Dr. Helmut Böttiger, an alumnus of the University of Freiburg, has been awarded this year’s Leipzig Book Fair Prize in the category nonfiction/essays for his new book Die Gruppe 47 (“The Group 47”). alumni’aktuell asked Dr. Helmut Böttiger about his years as a student, Group 47 – and his interest in soccer.

alumni’aktuell: What do you remember when you think back on your years as a student?

Dr. Böttiger: The highlight was an “autonomous” seminar we students organized ourselves in summer semester 1978 – on Bernward Vesper’s Die Reise (“The Trip”), a book that was on the tip of everyone’s tongue at the time. Since we planned everything on our own and also gave ourselves our own grades – the wonderful professor Carl Pietzcker always attended and participated actively – we got into great discussions and wrote long term papers that were better than anything I had experienced up to then.

alumni’aktuell: Can you still remember what your favorite dish in the cafeteria was?

Dr. Böttiger: The chef had a liking for “Herz pikant,” “Berner Rolle,” and “Königin-Pastetchen.” These dishes were often on the menu. I think my favorite was something called “Schinkennudeln” (“noodles with ham”).

alumni’aktuell: You work today as a freelance writer and critic – was that already your career goal when you were a student?

Dr. Böttiger: I devoted a lot of time and energy to the literary journal Das Nachtcafé (“The Night Café”) and secretly hoped that it would be my ticket to something else later on. Then I ended up signing up for the state teacher training program, because I suddenly felt pressure to get a secure job after finishing my degree. But from one day to the next they announced they weren’t hiring any more German teachers in Baden-Württemberg. Miraculously, Nachtcafé ended up leading to something after all: All of a sudden, a colleague I didn’t even know had a traineeship at the newspaper Stuttgarter Zeitung; I contacted her, and she started giving me jobs writing for the local section. That was good training.

alumni’aktuell: Many of your publications focuses on German literature from after the Second World War – what captivates you about this literary period?

Dr. Böttiger: We read Alfred Andersch, Peter Weiss, and Grass’ Tin Drum on our own as 17–19-year-olds, because they weren’t on the syllabi for German courses back then. Those were great discoveries. I wanted to get to the bottom of my fascination for those authors from an autobiographical standpoint.

alumni’aktuell: Your latest book, Die Gruppe 47, which received the Leipzig Book Fair Prize, offers a new perspective on this legendary group, particularly through the biographies of its members. What was it that held such different authors together?

Dr. Böttiger: In the fifties and sixties writers and intellectuals in the Federal Republic of Germany had a common enemy: the spokesmen of the restoration in the Adenauer era. After 1968 the lines weren’t so clear-cut anymore.

alumni’aktuell: What made the Group 47 into such a legendary institution?

Dr. Böttiger: For 20 years, the entire literary scene came together on a single weekend each year. There were no other competing events. You had to be at the Group 47 meetings, because it meant you had made it to the center of literary life. When the group wasn’t there anymore, its aura became stronger than ever.

alumni’aktuell: The Group 47 had enormous significance for society. Would a group like this be possible today?

Dr. Böttiger: Today all manner of hip literature festivals and events take place every weekend in mid-sized cities across the country. The same authors are invited to Regensburg on one weekend and to Paderborn on the next. All kinds of experts in communications and the media are in constant competition for new formats and concepts. That excludes the possibility of a single event playing such a dominant role as the Group 47 meetings did right from the beginning.

alumni’aktuell: You have also written several books about soccer – how did this come about?

Dr. Böttiger: On a dreary Saturday afternoon in the eighties on Schwarzwaldstraße, I listened to a soccer broadcast by reporter Günther Koch from Nuremberg for the first time. I was hooked. At once I knew: Soccer can also be art.

alumni’aktuell: Did you ever go to the stadium in Freiburg when you were a student?

Dr. Böttiger: In my last two years in Freiburg I shared an apartment near the Dreisamstadion, and a medical student named Hans convinced me to go with him to the SC Freiburg home games. They were still the second most important team in Freiburg back then. In the Badische Zeitung, Werner Kirchhofer always wrote what seemed like an entire page on the Freiburger FC, and then there would be a tiny piece in the corner on the SC written by a trainee. There were sometimes only a few hundred fans in the stadium, the opponents were clubs like TuS Schloss Neuhaus, Union Solingen, or SC Charlottenburg Berlin. Everyone knew each other personally on the terraces. What the club developed into shortly afterwards is absolutely inconceivable.