Pilgrimage to the Low Tide of Reason
A Speech in Honour of Gerd Koenen and Mikhail Ryklin
Deutsche Fassung
Abstract
This year's Leipzig Book Prize for European Understanding honours Frankfurt historian Gerd Koenen for his diagnosis of the German "Russia complex" and the Moscow philosopher Mikhail Ryklin for his trial dossier "By right of Being Stronger". Koenen resurrects affinities between German nationalism and Bolshevism, while Ryklin shows how civil rationality in Russia is being dismantled by legal logic. For speaker Kerstin Holm, both also make clear why Russia seeks to be a cultural part of Europe and at the same time is forever distancing itself from it.
(Osteuropa 4/2007, pp. 101–108)