War and Peace
For decades, Karl Schlögel has been among the lucidest, learnedest analysts of European historical trends. This week he was awarded the Peace Prize of the German book trade. His acceptance speech is a powerful summons to relinquish naivety and wishful thinking, to think hard and to act bravely: ‘And then it becomes clear that, despite all our knowledge, despite all the experience of previous generations, we must start again from scratch, and that our profound haplessness renders us incapable to describe what is going on before our eyes. The terms we use to describe the new circumstances are inadequate. We are at a loss for words to accurately convey what is happening. This is more than just a lack of concepts or writing skills; it is the loss of the horizon of experience that has formed us till now, a reality where everything we have accumulated over the course of a lifetime seems in question, devalued, even in ruins.’
