The German Language Column
Word!

Born in Rastatt. Studied literature at the FU Berlin. Founder, lyricist and singer of the Berlin bands Lassie Singers and Britta. In the 1990s she ran the Flittchenbar at Berlin’s Ostbahnhof and from 2010 to 2020 she organised the monthly “Flittchengala” at Club Südblock in Kreuzberg. Besides her work as a musician, she writes columns and other contributions for the newspapers “taz”, “Tagesspiegel” etc. Solo records since 2010. In March 2025 she was awarded the “Göttinger Elch” satire prize for her life's work.

 Elias Hirschl, born in 1994, is a novelist, spoken word artist, musician and writes for theatre and radio. In 2022, he won the Audience Award at the Ingeborg Bachmann Competition. His most recent novels Salonfähig (2021) and Content (2024) were published by Zsolnay-Verlag. Elias Hirschl lives in Vienna.

Our new columnist is the chatbot ChatGPT (Generative Pre-trained Transformer) from the company OpenAI, a machine system for text creation based on machine learning and the statistical analysis of web texts. The texts were created by ChatGPT according to the editorial team's specifications.

Based on the question of ChatGPT's performance, we were also interested in the result - what will the algorithm put together for questions about language? To find out, we had the artificial intelligence (AI) tool create a series of articles for our language column. 

Hasnain Kazim, born in Oldenburg in 1974, is the son of Indian-Pakistani immigrants. He grew up in the Alte Land, just outside Hamburg, and in Karachi in Pakistan, studied political science and pursued a career as a naval officer. He was awarded various prizes for his journalistic work, including the CNN Journalist Award. He lives as a freelance author in Vienna and has published several books. The book Post von Karlheinz (Mail from Karlheinz), which collects his dialogues with angry readers, was on the bestseller list for many weeks. 

Hauke Hückstädt, born in 1969 in Schwedt, Brandenburg, and now based in Frankfurt am Main, has been director of Frankfurt’s Literaturhaus (“House of Literature”) since 2010. Before that, he worked for a number of years at Hanover’s Literarischer Salon and Göttingen’s Literarisches Zentrum. He is also active as an editor, critic, jury member and lecturer, and advises authors on PR matters for selected publishers. A member of the German Book Prize jury in 2019, Hückstädt is also chairman of the board and spokesman for the network of Literaturhäuser in Germany, Austria and Switzerland.

Nora Gomringer, born 1980, is both a German and a Swiss, poet and performer. She writes for radio and television, conceives films, plays and libretti. She has received many awards for her work and is constantly expanding her oeuvre. Nora Gomringer is the director of the “Künstlerhaus des Freistaates Bayern”, which is located in Bamberg as the “Internationales Künstlerhaus Villa Concordia”. nora-gomringer.de

Henning Lobin, born in 1964, has been Scientific Director and Chairman of the Board of the Leibniz Institute for the German Language in Mannheim and Professor of German Linguistics at the university of Mannheim since 2018. His new book Sprachkampf (language battle) on current language policy debates was published in mid-March 2021.

Olga Grjasnowa was born in 1984 in Baku, Azerbaijan, and is one of Germany’s most admired young authors. She spent many years living in Poland, Russia, Israel, and Turkey, and her celebrated debut novel All Russians Love Birch Trees was awarded the Klaus-Michael Kühne Prize and the Anna Seghers Prize. Her latest publications are Die Macht der Mehrsprachigkeit and Der verlorene Sohn. All her novels have been adapted for the stage and translated into several languages. Olga Grjasnowa lives with her family in Berlin.

Sharon Dodua Otoo (*1972 in London) is an author and a political activist.  

She writes prose and essays and is editor of the English-language book series “Witnessed” (edition assemblage). In 2017 her first novellas “the things i am thinking while smiling politely“ and “Synchronicity” were published in German translation by S. Fischer Verlag. Otoo won the Ingeborg Bachmann Prize in 2016 with the text “Herr Gröttrup setzt sich hin”. In 2020 her inaugural speech at the Festival of German Language Literature “Dürfen Schwarze Blumen Malen?” was published by Verlag Heyn. Her first novel in German “Adas Raum” will be published in February 2021 by S. Fischer Verlag. Otoo is politically active with the Initiative Schwarze Menschen in Deutschland e. V. and Phoenix e. V. She lives with her family in Berlin.

Hernán D. Caro, born 1979 in Bogotá, Colombia, has been living in Germany for about twenty years. He holds a doctorate in philosophy from the Humboldt University of Berlin and is a freelance contributor to the Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung (FAZ) and freelance editor of the art magazine Contemporary and América Latina (C&AL) and the Goethe-Institut’s Humboldt magazine in South America. He was nominated for a Theodor Wolff Prize for German journalism in 2020 for his essay “Deutschland – Ein  Annäherungsversuch".

Thomas Böhm, born 1968 in Oberhausen in the Rhineland, is a mediator for literature and cultural journalist. He has curated the guest appearances of Iceland (2011), Switzerland (2014) and Norway (2019) at the book fairs in Frankfurt and Leipzig. His most recent publications are the radio plays for the television series “Babylon Berlin” and - together with Carsten Pfeiffer - “Die Wunderkammer der deutschen Sprache” (i.e., The cabinet of curiosities of the German language).

Kathrin Kunkel-Razum (born 1959 in Potsdam) studied German and history in Leipzig, where she did her PhD in German linguistics. She has been on Duden’s editorial staff since 1997 and editor-in-chief since 2016, so she’s in charge of Duden’s whole range of dictionaries and grammar guides. She is also a member of the German Spelling Council, which develops spelling rules and issues recommendations for state institutions. Since 2020 she is also a member of the Goethe-Institut's advisory board for Literature and Translation Grant Programme Department. She lives in Berlin.