Tankred Dorst

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

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

Dorst is - like the Brothers Grimm were - a border crosser who seeks possibilities across genres and media: a novelist and playwright as well as a film author, a writer as well as a contemporary critic. What possibilities media such as theater or film open up for an author, including their interactions, was another topic Dorst addressed in Kassel. And the audience in Kassel was also curious about the connections between works such as Eiszeit, Toller, Merlin, Heinrich or die Schmerzen der Phantasie and the play Ich, Feuerbach, which premiered in Munich's Residenztheater at the end of October 1986, as well as the three films Dorst has made to date as an author and director - KLARAS MUTTER (D 1978), MOSCH (D 1980) and EISENHANS (D 1983) - 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 discussed his previous works in context in order to present them - especially his plays - 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 every year, as he had always perceived the images of the Grimm fairy tales as "images for our lives" and woven some motifs into films and plays.

The scheduled dates were November 20, December 4 and 18, January 15 and 29 and February 12, all 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 for the Gerhart Hauptmann Prize
  • 1962 Scholarship from the Villa Massimo in Rome.
  • 1964 Gerhart Hauptmann Prize of the Freie Volksbühne Berlin.
  • 1983 Grand Literature Prize 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 Literature Prize
  • 2003 Endowed 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)