Learning from Ukraine: Karl Schlögel’s Peace Prize Speech and Europe’s Moral Wake-Up Call

There are times when everything happens all at once. Sometimes so fast that it blurs. Sometimes the pieces align on their own, forming a mosaic that suddenly reveals the sense of things.

In these past two weeks, we rejoiced at the release of Israeli hostages — yet we also witnessed the rise of a new Pax Romana, a peace that feels more like conquest than justice. We saw Gaza reduced to rubble, and, as the Latin historian Tacitus wrote when recounting the Roman conquest of Britain, “They made a desert and called it peace.”

We’ve seen geopolitics ruled by “real-estatism”: the mindset that treats the world as a portfolio of properties to be sold, bought, or traded, as if they were empty deserts.

It’s the logic of a post-literacy society: maps matter more than people, conversational fake history more than books, handshakes among bosses more than international law. We see borders and deals — but not the stories, that layering of history and human experience we call culture and identity.

This reached its peak at last Friday’s White House meeting between Donald Trump and Volodymyr Zelensky. There, Trump shouted at the Ukrainian president that he “must give up the Donbas” — perhaps without even knowing where it lies, or what it means. For Trump, and for those who think like him, territories are just real estate. Assets to be traded in pursuit of an easy truce they call peace — a peace that legitimizes everyone, terrorists and rapists included.

Yet while the world reacted to that meeting, something entirely different was happening on Sunday in Frankfurt’s Paulskirche—St Paul’s Church. Something that spoke of another kind of peace.

The Friedenspreis des Deutschen Buchhandels — the Peace Prize of the German Book Trade — is one of Germany’s most prestigious cultural awards.

Since 1950, it has been given to individuals who, through literature, science, or art, have contributed to the realization of peace. The ceremony takes place at the closing of the Frankfurt Book Fair, Europe’s largest publishing event.

This year’s laureate is Karl Schlögel, a German historian of Eastern Europe and a scholar of Russia and Ukraine.

Schlögel is known for his innovative spatial historiography — a way of reading history through places, maps, and the traces of everyday life. One that saw the humans behind the maps.

In his acceptance speech, Schlögel issued a call against fear.

He urged us to face without hesitation those who despise, ridicule, and belittle Europe. And he had little patience for self-proclaimed “Russlandsversteher“ — those who claim to understand Russia, a comprehension that often masks sympathy. This includes those who believe the Donbass can be given away in the name of peace. But the Donbass is not real estate. Ukraine is not no man’s land — it is a country where Europe’s heart still beats. A place of poetry, literature, hard work, and remarkable human stories. A place of day-to-day heroism.

Many in Germany have been sharing the text of his acceptance speech, and I’m doing the same today—sharing it translated into English and Italian. In an age of short attention spans and micro-content, the fact that his speech is going viral is touching. But it makes sense: under the new geopolitical doctrine of real-estatism, we need those who can still read space—and the history that lives within it—not as something to buy, sell, or exchange, but to respect.

At the end of his speech, everyone stood and applauded. Many cried. Karl Schlögel cried, too. And who knows—perhaps after reading his speech, you will, too.

Here is the original speech in German. Below is the English translation (I’ve only removed the opening salutations):

“It is particularly important to me that this award gives me the opportunity to speak at this historically significant location, not only in the 75th calendar year since the Peace Prize was established, but at a time when, in view of the new world disorder, we are becoming painfully aware of the limits of our own judgement.

“The most monstrous thing is happening: before our very eyes, Ukrainian cities are being bombarded day after day, night after night, by Russian missiles, and Europe seems unable or unwilling to protect them.

“We were stunned to witness the murderous pogrom carried out by Hamas on 7 October 2023 and the transformation of Gaza into a battlefield with thousands upon thousands of civilian casualties. The world takes little notice of the apocalyptic scenarios of civil war in Sudan. 

“But where, if not here in Frankfurt’s Paulskirche, is the place to talk about ways out of war and take Walter Benjamin’s statement seriously: “But those who want peace must speak of war.” Or, in an older version: “Si vis pacem, para bellum.”

“Looking back at the Peace Prize awards – which is easy to do with a click on its website – one might at first glance get the impression that everything has already been said on the subject of war and peace.

“The speeches read like a chronicle of the intellectual situation in post-war Germany: at first, in the early years, everything was still overshadowed by the Second World War, which had just ended, and the catastrophe that Germany had brought upon the world; the venue for the award ceremony itself had just been rebuilt from the ruins.

“Looking back, it becomes clear that the following decades were by no means an idyllic time of peaceful coexistence, but rather a period of the Cold War, a time of the balance of terror, of the ever-present possibility of nuclear self-destruction.

“The fall of the Iron Curtain and the end of the Cold War did not bring about the end of history in Europe, but rather a period in which, with the disappearance of systemic antagonism, the reasons for the great military conflict between the two superpowers also seemed to have become obsolete, while the Yugoslav Wars – as keen observers had already noted – already pointed to an end to the post-war period, which came to an end with the Russian occupation of Crimea in the spring of 2014 and – definitively – with the invasion of Russian troops on 24 February 2022, opening the door to a new pre-war period. 

“Researching the origins of wars and the complicated paths to peace – silencing the guns, ending the killing, disempowering the aggressor, perhaps reaching a peace treaty that can then be followed by reconciliation – offers an infinitely rich source of illustrative material for what diplomacy can and cannot achieve, but it does not provide any recipes that can be applied for all time, since history does not repeat itself.

“And then you realise that, despite all the knowledge, despite all the experience of previous generations, you have to start all over again from scratch, and that, in your deep perplexity, you lack the words to describe what is happening before your eyes.

“The terms we use to describe the new circumstances are inadequate. We are lost for words to describe what is happening. This is more than just a lack of terms or literary talent; it is the collapse of the horizon of experience in which we grew up and where everything we have gathered in the course of our lives seems to be called into question, devalued, even in ruins. 

“I couldn’t imagine that Russia would once again fall back into times that in many ways resembled the practices of Stalinism, the study of which I had devoted years of my life to; I couldn’t imagine that America, which I had come to know as a student, would one day be gripped by fear of an authoritarian regime.

“The idea that something could go wrong in the Federal Republic of Germany was completely foreign to me. Above all, I couldn’t imagine that war, which for me was something I only knew from television or documentaries, could become a reality in my immediate neighbourhood. But that is what happened.

“And it seems to me that now it is our turn – if I may speak in the collective singular – the generation accustomed to and spoiled by apparent peace, to think everything through again from the beginning, a kind of assessment and examination of a generation that has been incredibly fortunate and is now finding it incredibly difficult to say goodbye and prepare for war in Europe and everything that goes with it. 

“What a liberating feeling it was to break free from the confines of the divided world of the Cold War and to move across the demarcation line between East and West or under the Iron Curtain. For me, a person who had no family ties to Eastern Europe, but whose father had been at war since 1 September 1939, mostly on the Eastern Front and in Ukraine, this was the case very early on.

“I learned very early on that beyond the division of Europe into East and West, into socialism and capitalism, there was another, a third, which was not identical to either, the lost centre of Europe.

“This marked the beginning of a journey of discovery into a region that was not particularly interesting to post-war West Germany at the time, or was mostly viewed from the perspective of enemy observation.

“As always, biographical coincidences played a decisive role: Russian lessons at a Bavarian boarding school, the atmosphere of thaw and peaceful coexistence in the 1960s – first Yevgeny Yevtushenko’s poem Babi Yar and Boris Pasternak’s novel Doctor Zhivago, but above all the lasting impressions of early trips to Prague and the former Soviet Union.

“It was thanks to these trips that Central and Eastern Europe became not just a matter of reading and academic education, but something to do with the people, landscapes and historical sites I was to study, long before Milan Kundera’s famous 1983 essay Un Occident kidnappé ou La tragédie de l’Europe centrale: the atmosphere of the Prague Spring, my encounters and friendships with dissidents and emigrants, and the idea that the opposition movements in East and West had to find common ground across the Wall, perhaps even in a bridge between intellectuals and workers.

“The mental map of Europe had already shifted before the fall of the great border. In dissident circles in Budapest, Warsaw, Berlin and in Moscow kitchens, discussions were taking place that soon led to the revolutions in Eastern Europe. It was an exciting time of cross-border conspiracy, new reading material and the discovery of connections that created a new cultural space beyond the dichotomy of the divided world.

“A historical space of tremendous linguistic and cultural diversity, lost in war, genocide and expulsion, opened up. People had always been travelling in the deadly zone between Hitler’s and Stalin’s empires, always moving in a space of double experience where, as they learned, there was no escape, no possibility of flight, a place of total helplessness.

“The exploration of this space and the realisation of its history were soon followed by the transformation of the political map, which, with the dissolution of the Soviet Union, did not stop at the borders of the last multi-ethnic empire. However, there was still a long way to go before Ukraine achieved complete independence and freedom.

“It took the Maidan Revolution and a war to finally bring Ukraine out of the margins of a narrow Western-centric perception.

“It ceased to be terra incognita, a blank spot on the map. Through the screens, the news reports, the refugees who came to us, it became present to us, a large and beautiful country, a Europe in miniature, connected to the world by thousands upon thousands of threads: the thousand-year-old Kyiv, Kharkiv, a metropolis of European modernity, Odessa, from whose grand staircase down to the harbour one could look out over the entire 20th century, Lviv, Leopolis, Lwów, Lwow, Lemberg, more than just ‘Little Vienna’, a cultural source for the entire continent.

“Ukraine as a prism of all European experiences in the ‘century of extremes’: the scene of revolutions, civil war and world wars, Holodomor and Holocaust, and, after decades of struggle, finally independence and freedom.

“But then came Russia’s occupation of Crimea. Over ten years ago, having returned from Kharkiv, Donetsk, Mariupol and Odessa, I wrote:

“We do not know how the struggle for Ukraine will end; whether it will stand up to Russian aggression or whether it will be brought to its knees, whether the Europeans, the West, will defend it or abandon it; whether the European Union will hold together or fall apart. Only this much is certain: Ukraine will never again disappear from the map in our minds.”

“Putin’s Russia is determined to wipe independent and free Ukraine off the map of Europe. Putin has openly declared this and has been proving day after day since then that he is serious about it. No words can describe the images of destruction. There is no atrocity that his troops have not committed. Nothing and no one has been spared from becoming a target for drones and missiles: marketplaces, residential areas, museums, hospitals, port facilities, railway stations. Cities that were in the process of getting back on their feet – new airports, transport routes, hotels – are being bombed back into ruin.

“Cities are becoming hunting grounds for drones. The missile’s direct hit is followed by a direct hit on the rescue team. The industrial giants of socialist construction are reduced to rubble and ashes, as are churches, monasteries and sanatoriums. What was once the Ukrainian Ruhr region no longer exists. If the country cannot be conquered, then at least it must be destroyed, made uninhabitable.

“A new term is doing the rounds: urbicide. Deserted villages of the 21st century, blown-up dams and bridges, flooded landscapes, black earth fields burned and contaminated for generations, ethnic cleansing and the abduction of tens of thousands of children, the occupied territories as one big camp under the control of warlords and criminals.

“The disaster that Putin’s Russia has brought upon Ukraine has many names: imperialism, revisionism, mafia state, fascism, Raschism.

“His crimes are documented and stored in an endless number of images in real time, and the names of the perpetrators – whether on the front lines, in the torture chambers, in the propaganda and command centres – will certainly be found. 

“It is astonishing how long it took Germany to realise what Putin’s Russia is all about.

“Whatever factors were at play – historical path dependency, cultural affinities, nostalgia and sentimentality, economic interests, even corruption – there is much scope for historical clarification and a reappraisal that spares no one.

“There were many who “understood” Russia, but too few who understood anything about Russia.

“Otherwise, they would have explained to us what was in store for us and that the categories used to describe Putin’s empire were more the result of wishful thinking and credulity than an admission that we were no match for this embodiment of evil – whatever term may yet be developed for it.

“How much easier and more convenient it was to blame NATO or the collective West: to this day, the search for a deeper meaning in Putin’s politics has not subsided. The following are mentioned: humiliation of the former superpower, fears of encirclement, need for security, struggle for recognition. This corresponds to the idea that misunderstandings can be cleared up and deals negotiated in argumentative discourse with him.

“However, Putin has disproved the notion that he would adhere to arguments or even procedural rules from the outset. He simply overturned the table at which negotiations and discussions were supposed to take place according to certain rules and brilliantly declared rule-breaking to be the norm long before the term ‘disruption’ came into circulation.

“He was and remains the master of escalation dominance, the calculated intensification of conflicts, including the calculated breach of the nuclear taboo.

“Fear is his most important weapon, and his true talent lies in managing fear. To this day, he considers himself the undisputed master of the process. 

“But not everything has to go according to his plan – the blitzkrieg against Ukraine, the capture of the capital, the victory parade on Khreschatyk Street in Kyiv, the encirclement of Kharkiv. Things turned out differently. Since he is making little progress on the front despite hundreds of thousands of dead and wounded, he is targeting the defenceless civilian population. His slogan is simple: we will destroy you wherever you are, you have no chance except to surrender. Diplomacy is merely a tool to gain time, which he believes is working in his favour. The masterminds around him say it openly: we will break the backbone of you Europeans.

“Is what I am saying Russophobia? It is part of the repertoire of intimidation rhetoric to defame criticism of Putin’s regime as slander against Russia. As someone who has been enamoured with Russian culture since his youth and who has spent his entire life promoting it, this does not affect me. It pains me greatly to see friends and colleagues in danger and driven into exile today. The instrumentalisation of the prestige of Russian culture certainly plays a major role in the enforcement of Putin’s imperial ambitions – Russkij Mir, the Russian world that knows no borders, as soft power.

“Intimidation rhetoric and moral blackmail naturally also include defaming the Ukrainian leadership as Nazis and casting suspicion on the Germans as Nazis. The Bundeswehr is stigmatised as the successor to the Wehrmacht, while the Russian war against Ukraine is falsely portrayed as a continuation of the Great Patriotic War against fascism. All the crimes Russia is guilty of are summarily blamed on the Ukrainians – from the shooting down of flight MH 17 to the murders on the streets of Bucha. 

“As absurd as this propaganda may seem, it is not without effect, especially in Germany, which for well-known reasons is still unsure of itself and therefore vulnerable. Compared to this, the propaganda of the Soviet era seems outdated and downright harmless.

“This is no longer about the contrast between black and white, about the distinction between truth and lies, but about dissolving the distinction between true and false itself, according to the motto: everything is equally true, everything is equally false, thus destroying the basis of all judgement. It is aimed at the domestic audience, at creating enemy stereotypes and fears of encirclement, but also at the public outside the Russian world.

“There is nothing that cannot be brought into play to undermine the credibility and self-confidence of Western societies. It is not difficult to find out where open societies are most vulnerable and easiest to hit – and where the forces are that can be exploited.

“Even the capacity for self-criticism and self-doubt, the greatest achievement of open societies, is used to undermine stability and self-confidence.

“Russia then praises itself as the bastion of a unique and in every respect superior civilisation. Europe and the West, or what has been understood as such, are derided as weak and decadent, their time having passed. This voice is not without echo in a situation where Spengler’s Decline of the West is once again in vogue. Taken together, all this has an effect.

“The war that Russia has brought back to Europe is not only being waged by military means, but also as a war for hearts and minds, with moods, fears, resentments, nostalgia, or as a tempting offer to return to business as usual. 

“It is difficult to adjust to the new situation, the regrouping of forces and alliances in the world. It means saying goodbye to a world that has begun to disintegrate. Gone is the certainty of being able to rely on America, as we knew it from Alexis de Tocqueville’s De la démocratie en Amérique or from great American literature, the country I had remembered since my first visit as a land of freedom from fear and free speech. That America is now no longer valid.

“Europe is now confronted not only with the phenomenon of Putinism, but also with an American president who is throwing all notions of the silent functioning of checks and balances and alliances out the window and forcing us to rethink all the coordinates we thought were secure.

“Europe, left alone and entirely on its own in a situation where everything is up in the air.

“In this situation, I began to reread the old texts in which, in the 1930s, the most clairvoyant minds attempted to understand what was brewing in Central Europe. Once again, I returned to the analyses and writings penned in exile, whether in Paris, New York or Weimar on the Pacific: Ernst Fraenkel’s The Dual State, Franz Neumann’s Behemoth, Theodor W. Adorno and Max Horkheimer’s Dialectic of Enlightenment, or later, with Stalinism already in view, Hannah Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism.

“But however prescient and accurate these analyses were, we must now, at this turning point in history, set out on our own journey to grasp the novelty and danger of today’s situation in our own words. Taking note of the lessons from Ukraine is helpful, indeed indispensable, for this purpose.

“No one is more interested in peace than the Ukrainians. They know that an aggressor who is determined to do anything cannot be stopped with words. They are realists who cannot afford to have any illusions.

“Because they do not want to be victims, they are fighting back. They are prepared for anything. They are fighting for their children, for their families, for their state; they are even prepared to die for their country.

“What elsewhere are only television images is a direct experience for them. The defence at the front would be nothing without the army of volunteers behind it. They have survived the winter and have defied the nightly terror of drones and missiles for weeks, even months.

“Yesterday they may have been IT experts, today they fly drones. The festive dresses women wear to the theatre or concerts demonstrate a sense of dignity that cannot be taken away, even in a state of emergency, and the club is the place where young people draw strength to continue the resistance.

“In a world that has become post-heroic, they are heroes without making a fuss about it.

“They keep the transport system running and thus hold their country together. The wailing of sirens is background noise in their everyday lives, not just a test alarm. They have learned how drone strikes differ from ballistic missile strikes. They help us prepare for the post-apocalyptic era. They teach us that national defence has nothing to do with militarism. Soldiers, and especially female soldiers, are respected because everyone knows that they are doing their duty and what they are prepared to do.

“The citizens of Ukraine are teaching us that what is happening is not a conflict in Ukraine, but a war. They are helping us to understand who we are dealing with: a regime that wants to destroy Ukraine as an independent state and that hates Europe.

“They show us that accommodating the aggressor only increases its appetite for more and that appeasement does not lead to peace, but paves the way for war. Because they are on the front line, they know more than we do in the still safe hinterland. Because they are at the mercy of a superior enemy, they have to be faster and smarter than him.

“Ukrainians, who are under general suspicion of nationalism, show us that patriotism does not have to be outdated in the 21st century.

“They are ahead of us in terms of military technology because they were forced to fight at a time when we could still afford to debate questions of eternal peace. They have developed their own weapons, which were withheld from them due to hesitation or fear. They are the mirror in which we see ourselves and which reminds us of what Europe once stood for and why it is worth defending.

“They call out to us: Do not be afraid, not because they are not afraid, but because they have overcome their fear.

“Their writers do their utmost to express what others far away cannot find the words for. They have carried the Ukrainian language out into the world and achieved a miracle of literature. Their poets speak with deadly seriousness, some even paying for it with their lives.

“Their president is a man who expects his compatriots to face the truth, even though he knows how bitter it is. They are well versed in the behavioural principles of resistance and are teaching Europeans what to expect if they do not finally prepare for the worst.

“They have learned from experience that in threatening situations, decisions are made overnight that in peaceful times would be postponed indefinitely. Stoic composure is a luxury they can only afford once the war is over.

“Enduring, persevering, despite unspeakable exhaustion – that is the revolution of dignity in permanence. It is to them that we owe our peace, and they pay a price that cannot be calculated in figures. 

“It is to them and to all people of good will that we owe our thanks first and foremost. And it is to them that we extend our greetings from this place – from Frankfurt’s Paulskirche, the site of the German unity and freedom movement, a hot spot of the European Spring of Nations of yesteryear.

“These greetings go out to the defenders of a free Ukraine, to the men and women who continue to go about their work despite everything, who take their children to school despite swarms of drones, to the residents of Kyiv who remain in the metro station, to the train drivers who steer their trains punctually from Ivano-Frankivsk to Kharkiv. As unlikely as it may sound, we Europeans can learn from Ukraine to be fearless and brave, and perhaps even to learn how to win.”

Beyond this speech: why read Karl Schlögel’s books?

Karl Schlögel is one of those rare historians who makes us see history, not just read it. His works transform the past into an inhabited space—made of streets, railway timetables, scents, and architectures. For years, he has been one of the most lucid voices on Eastern Europe and Russia. Many of his books have been translated into multiple languages, including English. His most influential titles include:

• Terror und Traum. Moskau 1937 (Moscow, 1937) — An almost cinematic reconstruction of the Soviet capital at the height of Stalinist terror. Translated into English, French, Polish, Czech, Ukrainian, and Russian.

• Das sowjetische Jahrhundert. Archäologie einer untergegangenen Welt (The Soviet Century) — A form of “material archaeology” of the Soviet world that recounts daily life through objects, architecture, and habits.

• Entscheidung in Kiew. Ukrainische Lektionen (Ukraine: A Nation on the Borderland) — Published in 2015 and reissued in 2022, this is an essential work for understanding Ukraine’s significance at the heart of Europe. On 11 December in Brussels, the French translation of Entscheidung in Kiew will also earn him the Prix Jacques Delors du Livre Européen.

• Im Raume lesen wir die Zeit. Über Zivilisationsgeschichte und Geopolitik (In Space We Read Time) — A foundational text of his “spatial historiography,” translated into English, French, and Polish.

• American Matrix. Besichtigung einer Epoche (2023) — A journey through the transformations of the Western world after the Cold War, exploring geopolitics and popular culture.

There was a time when historiography frightened many people. Then new ways of telling history emerged: social history, oral history, microhistory (the Italian Carlo Ginzburg), spatial historiography (Karl Schlögel), and now storytelling. Today, social media and platforms like Substack allow young historians to become bestsellers—sometimes without the necessary intellectual foundations.

Karl Schlögel has been innovating the way we tell the history of our continent for decades. He became a bestseller without needing Substack.

Above all, he is a man who believes in Europe with the conviction of someone who has witnessed both its darkest and finest moments. If this post has helped make him better known, then this little blog will have succeeded in its mission.