Reading | Cabaret + Comedy
"Everyone between Passau and Flensburg knows that Max Goldt's work is very funny. But the fact that, if you read it carefully, it is among the most finely crafted that our literature has to offer, that it contains true wonders of elegance and poetry and that his deceptive flights of thought conceal the most precise composition and a dazzlingly bright moral intelligence, still escapes many who are only out for a laugh and punchlines. Max Goldt should be read, praised and honored," praises his colleague Daniel Kehlmann. "Pointing out the ambiguities in the system of things is just one of the honorable tasks to which the German columnist Max Goldt has dedicated himself. Hardly anyone understands how to push the supposed sideshows of life into the eye of the beholder and scan today's everyday life for its contradictions and curiosities like Goldt," writes Regula Fuchs in the Bern-based Der Bund. "Listening to Max Goldt is a double pleasure, because his columns are actually 'lyrics' that require an interpreter, says the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung. There is probably nothing more to add, except perhaps that Max Goldt was born in Göttingen in 1958 and lives in Berlin. He once formed the music duo "Foyer des Arts" with Gerd Pasemann, in which he declaimed his own texts. Goldt has published ten comic books with Katz. He travels the German-speaking world as a performer of his own texts. In 1997 he was awarded the Kassel Literature Prize for grotesque humor, in 1999 the Richard Schönfeld Prize for literary satire, in 2008 the Kleist Prize and the Hugo Ball Prize and in 2016 the Göttinger Elch.
