Dhe Federal President did not come. The Peace Prize of the German Book Trade has always been a welcome opportunity for Federal Presidents to talk about peace and freedom during this morning ceremony at the memorial to the first German democracy. Federal Presidents often took the opportunity to laud their speeches themselves. Richard von Weizsäcker spoke at the award ceremony in 1993 to Friedrich Schorlemmer, Roman Herzog celebrated Annemarie Schimmel in 1995, and Joachim Gauck honored David Grossman in 2010. Steinmeier’s speech to the Peace Prize winner Amartya Sen two years ago is also remembered.
The fact that he did not appear yesterday certainly does not violate protocol, but it is symbolic for this year’s prizewinner, the Ukrainian writer Serhij Zhadan. And not just because the Federal President is always surrounded by writers, invites them to literary soirées at Bellevue Palace and likes to be called a friend of literature. His absence also carries weight because it appears at a central point in Zhadan’s current book. The author noted that “Heaven over Kharkiv” arose from the need to capture not only faces and names, but also hopes and disappointments. And Zhadan’s memories go back a long way: “I still remember how Foreign Minister Steinmeier, slightly bored, asked me about the situation in Ukraine,” he wrote about an encounter in 2014 that he has not forgotten.
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