Karl Schlögel - Award Winner 2009

Born 1948 in Hawangen (Germany)
lives in Berlin (Germany)

Karl Schlögel receives the Leipzig Book Award for European Understanding for "Terror und Traum. Moskau 1937".
With deep respect for the incomprehensible, the author is meticulous in his research and visualisation of that year of terror. Schlögel gives prominence to the disparities, mistrusts the thinking that presumes causality, planning and order. He reads the omnipotence of state power as impotence, utopia as "thinking for exigency" and in this way, incorporates the extreme opposites of terror and dream into a narrative of synchrony that is aware of the limits of language's communicability. With the altered perspectives, analogies and axes of observation which he unfolds, he brings to one of the most enigmatic arenas in recent European history a new, a locational awareness.

Accolade: Jens Reich, Mediziner, Molekularbiologe (Germany)

Jens Reich: Accolade for Karl Schlögel (PDF 40 kB)

Karl Schlögel: Acceptance speech (PDF 27 kB)