What is authentic? | Day 4

Rebekka Zeinzinger and Irene Zanol from the literature podcast ‘Auf Buchfühlung’ report daily from the European Literature Days.

What is real? | Day 4

Sunday, 23 November 2025

The Sunday matinee is both the highlight and the finale of the European Literature Days each year. This year, it will be held in honour of the writer Eva Menasse, who will receive the Austrian Book Trade's Honorary Award for Tolerance in Thought and Action.

Following a laudatory speech by political scientist Ivan Krastev, who praised Eva Menasse's significant intellectual contributions to important contemporary debates, including identity politics, Russia's invasion of Ukraine and Israel's war in Gaza, the president of the Austrian Booksellers Association, Benedikt Föger, presented the author with the award. In her acceptance speech, Menasse, who was born in Vienna in 1970 and has lived in Germany for 25 years, recalls two stories that should not be forgotten, ‘like most stories that come at us day after day and at such speed that we no longer have time to distinguish the special ones from the more banal ones.’ The first was the story surrounding the failure to award a literary prize to Palestinian writer Adiana Shibli shortly after Hamas' terrorist attack on Israel, the second the ‘ongoing execution of the public persona’ of journalist Fabian Wolff, after he himself revealed that his own Jewish heritage, which he had assumed, was based on a false statement by his mother, and he was ‘de-published’ and subjected to a de facto publication ban. Eva Menasse recalled these two examples and concluded her acceptance speech with the words: “I believe we all need to carefully examine the stories we encounter every day, which at first glance appear morally unambiguous, until we discover at least one tiny shift in light and shadow, one that does not correspond to our fixed assumptions.”

In conversation with Katja Gasser, she provides insight into her personal and political life, her career and her work as both a writer and a journalist but also shares her views on the current political situation, which she describes as ‘disturbing’. She says that the increasingly aggressive atmosphere has made it more and more difficult to become politically involved or even to express one's opinions. With regard to freedom of expression, she emphasises that it must always be a matter of tolerating the opinions of others and warns against the increasing misuse of the term when what is actually meant is only the freedom of one's own opinion. In this context, she also criticises parts of the intellectual and journalistic elite in Germany and Austria who feel morally superior. But rather than analysing why traditional parties are struggling to reach people in elections, she believes it is more important to focus on what works politically, citing the successes of the Communist Party in Graz and the Left Party in Germany. Eva Menasse's words are clear, nuanced and, for some, undoubtedly uncomfortable. It is precisely this ‘analytical acuity, incorruptibility and moral integrity’, as the jury stated in its reasoning, that has earned her this year's award.

The morning's celebrations were accompanied by music from Carles Muñoz Camarero & Paul Schuberth on cello and accordion.