Tankred Dorst

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Image: Tankred Dorst (Wikimedia Commons; CC BY-SA 4.0)
Tankred Dorst (2006)

Tankred Dorst has been appointed as Brothers Grimm Poetics Professor at the Gesamthochschule Kassel (GhK) for the 1986/87 winter semester. His lectures began on Thursday, November 20.

Dorst is - like the Brothers Grimm - a border crosser who seeks possibilities across genres and media: both novelist and playwright as well as film author, both writer and critic of the times. The possibilities that media such as theater and film open up for an author, including their interactions, were another topic Dorst addressed in Kassel. And one was also curious in Kassel about the connections between works such as Eiszeit, Toller, Merlin, Heinrich or the pains of the imagination up to the play Ich, Feuerbach, which premiered at the Munich Residenztheater at the end of October 1986, up to also the three films Dorst has made up to then as an author and director - KLARAS MUTTER (D 1978), MOSCH (D 1980) and EISENHANS (D 1983) - and which he himself sees as an attempt at a German mythology.

Image: text+criticism
Tankred Dorst

GPP event series with Tankred Dorst

In a total of six public (pre-)readings at the university, Dorst addressed his previous works in context in order to present them - especially his plays - also in the context of their contemporary history, such as Toller, which premiered in 1968, or Merlin or das wüste Land, which was written between 1978/80. Tankred Dorst felt doubly connected to the intentions of the Brothers Grimm Professorship at the GhK, to which renowned contemporary authors are appointed on a rotating basis each year. He had always perceived the images of the Grimm fairy tales as "images for our lives" and interwove some motifs into films and plays.

The scheduled dates were November 20, December 4 and 18, January 15 and 29, and February 12, each at 8 p.m. in the lecture hall of the GhK, Menzelstraße 13 (former art academy).

GPP Event Series

Prizes and awards (selection):

  • 1960 Scholarship of the Gerhart-Hauptmann-Prize
  • 1962 Scholarship of the Villa Massimo in Rome.
  • 1964 Gerhart Hauptmann Prize of the Freie Volksbühne Berlin.
  • 1983 Grand Prize for Literature of the Bavarian Academy of Fine Arts.
  • 1984 Prix L'age d'or of the Royal Film Institute of Belgium.
  • 1987 Carl Zuckmayer Medal / Carl Schaeffer Playwright's Award
  • 1990 Georg Büchner Prize 
  • 1997 E.T.A. Hoffmann Prize of the City of Bamberg (together with Ursula Ehler)
  • 1998 Friedrich Baur Prize (with Ursula Ehler)
  • 1998 Max Frisch Prize for Literature
  • 2003 Foundation Guest Lectureship in Poetics at the University of Frankfurt am Main
  • 2009 Honorary doctorate from the University of Bamberg
  • 2009 Prix européen de littérature, Strasbourg
  • 2010 Schiller Memorial Prize
  • 2012 Honorary Prize of the German Theater Award Der Faust
  • 2014 Brücke Berlin Initiative Prize (with Manfred Beilharz)