Frankfurt Book Fair awards Peace Prize to Russia historian Schlögel

Historian Karl Schlögel, a prominent critic of Russian President Vladimir Putin, was awarded the Peace Prize of the German Book Trade at the Frankfurt Book Fair on Sunday.

The 77-year-old Russia expert has "consistently set new standards in vivid and vibrant historical writing," the jury said.

In his acceptance speech in St Paul's Church in the city, Schlögel called on Germans to learn from Ukrainians. "They are well aware of the behavioural codes of resistance and teach Europeans what will happen to them if they do not finally prepare themselves for the worst," he said.

"The people of Ukraine teach us that what is happening is not called the Ukraine conflict, but war. They help us to understand what we have to deal with: a regime that wants to destroy Ukraine as an independent state and that hates Europe," he said.

"They show us that making concessions to the aggressor only whets its appetite even more and that appeasement does not lead to peace but paves the way to war."

The Peace Prize has been awarded since 1950 by the German Publishers and Booksellers Association. It is endowed with €250,000 ($292,000).

The prize was awarded on the closing day of the Frankfurt Book Fair in front of an invited audience of more than 700, including Culture Minister Wolfram Weimer, Bishop Georg Bätzing and Omid Nouripour, vice president of the German parliament.

Schlögel was one of the first to issue a warning on the expansionary policies of Putin, the certificate handed to him by German Book Trade head Karin Schmidt-Friderichs states. "His warning to us: Without a free Ukraine, there can be no peace in Europe," it says.

Schlögel describes himself as belonging to a lucky generation that now had difficulty in adjusting to war in Europe. He had not imagined that Russia would fall back into "times that in many ways resemble the practices of Stalinism," he said.

In her eulogy, Ukrainian-German author Katya Petrowskaja described how she met Schlögel in 2022, a few days after the Russian invasion, at a protest in Berlin, wrapped in a Ukrainian flag.

"Your public desperation helped us a great deal at the time, as well as your ability to get up and continue, despite everything," she said. "We knew that we were not alone."

Schlögel was born into a southern German farming family in 1948. He learnt Russian at his Catholic boarding school, travelling as a young man to Russia and Czechoslovakia and experiencing the 1968 Prague Spring first hand.

He studied the history of Eastern Europe and married a Russian author, travelling back and forth between East and West revealing life behind the Iron Curtain to the West. He turned away initially from an academic career but began lecturing after the fall of communism in Constance and in Frankfurt an der Oder.

His work combines empirical historiography and personal experience, according to the prize certificate.

It does not merely draw from the archives, Schmidt-Friderichs said. Schlögel needed the stories, the smells, the tastes of the land and the people, she said.

But she noted that this was now denied him. "Karl Schlögel, who knows Russia better than virtually anyone else and for whom Russia has become home, cannot travel there without risking arrest," she said.