By Porter Anderson, Editor in Chief | @Porter_Anderson
A recipient of the Jan Michalski Literary Prize 2021
Our Publish perspectives Readers will remember our report from June, which stated that the Polish-American journalist, historian and essayist Anne Applebaum had won this year’s Peace Prize of the German Book Trade, endowed with 25,000 euros.
This morning (12 August), the German Publishers and Booksellers Association, which manages the programme, announced that the Russian historian and human rights activist had been selected to deliver the eulogy for Applebaum.
The broadcast is scheduled for October 20 (Frankfurt Sunday) at 10:45 a.m. CEST and is expected to be broadcast live on ARD television from Frankfurt’s Paulskirche.
Publish perspectives Readers know Irina Lasarevna Scherbakova, among other things, through the award she received from Vera Michalski in November 2021: the Jan Michalski Literary Prize, which was awarded to Scherbakova and the human rights organization Memorial International together with Alena Kozlova, Nikolai Mikhailov and Irina Ostrovskaya.
Related article: An exposé about the “Eastern workers” wins the Swiss Jan Michalski Prize, worth 50,000 Swiss francs. Image: Fondation Jan Michalski
Scherbakova was born to Jewish parents in Moscow. After completing her doctorate, she worked as a translator of German-language fiction and as an editor of literary magazines Soviet literature And Literaturnaya Gazeta.
In the early 1980s, she recorded interviews with Gulag survivors and in 1987 was a founding member of Memorial International, an organization that won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2022. Memorial advocated a process of documenting, investigating and coming to terms with the crimes of Stalinism in the former Soviet Union.
Today, Scherbakova is one of the best-known human rights activists in Russia and the former Soviet Union.
From 1996, she worked for ten years as a professor at the Russian State University for the Humanities in Moscow. In addition to her work on the Gulag and Soviet camps on German soil, her research focused on oral history, totalitarianism, Stalinism, and memory politics and cultural memory in Russia.
Scherbakova’s most important works in German include:
- Only a miracle could save us. Life and survival under Stalin’s terror (Only a miracle could save us: life and survival under Stalin’s terror), 2000
- The Russia Reflex: Insights into a relationship crisis (The Russia reflex: insights into a relationship crisis 2015
- My father’s hands. A Russian family history (My Father’s Hands: A Russian Family Story), 2017
Related article: Anne Applebaum wins the Peace Prize of the German Book Trade. Image: Anne Applebaum
After the Russian invasion of Ukraine and the dissolution of Memorial International, Scherbakova left her homeland and moved abroad. Today she lives in Berlin and Israel and is chairwoman of Memorial Zukunft, an exile organization founded in Berlin.
Many of the films and books based on Scherbakova’s research have won awards, and her work as a scientist has taken her on several extensive research trips to Berlin, Vienna, Salzburg and Jena, among others.
She is a member of the Board of Trustees of the Buchenwald Memorial and a member of the International Council of the Berlin-based Topography of Terror Foundation and the non-profit organization Action Reconciliation Service for Peace eV (Action Reconciliation Service for Peace).
Scherbakova’s awards include the Marion Dönhoff Prize 2022. On this occasion, Federal Chancellor Olaf Scholz gave the laudatory speech for the award winner.
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