, for the first time in its entire history, there is literature without censorship. And the most important thing, quote: "that the long-standing conflict with my country, which has lasted my entire conscious life, is over."


Dear Yuri, dear audience,

As we all know, things turned out differently. At the third attempt to free himself from a corrupt regime, in the winter of 2013/14, the laughter and the carnival were over. Andrukhovych was on the road with a travelling theatre company, his own play in his luggage: a participant and chronicler of what later became known as the "Revolution of Dignity". Witness to violence and death on the Maidan. With the change of power in Kiev, the flight of the hated President Yanukovych out of the country, a civil war orchestrated by Moscow began in the Donbas.

In his many attempts to convey the Ukrainian perspective to people in the West, the belief in European values, for which all passion had long since been lost in Europe, even he ran out of humour. His irony was mixed with bitterness:

<p>"Remember us all," he concluded his speech at Buch Wien in November 2014: "We were alone and not only defended our own égaliberté, but also yours. Forgive me - without meaning to, we have become your guilty conscience."

In February 2022, Russia launched the full-scale invasion. On the evening of the 24th, he wrote back to me - and his response was unrivalled in its laconicism: "Well, now it's started."

At that time, we were again working with Sabine Stöhr on the translation editing.  Radio Night, originally published in 2021. An artist's novel, like its predecessors Twelve Rings and Perversion. A contemporary novel about a failed revolution in an unnamed Eastern European country. The hero, barricade pianist Josip Rotsky, has killed the "penultimate dictator of Europe" and is on the run. Nobody knows where he is - on a prison island? On the zero meridian? His voice floats in the ether. Throughout the night, the ageing rock star talks about his adventurous life, playing a favourite song at the end of each radio hour.

Rotsky - what a name: Trotsky, Brodsky, and another Joseph - Roth from Brody in Galicia. 

Dear Yuri, the "International Interactive Biographical Committee" commissioned by your narrator has overlooked the fact that Rotsky is an anagram of Rostyk. 

And who, dear audience, is Rostyk? None other than the poet hero in Andrukhovtych's aforementioned, ground-breaking debut novel 

Recreaciji, which was first published in German in 2019 under the title Karpatenkarneval.

A stroke of genius from 1990. A phantasmagorical, carnivalesque polyphonic text from the mind of Bakhtin.

"... they took Kiev and Lviv and even Zaporizhia, and all in just two or three hours, someone prepared it very well ...", is the ending. The novel's characters panic. The reader's breath catches. Until the redemptive last page reveals the scene to be a re-enactment - of the 1930s, when the Ukrainian poets were shot on Stalin's orders.

Can a re-enactment be sketched into the future? How much prophecy can a writer be expected to make?

The fact that late life may rhyme with earlier phases of life is a longing of old people. The fact that an author's works may correspond with each other underground arises from an analogous desire for coherence. But the three, no, four epochal breaks that fall within Andrukhovych's lifetime and creative period - how can they be integrated or transcended? I have often wondered how he managed to write prose and literary essays in such times without running out of inventions, without his love of language drying up, his music falling silent, his joy of storytelling dying out. How he managed to interfere tirelessly, journalistically, performatively - not only at home, but everywhere in Europe?

As if the literary power station was fed from self-sufficient sources - writing on the high alpine pasture, if you will.


Ladies and gentlemen,

<p>I am coming to the end.

Sisyphus does not give up, but you should not imagine him as a happy man.

"One step further - and the future would have swallowed us up like a black wave" -

The person saying this, standing there, after the rehearsal, on the beach in Odessa, below the French Boulevard, is my friend Yuri Andrukhovych. Together we hold our breath for a historic minute. Your contribution to our anthology ended with this sentence, dated 23 March 2014: Euromaidan. What's at stake in Ukraine.

Twelve years earlier, we had been in the process of agreeing on the first Suhrkamp volume: The Last Territory.

Twelve years and twelve (!) books later, here we are, in Chemnitz, the black wave has indeed passed over you and you, it does so anew every day.

In view of the desperate clairvoyance with which Andrukhovych has infected many of us, we realise in all illusionlessness how limited the possibilities of a writer are. Today, the word as a weapon belongs to the powerful, who give the order to invade other countries.

Even if the phrase "the muses are silent in war" does not apply to contemporary Ukrainian literature: literature, art and music are not able to dissuade governments from their course. Dictators cannot be made to laugh at themselves.

Andrukhovych's success is different: he has forged friendships, curated festivals, brought academies and discussion forums to Ukraine and, conversely, ensured that the Ukrainian literary scene and the most talented young colleagues are recognised abroad. In the aftermath of the Orange Revolution, the orange wave also reached us musically, literarily and theatrically - and could no longer be ignored. When the great land war that was no longer imaginable in Europe began, in the black wave, they were finally read. 

But above all, he liberated Ukrainian literature, enriched it with new, incomparable forms, intensified the saving irony, the Central European melancholy, sharpened his beloved "nightingale language" with caustic criticism and made it widely audible with his voice, music and spectacle. He made things speak that we in the rest of Europe didn't even know existed and gave us unforgettable excesses of laughter and reading. His novels and essays, translated by Sabine Stöhr in a captivating and highly comical way, are world literature. 

He has brought the imagination to power.

Thank you for that, dear Juri. And thank you all for your attention.

(The spoken word prevails.)