A formal highlight of the fair each year is the awarding of the Peace Prize of the German Book Industry, which is presented Sunday morning in an elaborate televised ceremony at Frankfurt's Paulskirche, site of the 1848 National Assembly, a milestone in the attempts to establish democracy in Germany. Last year's Peace Prize winner was writer Martin Walser, whose comments caused some consternation: he seemed to say that Germans no longer should be overly concerned and burdened about the horrors of the Nazi period. This year's winner is seen by many as a kind of commentary on Walser's remarks. He is Fritz Stern, from a Jewish family that fled Germany in 1938.
An American citizen for more than 50 years, Stern is a professor of history at Columbia University in New York, author of the classic Blood and Iron and the recently released Einstein's German World and, last but not least, husband of Elisabeth Sifton of Farrar, Straus & Giroux.
As the Peace Prize organizers put it, Stern "has for a long time researched, explained and interpreted the difficult history of Germany, his native land, out of which he was driven. He has served peace by building bridges of understanding between times and peoples and in his life's work has presented in a balanced way the always controversial historical presence of Jews in German politics, business, culture and science."
For someone with a first-hand experience of Nazi persecution, Stern takes a decidedly scientific and historical approach to the Holocaust, arguing that some works about it, such as Schindler's List, trivialize the horror by offering little context and historical understanding. He also emphasizes that others were the victims of Nazism. For him it seems most important that, as he told Spiegel magazine this week, in this century "the degradation of another person belongs to the worst that can happen. I mean not only in the brutal forms but also the elementary and unspectacular form of degradation: that one d sn't even care about understanding the other."
At the Sunday ceremony, Polish foreign minister Bronislaw Geremek, who is also a historian, will introduce and speak about Stern.
