Bremen
Hannah Arendt Prize for Masha Gessen
The journalist Masha Gessen has been awarded the Hannah Arendt Prize. photo
© Focke Strangmann/dpa
The awarding of the Hannah Arendt Prize to Masha Gessen recently caused heated discussion. The honor still took place on Saturday – but differently than planned.
The celebration of the controversial award of the Hannah Arendt Prize for Political Thought Masha Gessen only took place on a small scale. Instead of in the large hall of the Bremen town hall, a good 50 guests crowded into a small event room in the Steintorviertel on Saturday, where the sponsoring association had moved after the Heinrich Böll Foundation and the Bremen Senate withdrew. Many of the guests had to stand in the narrow space, and police officers secured the event in front of the door.
Those responsible had moved the previously changed venue again at short notice on Saturday morning – for security reasons, as the organizer said. In the end, the award sponsoring association was nevertheless satisfied. “It was a very close event in a small format that we are all glad that it took place,” said Eva Senghaas from the club’s board of directors of the German Press Agency. It was a “very fruitful form of dialogue” that showed “that controversial questions and assessments can be discussed in a good way.”
The event originally planned for Friday in the town hall was canceled after criticism of Gessen’s statements. The Heinrich Böll Foundation and the Bremen Senate had previously withdrawn from the award ceremony. The trigger was statements in an article in the US magazine “The New Yorker”, with which Gessen is said to have compared the situation in Gaza with the Jewish ghettos in occupied Europe. “This statement is unacceptable to us and we reject it,” said the Böll Foundation, which is close to the Greens. The cancellation of the ceremony in the town hall was therefore appropriate.
The jury’s decision for Masha Gessen was made in early summer. It was said at the time that Gessen’s journalistic commitment to reporting on Russia was crucial. “So we can only cancel the award ceremony and this celebratory event,” the Böll Foundation said. “We cannot reverse the award.”
The sponsoring association had defended sticking to the honor and looked for another venue. It was noteworthy that a public debate about understanding the conflict was prevented and that Gessen was boycotted, it said. Gessen is trying to “bring knowledge, insight and sharp thinking skills to this dispute.” Gessen, born in Moscow in 1967, writes about political trends and conflicts in US and Russian society. Gessen lives in New York.