2026 Literature Scholarship: Launch event on 23 April

Dear Judith Kuckart,
Dear Burkhard Peter,

Dear friends gathered here at the NSG to welcome the literature scholarship holders today on International Book Day 2026. We send a brief but enthusiastic wave to Barcelona and Catalonia and feel warmly united, virtually, with everyone celebrating books and their creators today.

We received compelling and exciting applications for the Third Chemnitz Literature Scholarship, but yours won me over straight away. Round and about. Simply won me over. No ifs or buts. Brilliant. An exclamation of quality that proves its vitality. Brilliant.

Where’s the problem? It was only when the first few gave me stern looks, and the next few giggled, and everyone asked me: ‘Since when has photography been literature?’, and almost all of them – like those dachshunds –
know what I mean – shook their heads, did I realise that a little explanation or justification might well open up a whole new horizon of understanding … might.

So … en avant … without hesitation

The text, or why photography is like storytelling and can – or must – be literature.

Piano. The motto under which I view the current literature scholarship.

Even now:

“Our life stories are the houses from whose windows we humans interpret the world: a vessel of experience for what can be narrated in literature.” – Alexander Kluge (14 February 1932 – 25 March 2026)

We – I’ll come back to that …
or

a bit more down-to-earth, broken down, in the colloquial language of central-eastern North Rhine-Westphalia. Condensed. After all, this phrasing suggests that a decisive movement is beginning, is being set in motion:
“Where on earth have you been?”

That, too, will need to be clarified.

But for now: the text, or why photography is like storytelling and can – or must – be literature.

The initial coordinate system from which we, human beings, set out on our journey … and retrace that journey retroactively, attributing meaning to it, attaching it to it – which is our narrative, even if
we conceal or conjure away this starting point. It is our life, from which we remember and draw conclusions.

Remembering is storytelling. In the present. Remembering is a movement in the present, a pseudo-past. Janus-faced. Remembering necessitates forgetting, just as forgetting is interwoven with remembering.

Remembering thrives on the gap; storytelling on omission.

Dancing is like storytelling. So say some.
Storytelling is like photography. So say others.
Is dancing like taking photographs?

I say yes!

It happens in the present, striving from a point of rest into a movement towards a point of rest. The endpoint. The resolution. Dialectically. Nothing is as it was before, yet the ‘before’ is contained within it
. Precisely ‘sublated’ in the sense of being preserved yet no longer valid, and furthermore ennobled, exalted: raised up. Georg Friedrich Wilhelm Hegel recognised this brilliantly and put the observation into words, telling the story in German.

From seeing, to narrating, to materialising. That which is becoming seen, that which is becoming narrated, seeks to be materialised. We wish to materialise it. Into that which is seen. Into that which is narrated.

Materialisation.

Seeing becomes, seeks to become, becomes photography; telling becomes, seeks to become, becomes writing.
Writing. The text.

Pausing within the movement. Still. Firm. A fixed point.
A souvenir. A stopping point. A (provisional) endpoint.
The text. The image. The photograph. The text.
The punchline can become the catalyst for new stories from the narrator or the listener.

Lifted out of time. Timeless.
Beyond the value of timelessness.

Yet in its creation, all the movements, cultures, people and stories of the past have been incorporated into it, woven in as in Penelope’s shirt or melted down as in a blast furnace.

And the frozen stories generate, give rise to, the new stories, the new images, the new movements.

And so we can say that everything is text. It is text because everything – according to a different conception – has as many immaterial layers as a leaf-shaped brittle.

Everything dies and is reabsorbed into that which follows from it.
‘Yesterday refuses to stop speaking in today.’ – Judith Kuckart, Café der Unsichtbaren, quote from the blurb of the paperback

Who is telling the story?
The hermit has descended into the valley and sings in the choir.

It dances within us, it creates images, it tells stories within us.
We tell stories, let stories be told, and listen.

“The intertext is not necessarily a field of influences, but rather a music of figures, metaphors and word-thoughts; it is the signifier as a siren.”

Dancing, storytelling and writing are expressive sisters in rhythmic motion.

The dancer’s posture gives her stability, including inner stability. This discipline also supports narrative writing. Something like this: the elegant Judith Kuckart herself, in a dialogue, raised her voice … I was already in
a sleeping position – so completely focused, without distractions, I love to listen to structures of thought – the dancer’s poise and posture flared up once more – ‘Commit to memory! ’ – and stayed with me through the night. The
the next morning, I didn’t try to find out which programme I’d heard the statement on. To me, it felt like a reinforcement of what I’d already seen before: ‘Haltung absolut’ beckoned to me from her website,
is reflected in its structure.

Posture is a conditio sine qua non for Judith Kuckart. Elsewhere, I found a comment confirming the necessary omnipresence of posture for the ‘Femme-orchestre’, the ‘symphony orchestra woman’,
namely in a review of the writing workshop with Polizei-Poeten e. V. in Karlsruhe Durlach:

‘… at the same time, your stomach growls because, despite the fresh corpse within reach, a fresh breakfast roll beckons. The truth is that this is how – perhaps – you find the one sentence that’s right. Oh sh*t,
bloody hell, death. And because a sentence like that has no stance without a verb, you start looking for the verb. That’s how it begins with writing. With the police officers. With the poets.” – #judithkuckart – 14 November 2025 – Instagram

We stop and peer through the windows into the biographical houses: political-sociocultural context_coarse-grained

Judith Kuckart was born on 17 June in Schwelm, on the far south-western edge of Westphalia, where Catholicism and pseudo-Catholicism were particularly prevalent in the post-World War Two era, just as they were with
Heinrich Böll, right down to her own family…. The Degenhardt cousins: the singer-songwriter behind ‘Don’t Play with the Dirty Kids’, and the other, the cardinal, from whom the respectable people of Paderborn will now, in the year 2026, once again revoke his honorary citizenship and remove his presence from the cityscape due to his involvement in sexual violence.

Let’s get out of here, like Ina Siepmann, the pharmacist’s daughter who wanted to be an actress, whom the younger Judith Kuckart looked after; she, who was part of the 2 June Movement and, following the Lorenz kidnapping, faded into the turmoil of the German Autumn, yet remains present in Judith Kuckart’s work.

And Judith danced on the pole, on the bar against the wall in the smoke-filled pub. In the 1960s in Schwelm. Her expression. Her storytelling with poise.

Before she had even started school – before she could read or write – her grandmother taught her *Das blaue Klavier* by Else Lasker-Schüler. She learnt it by heart by repeating it aloud. To recite under the Christmas tree.

Would you like to … Shall I … Let’s let people discover …

[Judith Kuckart recited *Das blaue Klavier* herself.]:

I have a blue piano at home
And yet I know not a single note.
It stands in the darkness by the cellar door,
Ever since the world grew brutal.
Four starry hands played it –
The moon woman sang in the boat.
– Now the rats dance to the clatter.
The piano keyboard is shattered.
I weep for the blue dead woman.
Oh dear angels, open up for me
– I ate of the bitter bread –
The gates of heaven are already open to me whilst I am still alive,
Even in defiance of the prohibition.

Else Lasker-Schüler – First published in the NZZ, 7 February 1937

And the piano at the Florian guesthouse in the library is blue.

The Prince of Thebes embodies a dancing, narrative movement. Forty years after the death of Else Lasker-Schüler, you published your Master’s thesis *In the Mirror of the Streams I Can No Longer Find My Image. A Tightrope Walk of a
Different Aesthetic of the Poet Else Lasker-Schüler. A further 40 years later, you submitted your application to C, Judith Kuckart.

Else Lasker-Schüler was born in 1869 in Elberfeld, which merged with the town of Barmen and neighbouring areas in 1929 to form Barmen-Elberfeld, and adopted the name Wuppertal in 1930. The German Manchester … Friedrich Engels, the suspension railway, Tuffi, the female elephant who rides the suspension railway, falls out and lends her name to a yoghurt, the suspension railway accident as late as 1999, Pina Bausch, Johannes Rau … Does that matter when you’re born there in 1961 … the year the Berlin Wall was built?

Burkhard Peter remains publicly silent on the matter.

Schwelm and Wuppertal are geographical neighbours, yet a boundary runs between the two towns, which is also reflected in the current administrative and political divisions:
Schwelm belongs to Westphalia; Wuppertal, through its historical affiliation with the Duchy of Berg, belongs to the Rhineland.

But away from that … away from that … from West Germany to Berlin

West Berlin & Berlin, capital of the GDR; following the ‘German Autumn’, a housing crisis, squatted buildings, the first AIDS patients and the first AIDS deaths; in the snap elections on 10 May 1981 for the
House of Representatives, the CDU won 48.00 per cent of the vote; Richard von Weizsäcker was elected Governing Mayor of Berlin on 11 June 1982. The SPD era in Berlin came to an end, for the time being.

In 1984, Judith Kuckart founded the Skoronel Dance Theatre, named by her after Vera Skoronel, the brilliant dancer and dance teacher, which she ran with the collaboration of Jörg Aufenanger until 1998
. *Kassandra*, based on Christa Wolf, at the Ballhaus Naunynstr., *Ophélia peut-être* as the second production in Paris … the dynamic Paris–Berlin axis. It was during this period that the mutually enriching collaboration between Burkhard Peter and Judith Kuckart began – although Burkhard Peter did not move to Berlin until after completing his studies – a collaboration that intensified once more with the revival of Skoronel alongside its founders and dancers after more than 20 years.

Through practice, they discover that dancing is like storytelling, like photography. The practice of these activities, which are comparable in their characteristics, is vividly documented in Judith Kuckart’s life story … I need only mention the pleated skirt.

For Burkhard Peter, another biographical reference might also be significant, though I cannot substantiate it; it has simply emerged from the perspective of my own life story:

Burkhard Peter studied at Dortmund University of Applied Sciences from 1987 to 1991. The photography degree programme at that university was founded and developed by Pan Walther, the photographer; this Dresden-born figure, shaped by expressive dance, set off for Münster in the early 1950s; the agnostic artist played a significant role in shaping public, social, festive and intellectual life in the Catholic Baroque city of Münster; he had adopted as his motto:

‘Photography is like dancing.’

I would not rule out the possibility that he established the course in this spirit; the two probably did not meet in person again in Dortmund.

It all comes down to attitude: following the movement, sensing the end of the movement, anticipating it, and, at the decisive moment – *au moment décisif*, as Henri Cartier-Bresson put it – pressing the shutter in analogue photography.

In her application documents, Judith Kuckart traces a link to the thinking and exemplary learning of Alexander Kluge. Her writing sample for C ends:

As I make my way to the train at Kiel station the following morning, the forecourt doesn’t smell of chips. The food van is closed.
The sky above me – at a loss.

A hidden message to the jury: The sky above me – at a loss, in analogy to the film title *The Artists in the Circus Dome: At a Loss* by Alexander Kluge, which premiered on 30 August 1968 at the Venice International Film Festival and won the Golden Lion.

That led me to explore the connection;

Voilà:
I met Alexander Kluge in Berlin in the early 1980s. In one of the squatted houses – near Anhalter Bahnhof – I spent a week with Alexander Kluge, watching him screen his films in a darkened room that had once been a florist’s, and then discussing them with us up on the flat roof. He explained that personal life stories record not only sad tales but also History itself; that the framework by which we ultimately orient ourselves is the power of emotions, rather than reason or a scale of shaky values. He assured us that we know far more than we realise, that corpses are walled up in the very foundations of our state, and that the survivors mostly remain silent about it, but the dead speak out. On that illegal rooftop, a little closer to the sky, we spoke about what one should trust, how one should protect oneself and what one must fear, and that the possessions which each of us indisputably possesses are our lifetime and our libido. I remember the mood that pervaded those conversations. It was the political and personal disposition of Mr Kluge – who was already an elderly gentleman to us at the time, with his heavy-lidded eyes – as he spoke to us gently yet vehemently. He w a s the summer night.

‘Our life stories are the houses from whose windows we humans interpret the world: a vessel of experience for what can be narrated in literature.’ – Alexander Kluge, broken down in the librarian’s inner monologue: the fringe.

He, a fringe in the course of events; the course of events, a fringe on him.

*The World Between the News*, Judith Kuckart’s latest novel, can (also) be seen as an illustration, an unfolding, a testing of this assumption, this model of the lived world:
testing and confirmation.

“Whoever triumphs slips away” – NSG 2026, perhaps rather at the end after all.

For the presentation of the photography, I have developed and discarded formats such as a postcard, a poster exhibition, etc.; since Burkhard Peter presents his photographs himself, I shall merely lay the groundwork,
verbally, if photography is indeed literature … and delegate the task of further interweaving these ideas to all of you.

Whilst developing the experimental framework, I came across a commissioned photograph which, despite its innocuous nature, nevertheless embodies multifaceted literary narratives of both ‘Big History’ and individual lives:
a photograph of Zoo Station for an illustrated collection of stories about Berlin as an ‘island’ in the past, published in 2005.

A black-and-white photograph: Zoo Station, with an open space in front of it, viewed from the direction of the Gedächtniskirche; the postmodern BVG bus shelters from the 1980s, drawing the viewer into the Hardenbergstraße underpass or inviting them to look up towards the station concourse; the photograph itself looks like a souvenir snap for tourists.

Let’s sketch out some possible stories in brief:
the transparent glass panes of the station concourse, which have replaced the yellowish, murky, opaque ones; Christiane F. and the children of Bahnhof Zoo; the ladies serving coffee on the terraces by the zoo, occasionally sipping Mampe brandy; Ullrich, the supermarket in the bowels of the station, the defunct Heinrich Heine bookshop and … the D 242, Warsaw – Paris Nord, with through carriages from Moscow and through carriages to Ostend
3.40 pm, daily.

This is not the most telling photograph for defining the personal style of the photographer Burkhard Peter; my aim here was to highlight the inherent literary potential of photography
in a variation on the countless unnamed, hidden examples.

Given the focus settings, the reduction of the main subject’s surroundings, the clarity, and at times something akin to clinical purity in the images, I see Burkhard Peter as part of the New Objectivity tradition.

As regards the depiction of people, he continues the approach of August Sander, and with regard to objects, he follows in the tradition of Albert Renger-Patzsch – not Bernd and
Hilla Becher in terms of emphasising the serial nature of the work, but rather the singularity of what is depicted.

If we look at his photograph *Zimmermann Auf der Waltz*, he could well be standing on the Hessian hills alongside Sander’s trio of men in their Sunday best …In the case of Wolfgang Schäuble as Chancellor of the Exchequer and representatives of various professional groups, the defining features of their professions are brought to the fore through the setting of the background, a gesture or an associated object, whilst respecting the individual.

A report on integration at the Rostock-Evershagen School Centre, in its capture of the living moment and the freezing of movement, is in no way inferior to the artistic expression of a Robert Doisneau.

Renger Patzsch would have been delighted by the still lifes of medical implants.

There is yet another area in which Burkhard Peter particularly excels, which he himself categorises as ‘urban landscape photography ’. He showcases selected examples on his Instagram account.

I see Eugène Atget as the forefather of this branch of photography; having come to Paris from the Gironde, he captured the urban landscape in all its changes, wounds and scars – a figure we would never have discovered had it not been for Berenice Abbott.

This genre flourished amidst the upheavals and destruction of the 20th century: ruins, lost places.

Burkhard Peter is interested in neither the one nor the other, but rather the intermediate stage between intactness and decay, in which people seek to save the damaged buildings by patching them up, as if with plasters
and provisionally bound together. The people who carried out this work are not visible.
A collection of these traumatised houses and resilient urban landscapes is entitled *Somewhere in Germany*. Exhibited in 2025 at the Kulturhaus Osterfeld in Pforzheim under the title *Somewhere in Germany*.

The series is set against the backdrop of fraying cities: what is a city, a city outskirts, a periphery, the countryside? Internationally and nationally, it also mirrors the burning suburbs … the upheavals of torn societies in their loss of communication and endless hatred.

Judith Kuckart and Burkhard Peter are, each in their own right, a symphony orchestra of creative energies; together, they form a great transcultural, translocal ‘A’ orchestra.

This is something they have demonstrated interactively for decades through various creative forms with diverse audiences.

Everything is text, text that is constantly being recycled.

Here, only a tiny glimpse has been offered from the perspective of:
Dancing
How
Storytelling
How
Photographing.

Judith Kuckart & Burghart Peter have been creating, telling stories and taking photographs together since 2022 as part of the as-yet-unfinished project ‘Transit’ (working title) at the Berlin Academy of Arts.

In 2023, they jointly organised the ‘Landgang’ event in the Oldenburg region, including the local travel literature fellowship and a subsequent presentation in the region.

Two concluding voices from the outside.

“The situations captured by the photographer Burghart Peter become stage sets for the imagination of everyday life.” – So says Silke, the curator of the Pforzheim exhibition.

“Not many authors, according to the organisers, manage to both create and conclude an entire poetic cosmos in just a few sentences. Yet this is precisely what characterises the prose of the dancer, choreographer, director and storyteller Judith Kuckart, who knows how to captivate the reader with ever-changing poetic turns of phrase and fascinating, physical and sensual imagery. Hints and omissions keep the texts in a state of suspense in a quite unique way, thereby offering the reader a wealth of opportunities for contemplation, reflection and even daydreaming.”

Everyone at C, and we here in particular, look forward to this narrative exchange with you.

I would like to thank you all very much for your attention.


(The spoken word takes precedence.)