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Jürgen Kaube
Photo: Jörg Carstensen / picture alliance / dpa
The journalist and author Jürgen Kaube was awarded the German Non-Fiction Prize 2021 for his description of the ways in which the philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831) thought.
The 58-year-old Kaube, as co-editor of the “Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung” responsible for the feature section of the paper, received the 25,000 euro award from the Foundation for Book Culture and Reading Promotion of the German Book Trade Association on Monday in Berlin.
"Jürgen Kaube thoroughly does away with the genre of heroic narration in his biography of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel," said the jury's statement. He describes the philosopher as elegantly and ironically "as a man who perceives and thinks through the contradictions of the period of upheaval around 1800, and yet again and again fails to recognize their revolutionary potential, for example when it comes to women's claims to freedom." At Kaube, intellectual history is cultural history, "and it was Hegel's strength to surrender himself to all areas of knowledge with a whole person and thereby to doubt his own knowledge."
With the award, the Börsenverein wants to honor outstanding non-fiction books written in German that provide impetus for social debate.
The prize is endowed with a total of 42,500 euros, the seven other authors in the final round will each receive 2,500 euros.
Also the science journalist Mai Thi Nguyen-Kim with her book “The smallest common reality” and the ethnologist Heike Behrend for “The Incarnation of a Monkey.
The Autobiography of Ethnographic Research «recently received the Leipzig Book Fair prize in the non-fiction / essay category.
cpa / dpa