Karl Schlögel, German Historian and author represented by the agency through Hanser, has just been awarded with the prestigious German Peace Prize of the German Booksellers.
From the statement by the Board of Trustees:
“In his work, Karl Schlögel combines empirical historiography with personal experience. As a scholar and flâneur, as an archaeologist of modernity and a seismograph of social change, he began exploring the cities and landscapes of Central and Eastern Europe even before the fall of the Iron Curtain. He put Kyiv and Odesa, Lviv and Kharkiv on the map for his readers and portrayed Saint Petersburg and Moscow as European metropolises. With his narrative style—combining observation, emotion, and understanding—he corrects prejudices and awakens curiosity.
After Russia’s annexation of Crimea, Karl Schlögel sharpened both his own and our view of Ukraine, sincerely confronting the blind spots in German perception. He was among the first to warn against Vladimir Putin’s aggressive expansionist policies and his authoritarian-nationalist claims to power. He vividly describes Ukraine as part of Europe and calls on us to defend the country for the sake of our shared future. His warning: Without a free Ukraine, there can be no peace in Europe.”
Historian Karl Schlögel, born in 1948, studied philosophy, sociology, Eastern European history, and Slavic studies at the Free University of Berlin. After earning his doctorate, he initially worked as a freelance translator, journalist, and author before being appointed in 1990 to the Chair of Eastern European History at the University of Konstanz. In 1995, he moved to the European University Viadrina in Frankfurt (Oder), where he taught until 2013. Karl Schlögel is a member of the Pour le Mérite order. He has received numerous awards for his work, including the Sigmund Freud Prize in 2004, the Leipzig Book Award for European Understanding in 2009, the Prize of the Historical College in 2016, the Leipzig Book Fair Prize in 2018, and the Gerda Henkel Prize in 2024. For the French edition of Entscheidung in Kiew (Gallimard), he was awarded the Prix Jacques Delors du Livre Européen.
Karl Schlögel lives in Berlin.
Most recently published by Hanser: American Matrix. Exploring an Era (2023), Decision in Kyiv. Ukrainian Lessons (2015, new edition 2022), and The Scent of Empires: Chanel No. 5 and Red Moscow (2020). Schlögel is also widely known for his monographs In Space We Read Time: On the History of Civilization and Geopolitics (2003) and Terror and Dream: Moscow 1937 (2008).
His work has been published in Spanish mainly by Acantilado but also by Galaxia Gutenberg and Siruela.
In Portugal and Brasil rights on his work is still available.