Ralf Rothmann wins Uwe Johnson Prize 2018

»With their vote for Der Gott jenes Sommers the members of the 2018 Uwe Johnson Prize jury have decided to honour an author in whose oeuvre the uncompromising work of memory plays a central role. In his latest novel Ralf Rothmann, through the eyes of a thirteen-year-old girl, shows us that there is more to war than just death and injury, privation, fear and worry about the members of one’s family. Here he is not only concerned with depicting the visible face of violence, but how war attacks the soul as well as the ›ethical security‹ of the individual. […] the exceptional wealth of detail together with its means of depiction allow us to experience, through the literary act of remembering, the final year of the war and the summer of 1945 in an incredible fashion. And though these experiences are softly and quietly being threatened with extinction due to the disappearance of their eyewitnesses, their retelling once again makes them important for the present.«

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