|
|
 |
| |
Presenter of the Tribute speech 2012 |
|
Karl Schlögel
a native of Hawagen in the Allgäu region, was born 1948. On leaving school, he read Eastern European History, Philosophy, Sociology and Slavic Studies at the Free University of Berlin, in Moscow and in Leningrad. During this period, he was a member of Maoist Groups in West Berlin and was also active in the student movement. In 1981, Schlögel completed his PhD with a text on workers’ conflict in the post-Stalinist Soviet Union and then worked as a freelance translator, publicist and private scholar; from time to time, research projects took him back to Moscow (1982/83) and Leningrad (1987).
In 1990, he accepted the Chair of Eastern European History at the University of Constance; he has been Professor of the History of Eastern Europe at the European University Viadrina in Frankfurt/Oder since 1994. Among others, Schlögel was a Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study within Collegium Budapest (2000), at the Historical College in Munich (2005) and at the Swedish College for Advanced Social Studies in Uppsala (2006).
He has received numerous distinctions for his work, including the Essay Prize from the Tagesspiegel in Berlin (1986), the European Charles Veillon Essay Prize (1990), the Sigmund Freud Prize for Academic Prose from the German Academy for Language and Poetry (2004), the Lessing Prize from the City of Hamburg (2005), the Leipzig Book Prize for European Understanding (2009) and the Samuel Bogomil Linde Prize (2010). He was awarded The Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany on Ribbon in 2005.
The topics Karl Schlögel has focused on in his numerous books are manifold: the spectrum ranges from the history of enforced migration and the cultures in Diaspora throughout the 20th century as far as to metropolitan history and urbanity in Europe. An interest in the culture of modern life in Eastern Europe is a recurring theme throughout his work, focusing in particular on Russia and Russian life in the West.
For instance, Karl Schlögel had beaten a trail through Moscow long before the Iron
Curtain collapsed. Long walks through the city taught him to grasp the inherent
qualities of each urban district and to read the facades of their houses. In his first major book in a city, in 1984, he presented a Moscow that was entirely alien to the West: a stony landscape bearing the marks of each individual, historical epoch. Even at this early stage of his writing, we see how he adds a spatial perspective and an aspect of synchronicity to the t raditional, chronological perception of history: he
seeks out timetables, old address books and buildings as historical sources, and
does not rely simply on chronicles and books. What, for instance, does the layout of an American city divulge to us about the “American Dream”? How have railways, motor vehicles and airplanes altered our sense of distance? No matter how varied Schlögel’s staging points are: Moscow in the year 1937, old St. Petersburg, a bazaar in the Lithuanian hinterlands or a rickety train between Odessa and Chernivitsi, the author constantly leads us to the limits of our perceptive horizon, to the apparent
blind spots on the mercurial map of Europe. |
|
| |
|
|
|
|
Back
print version