Hansel Mieth Prize 2000
The book with the ten Hansel Mieth Prize finalists of 2000, as well as the feature funded by 1999 Gabriel Grüner Grant (in German).
ISBN 3-927704-05-9
15.24 Euros
Stupid kid
Das Magazin No. 38, September 2000
By Antje Potthoff, photos by Vincent Kohlbecher
“The girl hasn’t fulfilled her mother’s expectations. At 23, she is helpless as a baby – profoundly mentally retarded, epileptic, short, chubby, with the narrow hands and feet of a child. Her pale, cropped hair is stringy, her face round and flat, her mouth small and given to strewing threads of spit across her teeth whether she speaks, laughs, or expresses surprise. Her eyes stare, sometimes uncomprehending, sometimes empty. She seems listless, but ‘You wish!’ the mother retorts: She’s often aggressive, vomits in her food dish, frightens her parents by pretending to be suffocating, scratches, bites, uses vicious language she doesn’t understand, though she knows her mother will be hurt. Her mother fights back. ‘In this battle,’ she says, ‘I have to be the strong one.’ Otherwise, she fears she might lose forever.”
Antje Potthoff has six children, and after many career changes, found her feet as a free-lance writer in 1994. She has published two books and is working on two more. In 1996, she won the Axel Springer Prize and third place in the Egon Erwin Kisch competition.
Vincent Kohlbecher, born in 1960, freelances for Stern, Merian, Der Spiegel, und Das Magazin.