Overview
- The Bavarian Publishers' Association and the city of Munich announced the award on Thursday and set the €10,000 prize with a ceremony on 24 November in the Große Aula at LMU Munich where Cécile Wajsbrot will deliver the laudatio.
- The prize jury praised Geipel for historical accuracy, intellectual independence and responsible judgment and framed Buchenwald as both a historical site and a political space of contested memory.
- Geipel’s book, Landschaft ohne Zeugen, uses archives, documents and biographies to show how layers of interpretation have shaped what is visible in the camp’s history and what has been silenced.
- The jury argued the book matters for the present because it traces how experiences of dictatorship and state‑directed forms of remembrance have lingering effects that can be mobilized by authoritarian and nationalist forces.
- Coverage places Geipel’s work in the context of her earlier writing on the DDR and her personal background as a former elite athlete with family ties to both the SS and the Stasi, and it notes Buchenwald’s differing memory politics in East and West Germany as key context for her study.