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The Week in Germany: Culture

June 22, 2007

Jewish Historian Saul Friedlaender Gets Top German Literary Prize

An "epic storyteller of the history of the Shoah": Saul Friedlaender, Photo: dpa

French-Israeli historian Saul Friedlaender has been awarded the Peace Prize of the German Book Trade (Friedenspreis des Deutschen Buchhandels), officials announced in Frankfurt on June 14.

The prize, with a value of 25,000 euros (33,000 dollars), is Germany's most prestigious literary award. An international peace prize presented annually at the Frankfurt Book Fair in the Paulskirche church in the heart of the city, it has been awarded by the German Publishers and Booksellers Association (Börsenverein des Deutschen Buchhandels) since 1950. Friedlaender will receive his prize before leading German and international figures in a ceremony that is broadcast on German public television on October 14.

The jury said Friedlaender was an "epic storyteller of the history of the Shoah, the persecution and extermination of Jews in the time of Nazi dominance in Europe."

Friedlaender had provided people burned to ashes with a voice and a memorial, it said.

Friedlaender was born in Prague in 1932, surviving the Holocaust in France. He has taught at the universities of Geneva and Tel Aviv, and is currently a professor of history at the University of California, Los Angeles.

His two-volume work, Nazi Germany and the Jews, is perhaps his best known.

Friedlaender also won the Prize of the Leipzig Book Fair last March in the non-fiction category for the second volume in this series. The Leipzig jury hailed it as "unique and of exceptional caliber" and "masterful in the art of the representational". (TWIG/dpa)

Links:

More about Saul Friedlaender

Börsenverein des Deutschen Buchhandels (in German)

An Interview with Saul Friedlaender (Yad Vashem, Shoah Resource Center)

German Book Fair Showcases Jewish Authors (TWIG, Feb. 16, 2007)

Five Questions for Fritz Stern, Historian and Author of Five Germanys I have Known (TWIG, Feb. 9, 2007)

Ambrosia for Bookworms (TWIG, Sept. 29, 2006)

Scholarly Insights into "Being Jewish in the New Germany"
(TWIG, Jan. 20, 2006)

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