DistantNews
Support us
🇵🇾 Paraguay /Culture & Society

Nobel Prize Winner László Krasznahorkai Receives Germany’s Grand Cross of Merit

From ABC Color · () Spanish

Translated from Spanish and summarized by DistantNews. Read the original for the full story.

At a glance

Newswire From a news agency Outcome reported
  • German President Frank-Walter Steinmeier awarded Hungarian author László Krasznahorkai the Grand Cross of Merit with Star.
  • Steinmeier praised Krasznahorkai’s mysterious characters, distinctive long sentences and treatment of life, love, melancholy and apocalypse.
  • He placed Krasznahorkai, the second Hungarian Nobel laureate in literature, within the literary legacy of the former Austro-Hungarian Empire.

László Krasznahorkai, the Hungarian author who received the 2025 Nobel Prize in Literature, has been awarded Germany’s Grand Cross of Merit with Star. German President Frank-Walter Steinmeier presented the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic in Berlin.

In his speech, Steinmeier praised the characters who populate Krasznahorkai’s novels. They are “mysterious,” he said, including “fantasists, madmen and dreamers” who nevertheless understand the world and the secret of life.

mysterious

· Frank-Walter SteinmeierThe German president used the word to describe the characters in Krasznahorkai’s novels.

“They make us pay attention, they teach us to see, above all people: how they are and how they want to be, how they wander and yet find paths,” Steinmeier said. He added that the books serve as protection against a world without surprises, stripped of secrets and dead.

fantasists, madmen and dreamers

· Frank-Walter SteinmeierSteinmeier characterized the unusual figures who populate Krasznahorkai’s fiction.

The president also highlighted the nearly endless sentences that define Krasznahorkai’s prose and can extend across entire chapters. “There seems to be a kind of fear of the ending in this work,” Steinmeier said, comparing the feature to a “life insurance policy.” As long as the author continues speaking, he said, life goes on, while the full stop represents a final ending resembling death.

Steinmeier described Krasznahorkai as the second Hungarian Nobel laureate in literature after Imre Kertész. He linked the author, along with other Hungarian writers, to the legacy of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. That literary world, he said, has also produced recent German-language laureates including Herta Müller, Elfriede Jelinek and Peter Handke.

They make us pay attention, they teach us to see, above all people: how they are and how they want to be, how they wander and yet find paths.

· Frank-Walter SteinmeierThe president explained what he believes Krasznahorkai’s books offer readers.

In Steinmeier’s summary, this is a literary cosmos where “the apocalypse is always darker, love more fragile, criticism more sarcastic and melancholy more melancholic than in other literatures.”

the apocalypse is always darker, love more fragile, criticism more sarcastic and melancholy more melancholic than in other literatures.

· Frank-Walter SteinmeierSteinmeier summarized the distinctive emotional world of Krasznahorkai and related Hungarian literature.
About this summary

Originally published by ABC Color in Spanish. Translated, summarized, and contextualized automatically by DistantNews, with a note on how the source frames the story. Not individually reviewed before publishing. How this works.

More Stories

From Our Blog