German non-fiction book prize for Ewald Frie – Kultur

The historian Ewald Frie has been awarded the German Non-Fiction Prize for his book “One farm and eleven siblings – The quiet farewell to rural life”. The book, which is part family history and part historical investigation, is preceded by a special biographical experience: Fried grew up as one of eleven siblings on a farm in the Münsterland before the triumph of factory farming and is now a professor of modern history at the University of Tübingen . In the book, the historian Ewald Frie examines, so to speak, the world of origin of the Catholic farm boy of the same name. An excellent decision by the jury.

In his acceptance speech at the award ceremony in Hamburg’s Elbphilarmonie, Frie said that he also wanted to tell a different story of the Federal Republic that did not focus on life in the cities and the economic miracle, but on life in the country. In 1940, a quarter of the workforce in Germany worked in agriculture.

This world has disappeared almost without a trace within a generation, including its social culture, its language, its manual skills. His parents and older siblings would still have spoken Low German and could have predicted the weather based on cloud formations. They had experienced a different time themselves, they had grown up in a world with a monthly breeding animal market, church, child labor. He wanted to tell about this world change between the 1940s and 1980s.

At the same time, Frie tells the downfall of the rural world in Münsterland, her “Indian Summer”, as he put it in Hamburg, not as a mere story of loss, but from the perspective of actors who themselves have no language for the changes they were exposed to had. Most of his siblings made a conscious decision not to live on a farm, thereby gaining freedom of choice and opportunities that their parents were denied. According to Fried, they would have wished for a life in which one did not “always work”.

In his acceptance speech, the author said that “Wolke 2”, the star of his father’s cow herd, was being honored for the second time that evening: once as the Red Holstein winner cow at the DLG show – now as the main character of a book with the German Non-Fiction Prize .

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