Karl Schlögel – winner of the 2025 Peace Prize of the German Book Trade
Outstanding Chronicler of the Contemporary World

The awarding of the Peace Prize of the German Book Trade is the ceremonial highlight of the last day of the Frankfurt Book Fair each year. In 2025, the German scholar and expert on Eastern Europe Karl Schlögel will be honoured with this important prize.

At the end of July 2025, it was announced that this year's Peace Prize of the German Book Trade would be awarded to the German historian and essayist Karl Schlögel. He is considered one of the foremost experts on the history of Eastern Europe. The highly regarded award for individuals who have contributed to the realisation of the idea of peace in literature, science or art is traditionally presented on the last day of the Frankfurt Book Fair in St. Paul's Church. This year, that date is 19 October. The prize, which has been awarded since 1950, is endowed with 25,000 euros.

Karl Schlögel has reinterpreted the cultural and contemporary history of Russia and Eastern Europe, wrote the Board of Trustees of the Peace Prize about the “scholar and flâneur,” the “seismograph of social change.” His work is distinguished by the way it combines empirical historiography with personal experience.

Solidarity With Ukraine

The choice of Schlögel is also a political statement of Germany and Europe's unwavering solidarity with Ukraine. Since the Russian invasion in February 2022, Schlögel has appeared on numerous occasions as a guest on talk shows and as a speaker at demonstrations and protest rallies against Russian aggression. According to the foundation's board, he was one of the first in Germany to warn against Vladimir Putin's aggressive expansionist policy and his authoritarian-nationalist claim to power.

Karl Schlögel had already travelled to Ukraine in 2014 to get an idea of the situation after the Russian occupation of Crimea. “He emphasised earlier than others that Eastern Europe is part of the cultural heritage of Europe as a whole,” praises the Foundation Council. Schlögel once formulated this idea of an undivided Europe as follows: “Europe really exists; it does not have to be invented first, even with the best of intentions.”

An Expert Observer of Social Transformations

Schlögel, who was born in Hawangen in the Bavarian Allgäu region in 1948, became famous after the collapse of the socialist regimes in Central and Eastern Europe in the 1990s. In numerous articles and books, he provided precise observations and expert analyses of the transformation of societies that had been under communist rule for decades. Among other things, he wrote about the so-called Berlin “Polenmarkt” (Polish market), which developed after the fall of the Berlin Wall on the site where Potsdamer Platz stands today. At that time, there was only a large wasteland there, divided by the very same wall, “a sandy area with parked caravans and a magnetic levitation train leading nowhere, the Philharmonic Hall and the State Library like spaceships in a border landscape”. The market was popularly known as the Polish Market because Eastern Europeans, including many Poles, sold their goods there.

Karl Schlögel had already travelled to the former Soviet Union in 1966 – and found his field of research in this country. After studying Eastern European history, philosophy, sociology and Slavic studies at the Free University of Berlin, he obtained his doctorate there in 1981 with a dissertation on labour conflicts in the Soviet Union.

Understanding From Personal Experience

Further stays in Moscow (1982/83) and Leningrad (1987) formed the backdrop for his intellectual engagement with political developments in countries that were still under communist rule at the time. Schlögel therefore understood more quickly and better than other Western Europeans how fundamental the upheaval of the years after 1989 felt to the people in the East: “The end of the Soviet Union was not just a change of scenery, not just the end of political institutions and administrative structures, but the dissolution of a way of life.”

His current book, Auf der Sandbank der Zeit (On the Sandbank of Time), bears the subtitle “The historian as chronicler of the present” – a fitting description of Schlögels work. In the foreword, he speaks of an “eastern expansion of consciousness” among interested people after the collapse of the socialist regimes. The honoured essayist has contributed greatly to this expansion of consciousness with his elegant, vivid texts.