Die Wechselkröte gewinnt
Ana Marwan hat am Sonntag den Bachmann-Preis 2022 mit ihrem Text „Die Wechselkröte“ gewonnen.
Die Siegerin der 46. Tage der deutschsprachigen Literatur in Klagenfurt schreibt sowohl auf Deutsch als auch auf Slowenisch. Sie wurde 1980 im slowenischen Murska Sobota geboren, studierte in Ljubljana und kam mit 25 Jahren nach Österreich. „Der Liebe wegen“, sagt sie.
Marwan lebt im niederösterreichischen Wolfsthal, einer Gemeinde mit knapp 1200 Einwohnern an der slowakischen Grenze. Dort hat sie – wie Laudator Klaus Kastberger erzählte – „genau an dem Tag, als die gesamte Teilnehmerliste hier bekanntgegeben wurde, vor der Haustür eine Wechselkröte gefunden“.
Sie hat immer schon gerne geschrieben, schon als Kind, erzählte sie im ORF Kulturmontag. Deutsch wird zwar „nie meine Sprache sein“, sagt sie, aber sie ist „sehr gut mit dieser Sprache befreundet“.
Auch im ersten Roman der stillen Gewinnerin des heurigen Hauptpreises des Bachmann-Wettbewerbs („Der Kreis des Weberknechts“) spielte eine zurückgezogen lebende Person eine Hauptrolle, ebenso wie in der Siegererzählung „Die Wechselkröte“, in der eine vereinsamte schwangere Frau auf dem Lande beschrieben wird.
Eigentlich widersprach ihre Teilnahme „meinem Glauben, dass Schriftsteller Eremiten sind, die irgendwo in einem dunklen Zimmer schreiben, weil sie sich nicht zeigen wollen“, meinte Marwan. In Klagenfurt als Person aufzutreten und sich porträtieren zu lassen, war für sie eine Herausforderung. „Was ich am Schreiben so mag, ist, dass man so lange daran arbeiten kann, bis man zufrieden ist. Wenn man sich in Echtzeit präsentieren muss, hat man nur einen Versuch.“
Gewonnen hat und prämiert wurde eine Literatur, resümierte der ORF, „die sich an die Fragestellungen des Alleinseins, der Position als Frau in einer auf Selbstbilder fixierten Welt sorgsam und fragil herantastete. Und die auf schmückendes Beiwerk und großes Namedropping wie in anderen Texten bei diesem Wettbewerb getrost verzichten konnte“.
„Ein klassischer Bachmanntext mit schön schwebenden Sätzen, der Tiermotive, Landschaftsbeschreibungen mit einer weiblichen Identitätssuche kombiniert“, meinte die TAZ.
Marwan war von vielen für ihren stillen Text favorisiert worden, hatte aber bekannte Namen unter ihren Konkurrenten, etwa Elias Hirschl (er gewann, so wie vor ihm zB die im gleichen Jahr wie Marwan [1980] geborene Vorarlbergerin Nadine Kegele [2014] den Publikumspreis und das Klagenfurter Stadtschreiber-Stipendium) und die bekannte Autorin Barbara Zeman (sie ging mit ihrem Venedig-Text allerdings leer aus). Auch den Texten von Juan S. Guse und Alexandru Bulucz waren im Vorfeld Chancen auf den Preis eingeräumt worden. Gewonnen hat ein „Text, der Einsamkeit und den Zwang zur stilisierten Selbstdarstellung knapp und schonungslos vorführt“ (ORF).
Die Prämierten:
- Bachmannpreis: Ana Marwan (vorgeschlagen von Klaus Kastberger)
- Publikumspreis: Elias Hirschl (vorgeschlagen von Klaus Kastberger)
- Deutschlandfunkpreis: Alexandru Bulucz (vorgeschlagen von Insa Wilke)
- KELAG-Preis: Juan S. Guse (vorgeschlagen von Mara Delius)
- 3sat-Preis: Leon Engler (vorgeschlagen von Philipp Tingler)
Lesung der Siegerin (Video ▶️ ORF)
Alle Wettbewerbstexte:
https://bachmannpreis.orf.at/tags/texte2022/
“Fab One”
At the 2022 Glastonbury Festival Paul McCartney, who just has turned 80 last week, played an amazing gig in front of the biggest crowd of this year’s festival on Saturday evening.
Macca with his Hofner bass and Beatles collar jacket performing at Glastonbury, Somerset, 25 June 2022
When it comes to knowing exactly what an audience wants and delivering it with perfection, Macca surely knows how to do that. And even among rock’s veterans, nobody has a more universally loved cross-generational back catalogue than the “Fab One”, with the Beatles, Wings and solo. Famously a people pleaser, he was certainly committed to pleasing the festival faithful.
McCartney and his tightly drilled combo just kept knocking them out, one absolutely storming classic after another, sending waves of excitement up the packed hillside and turning the bigger crowd of the 2022 Glastonbury festival into the world’s biggest choir.
“I mean,” Neil McCormick writes in “The Telegraph, “you haven’t heard 200,000 voices doing the Nanana’s on Hey Jude“.
“The world hasn’t exactly been a vision of love and peace lately, but here was the Fab One to put things right.” For a couple of hours in a Somerset field, rising on harmonies and wreathed in smiles, you could almost believe that “it’s getting better all the time”.
▶️digitaleditions.telegraph.co.uk/data/987/reader/reader.html
Nascent Life vs. Personal Liberty?
The US Supreme Court has overturned 50 years of abortion law in a new ruling. According to its decision in the case “Dobbs versus Jackson Women’s Health Organisation“, which was published on Friday – just one day after an other controversial ruling on bearing firearms was issued – the Supreme Court ruled that US states can restrict or ban abortions, as the choice to terminate pregnancy is not solely a “personal decision” which would be protected by Section 1 of the 14th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. The Fourteenth Amendment states that it is unconstitutional to deprive any person of “life” and of personal “liberty (…) without due process of law”.
“No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.” (U.S. Constitution, Fourteenth Amendment, Section 1: Rights Guaranteed)
The new case involves a Mississippi state law that prohibits abortions after the 15th week of pregnancy except in medical emergencies. A clinic that performs abortions filed a lawsuit against the law – and lost.
The Supreme Court used this decision to reopen two other earlier cases: “Roe versus Wade” and “Casey versus Planned Parenthood”. In 1973 and 1992, the court had ruled in two landmark decisions that women in the US generally had the right to terminate their pregnancies as long as the fetus was not yet viable outside the womb. “We hold that Roe and Casey must be overruled,” Justice Samuel Alito writes in his reasoning for the ruling which has found a 6:3 majority within the court. This puts abortion law in the USA back at the same level as it was 50 years ago.
In the German newspaper „Die Zeit“ it is explained that this ruling does not mean that abortions are now banned across the United States. “The Alito decision does not make abortions illegal,” says Kirk Junker, professor at the University of Cologne and an expert on US law. But it does give states the power to make abortions illegal through legislation. Thus, the Supreme Court’s reasoning says: “It is time (…) to return the question of abortion to the representatives elected by the people.” The court thus sees the constitutional right to decide on the continuation of a pregnancy with the state as legislator – and not with the person concerned himself.
British newspaper “The Times” explains why abortion has remained a source of political controversy in America for 50 years, whereas this is not the case in Britain or in Austria. The reason lies in the way in which the law was established. Whereas in Europe, it usually was parliament that enshrined a woman’s right to choose, in America it was the Supreme Court that led the way. In Roe v Wade, it ruled that state laws outlawing abortion in all circumstances were unconstitutional, citing the 14th amendment which protects “personal liberty”. Instead, the court set out its own criteria for when a termination would be legal, effectively creating federal law. That prompted accusations at the time, and which have reverberated ever since, of judicial overreach, ensuring abortion has remained an area of political controversy.
Now in the new decision, the nine Supreme Court justices voted by six to three to quash the 1973 precedent that has enshrined the legal right to abortion in the US for five decades, handing power back to individual states. More than half the 50 US states are set to enact near-total bans on abortion.
Roe v Wade had faced several legal challenges since 1973, most notably in the 1992 case Planned Parenthood v Casey, when the Supreme Court reaffirmed the precedent in a contentious 5-4 vote. Yesterday’s ruling marks the culmination of a decades-long campaign by “pro-life” groups.
The formal challenge to Roe v Wade itself was brought by Mississippi, which sought to reimpose a state law banning abortions after 15 weeks that had been struck down by lower courts. Appealing to the Supreme Court last year, Mississippi argued that the simplest solution would be to overturn the precedent set almost 50 years ago by Roe v Wade altogether.
Lynn Fitch, Mississippi’s Republican attorney-general, said that Roe v Wade and the 1992 Casey ruling were “unprincipled decisions that have damaged the democratic process, poisoned our national discourse [and] plagued the law”.
Triumphant conservatives celebrated the ruling, among them the former vice-president Mike Pence, who issued a statement declaring: “Today, life won.” He praised the justices for “having the courage of their convictions”, saying they had “righted a historic wrong”.
“The Times” expects the next battle to centre on patients who leave their state to have a legal termination, and on banning them from receiving abortion pills by post. Legislators in Missouri proposed laws this year that would allow action against anyone helping a patient cross state lines. It was blocked, but similar proposals are expected to follow. They raise the prospect of legal battles between states that will deepen the country’s political divide.
This divide will also be fuelled further by an other controversial ruling of the Supreme Court issued just one day earlier: in the Court’s decision in NYSRPA v. Bruen the judges affirmed that the right to bear arms according to the 2nd Amendment does not stop at a person’s front door, whereas New York’s proper-cause requirement violates the Fourteenth Amendment in that it prevents citizens with “ordinary self-defense needs” from exercising their right to keep and bear arms. This decision has also found a 6:3 majority within the Supreme Court.
U.S. Supreme Court decision of 24 June 2022 ▶️ DOBBS, STATE HEALTH OFFICER OF THE MISSISSIPPI DEPARTMENT OF HEALTH, ET AL. v. JACKSON WOMEN’S HEALTH ORGANIZATION ET AL.
U.S. Supreme Court decision of 23 June 2022 ▶️ NEW YORK STATE RIFLE & PISTOL ASSOCIATION, INC., ET AL. v. BRUEN, SUPERINTENDENT OF NEW YORK STATE POLICE, ET AL.
Created By God
“If there is one Creator God, then there is one created reality. If everything was made by the same Person, then everything is capable of cohering and we expect it to have order. If everything was made by an intelligent Being, then we have a basis for presuming that reality will be rational, that gravity will work in Austria as well as in Australia. Believing that Being to be Beauty itself, we are not surprised that creation is beautiful.”
Michael Lloyd, Café Theology. Exploring Love, the Universe and Everything (third edition, 2018), p. 38
Wien, Wien, nur du allein…
2021 war die Lebensqualität europäischer Metropolen wegen der Corona-Krise deutlich zurückgefallen. Im aktuellen “Global Liveabilty Index” der lebenswertesten Städte der Welt des britischen “Economist“ ist Wien aber nun wieder die „Nummer 1“ und schneidet bei der Bewertung von Gesundheitssystem, Bildung, Kultur und Infrastruktur sowie sozialer Sicherheit, politischer Stabilität und Kriminalitätsrate am besten ab. Ja eh.
Nach der Aufhebung von Corona-Beschränkungen ist Wien wieder die lebenswerteste Stadt der Welt. Im diesjährigen Index der britischen “Economist“-Gruppe, der am Donnerstag veröffentlicht wurde, gewann Österreichs Hauptstadt erstmals seit Pandemiebeginn den Spitzenplatz zurück. Im Vorjahr rangierte Wien lediglich auf dem zwölften Platz, während das weitgehend normale Leben im abgeschotteten Neuseeland Auckland den ersten Platz beschert hatte. Diesmal landen hinter Wien Kopenhagen, Zürich, Calgary, Vancouver und Genf. Danach folgen Frankfurt, Toronto und Amsterdam, sowie Osaka und Melbourne. Bewertet wurden 140 Metropolen weltweit.
Voriges Jahr war die Lebensqualität europäischer Metropolen wegen der Corona-Krise deutlich zurückgefallen. Mit der Aufhebung der Corona-Maßnahmen rutschten Metropolen in Neuseeland, Australien und China 2022 wieder ab und Wien, das erstmals 2018 die lebenswerteste Stadt der Welt war, kletterte im “Liveability Ranking” wieder auf Platz 1. Ein erfreuliches Ergebnis, das über Österreichs Zurückfallen auf Platz 20 im jüngsten Democracy Index des “Economist“ (publiziert vom “Economist Intelligence Unit” 2022 für das Jahr 2021) vielleicht ein bisschen hinwegtröstet. Ja eh…
Für die Studie des britischen Wirtschaftsmagazins werden jährlich insgesamt 140 Städte verglichen. Als erste europäische Metropole konnte Wien 2018 den Spitzenplatz der “Economist Intelligence Unit Global Survey” belegen. Bewertet werden Gesundheitssystem, Bildung, Kultur und Infrastruktur. Ebenso soziale Sicherheit, politische Stabilität oder die Kriminalitätsrate.
Infolge des russischen Angriffs auf die Ukraine büßten Moskau und St. Petersburg laut den Analysten stark an Stabilität und damit an Lebensqualität ein. Die ukrainische Hauptstadt Kiew wurde dieses Jahr aus der Wertung genommen. (APA)
Kommentar: Wien ist eh. ▶️ Hans Rauscher
First Signing Has Arrived
West Ham United are delighted to announce the signing of Morocco international defender Nayef Aguerd.
The 26-year-old joins the Hammers from French Ligue 1 club Rennes on a five-year contract and adds further quality and depth to David Moyes’ squad. He will wear the No27 shirt.
Aguerd has enjoyed two impressive seasons with Rennes, enhancing the reputation he established at FUS Rabat, Dijon and with the Moroccan national team.
Now, the left-sided player will continue his career in the English Premier League, where his combination of talents will see him provide strong competition for Craig Dawson, Issa Diop, Angelo Ogbonna and Kurt Zouma.
Aguerd has been scouted extensively by Hammers boss David Moyes and head of recruitment Rob Newman.
Aguerd’s talent is obvious for anyone that has seen him play or takes a look at his YouTube highlights reel.
His stats are seriously impressive too. According to Opta data, Aguerd has made the most forward passes of any outfield player in the top five European leagues since the start of the 2020-21 season!
Manager David Moyes was happy to welcome Aguerd to the Irons, commenting: “I am delighted to welcome Nayef to West Ham United. We have tracked his progress for some time and I’m very pleased that we have been able to complete the signing. He’s a great addition that will add to our defensive options.
“I have been really impressed with Nayef’s character and attitude during our discussions. He has a great desire to improve and be successful, and I am sure he will fit in very well to the environment we have at Rush Green.”
French football Website GFFN speaks highly of West Ham’s first signing of the new season: “In terms of attributes, Aguerd has fantastic pace, solid distribution, and a calmness on the ball, as has been repeatedly seen at Rennes, with him happy to bring the ball out of defence,” GFFN states.
“Tall and strong, he’s dominant in the air, allowing him to be a threat from balls into the box, where all seven of his goals for Rennes over the last two seasons have come from. For a defender, he is surprisingly disciplined, only picking up that solitary red card and 10 yellow cards in two seasons.”
So we’ve got a promising first signing, let’s hope Nayef does adjust quickly to English football and fit into the team. That he has a close friend in midfield player Pablo Fornals will of course help him settle in at West Ham.
Now let’s hope for more arrivals – especially the Hammers‘ attack needs to be strengthened!
How to Find Treasures in the Bible
“I first encountered Jesus through reading the Bible,” Nicky Gumbel writes in today’s Bible in One Year. “Ever since, I have read it practically every day of my life. Yet, I am constantly seeing and discovering new things.”
Immanuel Kant stated, “The Bible is an inexhaustible source of all truth. The existence of the Bible is the greatest blessing to mankind.”
St Gregory the Great said that “Scripture grows with its readers”. As Cardinal Raniero Cantalamessa explains, “It reveals new meanings according to the questions people have in their hearts as they read it.”
The Bible is full of inexhaustible treasure for you to read and digest, and through which you can encounter God.
Bible in One Year Day 170: How to Find Treasures in the Bible (Psalm 75:1-10, Acts 13:13-41, 1 Kings 6:1-7:22)
West Ham Fixtures 2022/23
West Ham will start the campaign on 7 August with a home fixture against Premier League champions Manchester City, then face a tough away test against newly promoted side Nottingham Forest, and in their second home game will welcome their bogey team Brighton which the Hammers still have to beat in the Premier League. This doesn’t look like an easy start into the new season for me!
Of course, all the Premier League fixtures, which have come out on Thursday morning, are subject to change as due to TV broadcasting and European games matches will be shifted.
The UK broadcast selections for the early match rounds are due to be completed by 5 July, with October’s broadcast selections to follow by 29 July; November’s by 13 September; December’s and January’s by 11 October; February’s by 6 December; March’s by 25 January; April’s by 21 February; Match Round 35’s by 23 March; Match Round 36’s by 30 March; Match Round 37’s by 7 April; and the final Match Round’s after each club has played 37 games.
EXTRA TIME 
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