German Non-Fiction Prize – the Award Ceremony

This autobiography of ethnographic research does not tell a heroic story of success. Instead, it recounts what conventional ethnographies usually leave out: the unheroic entanglements and cultural misunderstandings, the conflicts, mistakes and times of failure in foreign lands. This book invites the reader to take a frank look at anthropology as the poetics of social relations. In the unflattering names – ‘ape’, ‘fool’ or ‘cannibal’ – given to the ethnologist in Africa, she is confronted with an alien experience of foreignness, and is forced to ask herself what truth these labels express, what colonial history they tell and what criticism they convey of her person and work. In this account of four ethnographic research projects in Kenya and Uganda, spanning a period of almost fifty years, Heike Behrend also reflects on the history of the discipline of ethnology and her first-hand experiences of the changes in power structure between the researchers and the researched.

The child of Iranian parents, Asal Dardan grew up in Germany, and was shaped by her experience of exile. In an illuminating examination of German society, she embarks on a search for a common language, for a bridge across the eternal divide of ‘us’ and ‘them’. Her viewpoint is always surprising, her analysis always perceptive. Here is the fugitive child finding comfort in the homely paintings of Spitzweg that were also loved very much by Hitler. There are the Sardinian neighbour’s bureaucratic pension assessments that no-one can decipher. Here are the goldfish, released into the wild for Persian New Year, and the new personal traditions that emerge. Linguistically brilliant and stylistically elegant, the author draws an arc between intensely personal experiences and socially and politically controversial issues, while demonstrating that living together means accepting difference.

No other philosopher gives a better insight into what has been dubbed the ‘Saddle Era’: old Europe’s transition into a modern society. The enlightenment, Napoleon’s reign and the wars of liberation; industrialisation, the Vormärz period and great discoveries – the world experienced some fundamental changes during the decades of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel’s life, particularly from ideas which led to revolutions: political and industrial, aesthetic and educational. It is not for nothing that Hegel demanded philosophy grasp the concept of its own time; not eternal truths, not the ground of all being, but its own time in the mind. Jürgen Kaube recounts Hegel’s life, elucidates his work and shows how those epochal upheavals led to the attempt at a final revolution: a revolution in thought.

Hegel worked in Jena, the intellectual centre of the classical period, with inspiring proximity to Schiller and Goethe, with whom he was as familiar as with the other great figures of his time. As a gifted polemicist, he liked to argue with people such as the Romantics; interested in everything, he absorbed anything new. But Kaube also pays close attention to the personal: Hegel’s illegitimate son, for example, who died of tropical fever in Indonesia, or Hegel’s sister, who took part in the republican conspiracy in Württemberg. A fascinating biography, and a portrait of a time when the world, our world, was reshaping itself, this book carries a message for the present day.

Andreas Kossert, renowned expert on the subject of refugees and displacement in the 20th century and author of the bestselling Kalte Heimat, places the refugee movement of the early 21st Century in a wide historical context. Remaining close to people’s individual fates, Kossert paints a moving portrait of the existential experiences of uprooting and hostility that go hand in hand with the loss of a person’s homeland – and why it has always been so difficult for refugees and displaced persons to put down new roots in a foreign land. Whether they are fleeing from East Prussia, Syria or India: refugees are stakeholders in world history. In this book, Andreas Kossert gives them a voice.

How can a dictatorship address the legacy of injustice and state crimes committed under its rule? This was the question confronting the Chinese Communist Party after Mao Zedong’s death in 1976. Drawing on a multitude of previously unseen documents, Freiburg sinologist Daniel Leese paints a broad panorama of Chinese politics and society during a critical period of upheaval between 1976 and 1987.

The mass campaigns of the ‘Great Chairman’ Mao Zedong had claimed horrendous numbers of victims and led the People’s Republic of China to the brink of civil war. Under his successors, the Communist Party began a large-scale experiment in historical crisis management. Millions who had been politically persecuted were rehabilitated, compensation payments were made and perpetrators were brought to justice, above all the ‘gang of four’ surrounding Mao’s wife, Jiang Qing. The aim was to draw a line under history and direct all their energies to economic reform policies. But the ghosts of the past were not exorcised that easily. Drawing on a multitude of hitherto unknown sources – from secret speeches made by the party leadership to petition letters from ordinary citizens – Daniel Leese paints a highly diverse picture of the decade after Mao Zedong’s death. The effects of this struggle for historical justice can still be felt in Chinese politics and society today.

What is the secret of good style? How does language create literature? These are the questions explored by Michael Maar in his magnum opus, his life’s work, a book for which he has spent forty years reading. What is style? What is jargon? And what are the pitfalls that almost everyone falls into? How do the elementary particles need to interact to produce a perfect prose sentence? Maar demonstrates who can – or cannot – write dialogue, why Hölderlin is overvalued, and Rahel Varnhagen undervalued, why a continent of style would disappear without the Austrian Jews, why Kafka is an alien and why only Heimito von Doderer comes close to Thomas Mann. In a series of fifty portraits, from Goethe to Gernhardt, from Kleist to Kronauer, he unfolds en passant a history of German literature.

Degrees of freedom are a concept familiar from the field of mechanics. The term refers to the number of directions in which a body can move at a joint. In this attempt to bring liberalism up to date, Christoph Möllers takes as his starting point neither the general political climate nor the conflict between individual and community. Rather, he attempts to carve out forms of an order that permits freedom of movement and social variance. Thus equipped, he promises no answers, but instead offers new perspectives on various phenomena: on the concept of political representation, but also on the function of territorial borders. Freedom, Möllers postulates, is a practice of being open to results, enabling processes which must, out of necessity, have no clear destination.

Facts versus fakes! Renowned science journalist Mai Thi Nguyen-Kim examines the burning issues of our society with analytical brilliance and incorruptible logic. Using facts and scientific discoveries, she counters half-truths, fakes and conspiracy myths – and shows us exactly where an absence of evidence justifies a continuing debate.

In her captivatingly clear-sighted, wonderfully serene and delightfully entertaining style, she identifies the undeniable facts about the heritability of intelligence, the gender pay gap, climate change or drug legalisation. Mai Thi Nguyen-Kim’s search for the core of truth not only reveals that which is indisputable, and on which we can all agree: she also points out where the facts end, where figures and scientific evidence are lacking, and where we are therefore completely justified in throwing personal opinions at each other.