The Bruno Kreisky Prize for the Political Book is awarded annually by the Karl Renner Institute in cooperation with the social democratic educational organisation. In the spirit of Bruno Kreisky's life's work, this prize honours political literature that stands up for freedom, equality, social justice, solidarity and tolerance. In addition to the main prize, prizes are also awarded for a journalistic oeuvre, recognition prizes and a publishing prize.

The 2014 award winners at a glance:

Main prize for the political book 2014: 
Najem Wali "Baghdad Marlboro", Carl Hanser Verlag, 2014.

Prize for the journalistic oeuvre: Gudrun Harrer 
The internationally recognised Middle East expert is being honoured with the Bruno Kreisky Prize for her well-founded publications as an author and journalist, with which she has made a significant contribution to understanding events in the Arab world.

Recognition prizes: 
Peter Ulrich Lehner: "Persecution, resistance and the fight for freedom in Hernals. Events, figures, places, traces in a Viennese workers" district", Mandelbaum Verlag, 2014.
Johann Skocek: "Mister Austria. The life of the club secretary Norbert Lopper. Footballer. Concentration camp prisoner. Cosmopolitan", Falter Verlag, 2014.

Prize for special publishing achievements: 
As a specialist for literature from the European East, the Carinthian Wieser publishing house was honoured with the 2014 prize for special publishing achievements.

The award ceremony took place on 9 March 2015 at Vienna City Hall. Read the speeches below.

Laudatory speech by Hannes Swoboda (jury chairman) on the main prize
NAJEM WALI : BAGHDAD MARLBORO

©Peter Henisch

At the beginning of his work, Najem Wali quotes - with programmatic intent - Italo Calvino from "The Invisible Cities": In the face of hell, there are only "two ways of not suffering from it. The first is easy for many: to accept hell and become so much a part of it that one no longer sees it. The second is risky and requires constant attention and a willingness to learn: to seek and learn to recognise who and what is not hell in the midst of hell, and to give it duration and space."
That sounds somewhat more optimistic than Adorno's dictum from Minima Moralia:
"There is no right life in the wrong one." However, it corresponds to another commandment, also from Adorno, when he says: "The almost insoluble task is to allow neither the power of others nor one's own powerlessness to make one stupid"!

This is precisely what Najem Wali is concerned with: how can one survive in hell as a human being?
On the one hand, it is about the hell in which the various "Frankensteins" (Saddam Hussein, Ghadafi etc.), as Najem Wali described them in an interview, reign. And then it is about the hell of chaos after these "Frankensteins" are overthrown by military interventions from outside.

This interweaving of the various structures of violence is expressed in what Nadjem Wali himself describes as a convoluted story. Killing and being killed are everywhere and reinforce each other: "In this country, I had to choose between the role of the murderer and that of the murdered."
And if you can't decide between the two because you don't feel suitable or ready for either, then you have no choice but to leave this "slaughterhouse", your only option is to flee.

And that is also what Najem Wali himself had to do: leave his home country and go to Germany. Whether it was the war between Iraq and Iran - where the West was on the side of Saddam Hussein(!) - or the two Iraq wars: the violence was always partly caused or supported by the USA and some of America's European allies.
We should never forget this involvement of the "West". And its complicity in the terrorist atrocities that we are currently facing again.“

But it is not just these general developments that Najem Wali sheds light on, it is also the individual, personal consequences of this violence: "They destroyed my dignity and my humanity. I felt so mean. I began to live like a dog whose only concern is to stop being tortured."
These were the effects of torture in Saddam Hussein's prisons. Or the consequences of the torture in prisons such as Abu Ghraib. And this also applies to the militias that emerged from the chaos and continue to emerge anew.

This also has to do with the fact that there are not only soldiers who limit themselves to "doing their duty to the best of their ability". Unfortunately, there are also soldiers who are not content with this: "In short, these are soldiers who compete with God, if they do not even put themselves in his place"! These are the ones who follow the motto: "search and destroy"!
This is the kind of soldier whose courage "is measured by the number of enemies who have died at his hands - peace is a kind of slow suicide for him." He needs war to prove himself.

It is then not far from these soldiers and this attitude to the militias and terrorist organisations that claim God for themselves every day and not only invoke him as judge, but replace him and murder people cruelly. These terrorist groups do not arise out of nothing, but out of the chaos that results from the fall of the "Frankensteins" and foreign interventions. And there are enough weapons in circulation; Austrian Glocks also play a role in Najem Wali's novel.

As I said, "Baghdad Marlboro" is a novel with convoluted stories. But the stories in this exciting novel make it clearer than many historical and political analyses how the unfortunate links between history within this region on the one hand and the region with the USA and Europe on the other led to chaos and violence.
Violence comes from this region, but it was also essentially brought into this region - in the times of colonialism, but still today.
And many of those complicit in this chaos and violence were never brought to trial.

In his "round-up" to his novel, Wali refers to the trial of Bradley Manning, who was charged with treason "while the real murderers sit in their fancy offices in the Pentagon or the White House".
Perhaps they would feel a little guilty, like one of the novel's main characters, Daniel Brooks, if they read Baghdad Marlboro. At the very least, they should feel complicity, but perhaps that's asking too much.

I warmly recommend the book to all of you who have not yet read it and I thank you, Najem Wali, very much for your work. It is sometimes very depressing to read, but I at least found a glimmer of hope for humanity and decency in it.
And perhaps even in the wrong life there is a bit of the right one, a glimmer of love and hope, even in hell. But it would be even better if we could avoid constantly creating new hells. There would be enough material for novels. But until then, we are glad that there are authors like Najem Wali who give us hope - even if only a little.

Laudatory speech by Bernd R. Fragner for the journalistic oeuvre: Gudrun Harrer

©Peter Henisch

It was about 20 or 22 years ago when I first heard or read about Gudrun Harrer: I had already been working for a number of years as a university lecturer at the University of Bamberg, more precisely at what was then called the „Institute for Oriental Studies“. One of our doctoral students at the time had studied at the University of Vienna for two semesters shortly before that, and at some point he put up a clipping from the Austrian daily newspaper „Der Standard“ on the notice board - it was an article featuring Gudrun Harrer. I have to admit, I can't remember what it was actually about. The article was so strikingly good and interesting that it clearly stood out to me compared to the products of the Middle Eastern journalists that are common in Germany. The afficheur, who I immediately questioned, then told me with shining eyes about a very special, indeed extraordinary Middle East specialist who regularly analysed and commented on events in „our“ region in an impressive way in the press organ „Der Standard“, which until then I had only taken cursory notice of, living outside Austria.

A year or two later, I was invited to a late-night panel discussion on ORF - representatives of different denominations had come together for a dialogue, and two outsiders were to accompany the discussion - in addition to myself, Gudrun Harrer, whom I met for the first time in this way. That was an important step for both of us, because now we could also associate a face with each other's names. In 2003, after many years in Germany, my wife and I returned to Vienna rather unexpectedly, and now it all happened in quick succession: we both still consider it a great pleasure to have been friends with Gudrun Harrer ever since. She owed her incredibly deep knowledge of the countries of the Middle East to the fact that she had actually successfully embarked on a philological degree in Oriental Studies (Arabic Studies, Islamic Studies, Turkology), which she later topped with a doctorate in Political Science. This profound academic education was - as already mentioned - a prerequisite for her extraordinary depth of knowledge. Other prerequisites lie in her personality, above all in her joyful curiosity for - yes, actually I can only say: for everything.

I really mean „everything“! She is familiar with forests, game and hunting from her childhood in a forester's house, the world of music from her early studies in Detmold and Milan, and her stay in Milan at the latest has shaped her into a breathtakingly versatile gastrosopher who not only philosophises excellently about good food and drink and also enjoys it with knowledge and pleasure, but also prepares it herself to the highest quality and, together with her good and long-time friend Christa Fuchs, has made it accessible in valuable cookery books and also prepared it for cultural studies.

In 1993, she joined the „Standard“ as foreign policy editor. Five years later, she became head of the foreign policy department. In 2003, Mandelbaum-Verlag published her book „Kriegs-Gründe. An attempt to analyse the Iraq war“. This cemented her international reputation as one of the best Middle East experts in European journalism (and beyond), and since her doctorate in 2006 with the dissertation „Dismantling the Iraqi Nuclear Programme. The Inspections of the International Atomic Energy Agency in Iraq 1991-1998“ (now published by Routledge), she has also finally joined the ranks of those we cannot avoid consulting when it comes to the connections between politics, nuclear armament and nuclear development.
In 2006, she acted as special envoy of the Austrian EU Presidency on behalf of the Federal Government and as chargé d'affaires of the Austrian Embassy in Baghdad.

She is a gifted academic teacher: since 2005 she has been teaching „Modern Arabic History“ at the Institute for Oriental Studies at the University of Vienna and since 2007 at the Diplomatic Academy „History and Politics of the Middle East“.

She has also been managing editor of „her“ newspaper since 2007, and 2007 was the year in which she was awarded the „Press Prize of the Felix Ermacora Human Rights Award“.

Today she stands before us as the winner of the „Bruno Kreisky Prize“ for her journalistic oeuvre - and I very much hope that she is just as happy about it herself as we all are with her!

This complete work needs to be briefly characterised once again:

I don't know how many pages a hypothetical book publication of all her journalistic reports, analyses and commentaries from Der Standard and other media would contain.

An early publication is due to her orientalist studies: „Zur Wiedergabe arabischer Wörter in den deutschsprachigen Medien: Problematik, Praxis und Lösungsvorschläge“ (Frankfurt am Main/Vienna 1993).

I have already mentioned the „Reasons for War“ from 2003. In 2014, the most up-to-date book on the increasingly complicated situation in the Middle East was published in German - „Nahöstlicher Irrgarten“, in which she opens up a highly convoluted labyrinth that probably no one else could describe at the moment. All the reviews I have come across have emphasised the information gained from this book. Some readers moan cautiously about the fact that this book has to be read with great attention in order to understand what it says. I can only say that Gudrun Harrer herself, the complexity of the Middle Eastern turmoil and, not least, the reader's need for information clearly deserve this attention!

I will only mention your essays and contributions categorically.

However, it is also thanks to Gudrun Harrer's wide range of interests and a little bit of our personal friendship that I would like to emphasise two other books, only briefly mentioned earlier, as part of her oeuvre to be honoured today: The book „Als Oma im Keller Quargel aß - oder: Unser nicht alltäglich Brot - auch ein Kochbuch“, published in 1999 together with Christa Fuchs, followed in 2005 by „Besoffene Kapuziner und andere Rezepturen zur kulinarischen Verbesserung Mitteleuropas“, both published by Mandelbaum-Verlag.

Gudrun - Chapeau!

Speech by the main prize winner Najem Wali

  ©Peter Henisch

Ladies and gentlemen, dear friends,

On a sunny winter's day, which with its silvery light looked more like an autumn day, I received the news of the jury's decision in the middle of Manhattan/New York. You can hardly imagine how impressed I was. The news left me speechless with joy. Not just because it came as such a surprise, or because I was travelling on the other side of the Atlantic on a very unusual trip, but for two other reasons: Firstly, because it came after a day of travelling that had been dominated by the excellent novel. I was preparing its sequel and was in New York to explore the mood of the book, and I absolutely had to visit Fort Meade in Maryland, 200 kilometres from New York, the military base and headquarters of the feared and opaque NSA. This is also where the trial of Bradley - now Chelsea - Manning took place. Anyone who has read the novel knows that the former Marine who once served in Baghdad and later leaked hundreds of documents to the Wikileaks website, thanks to which we now know what crimes the Marines committed in Iraq, is not just a name that adorns the novel's subtitle. Without him, the novel would have ended very differently than it does.

A truly adventurous journey, in which my travelling companion in the car at the checkpoint at the entrance to the base showed no little courage. She deserves my sincere appreciation for this and I take my hat off to her, even though we were ultimately unable to enter the fortress city because only its 100,000 or so inhabitants, almost all of whom work for the NSA, are allowed to do so. Even the museum, which we used as a pretext for our visit to the already intimidating guards, even the museum, which like all other museums in the world should actually be open to the public, can only be entered if one of the inhabitants of the fortress vouches for you. Imagine that for a moment: This failed trip took place on 12/13 December 2014. And the very next day, in flat 5f on 25th Street in Manhattan, I learnt of the jury's decision. How could I not be speechless?

What was even more surprising, however, was that just two hours later I had an appointment with Annie Kelemen, an old lady who also has a story that overlaps with mine. On 13 May 1939, at the age of 14, she was taken along with other Jewish children on the last Kindertransport from Vienna Westbahnhof to London, thus escaping certain death in one of the Nazi extermination camps where her parents were killed. That day was the last time she saw her parents. Annie is an acquaintance of my travelling companion's mother and had just celebrated her 90th birthday. She would proudly tell me that she was committed to human rights and had only one goal in mind: The liberation of a Marine prisoner who was being held in complete isolation in solitary confinement, without a computer, radio, newspaper or television. The censor decides on her letters and she is only allowed to leave her cell for two hours twice a week. Her name is Chelsea Manning or something like that. Then Annie spread out leaflets demanding "Freedom for Manning" on the table of the restaurant "Il Posto" on the corner of 2nd Avenue and 18th Street - without realising that the person smilingly listening to her and quietly murmuring to himself "more interwoven stories" was none other than the author of a novel that had been awarded the Kreisky Prize just two hours before the meeting. And that this novel is a de facto homage to this prisoner, formerly a man, now a woman, whose release she is campaigning for - what a coincidence!

Since the moment Kreisky's sun rose over the window fronts and rooftops of New York on that sunny December day, I have been wondering what actually connects me to this man, that I am receiving this award at this exact moment? Yes, my life is a series of overlaps, if, like Musil, we avoid the word coincidence. But what overlaps connect me with such a great man as Kreisky?

After hearing about the prize, after the joy, the elation, even the initial excitement, after I had given Annie a farewell letter to Manning, which I had written in the restaurant and in which I told her that she was not alone and that an Iraqi had written a novel bearing her name and that this very novel had just been honoured with a prize, which in turn bore the name of a man who had worked tirelessly for peace, after all this I finally slowly came round again. I slowly began to put together pieces of information to form a picture of Kreisky. Of course, like everyone in my generation, I was familiar with Kreisky. He was a constant mediator in the Arab-Israeli conflict, a friend of the Palestinians, the first ever to call for a two-state solution with an Israeli and a Palestinian state that would recognise each other and live together in peace. Of course, this was pure utopia, but it was precisely the power of this utopia that made him a lost symbol of peace in our region.

But now I wanted to create a more comprehensive picture of him, including his youth. I had only noticed him as a sixty-year-old chancellor. What first caught my eye was his arrest in 1936 for his political activities against the Austrofascist regime. He was 25 years old at the time and spent a year behind bars. I tried to imagine him in prison and also in the time before, as a politically active high school student. And instead of immediately thinking of myself, who had also started my career as an activist against a nationalist-fascist regime when I was at secondary school, I first thought of another young man, Hans Scholl, who was just 23 years old when he was arrested. Two courageous young men who had resisted the dictatorship. Kreisky was lucky that Hitler's armies had not yet completed the annexation of Austria, otherwise he would have suffered the same fate as Scholl and his sister Sophie, who was three years younger: execution by guillotine. Hadn't I myself been 23 years old when I was thrown into the torture cells of the Ba'th Party and thus of a dictator for whom no one even shed a tear when he was overthrown?

Scholl was killed. The other two young men, Kreisky and Wali, however, survived and went into exile to continue fighting against the dictatorship from there. To give their shackled fellow citizens a voice. I wrote all my novels, all my interwoven stories, in exile, I learnt languages there. The dictatorship saw exile as a punishment, but instead it became a fertile field for new creations for me, an open novel project. And didn't Kreisky do exactly the same thing? Exile offered him space for activities and a draft vision for the Austria of the future. Eighteen years after the expulsion of the Nazis, he took over the Foreign Ministry and a quarter of a century after the end of Hitler, he realised his dream and became Chancellor of Austria. Politics was a project for him, an open vision, he worked on a new Austria. Is it even possible to imagine this country today without the achievements of this exile who returned full of hope?

But wait - Kreisky was by no means just a man of politics. In his magnificent novel "Time to Live and Time to Die", published in 1954, another peace activist, the man who laid the foundations for modern, anti-militarist world literature, the Osnabrück-based "son of the Peace of Westphalia" Erich Maria Remarque, tells the story of Ernst Graeber, a 23-year-old soldier who comes home from the Eastern Front to Berlin in the spring of 1944. It is the last year of the war and everything is in ruins. His parents" house is no longer standing. Graeber wanders aimlessly through Berlin and accidentally meets Elisabeth Kruse, a Jewish girl whose family was murdered by the Gestapo. She is also wandering through the ruins of Berlin. The two fall in love after the destruction brings them together and decide to marry. I beg your pardon, some people will ask. The war is still raging. And you, Graeber, can't think of anything else to do but get married? Yes, that's what it's all about. Taking a stand. To send out signals. Bombs fall on Berlin. Hitler gathers his youthful standard bearers around him, a bloody regime of terror rages with destructive fury - and Graeber wants to get married! Peter Weiß, another peace activist and contemporary of Remarque and Kreisky, who certainly met Kreisky in their joint exile in Sweden, would certainly describe Graeber's behaviour as the "aesthetics of resistance". And rightly so. Graeber, who, like the soldier Daniel Brooks from Baghdad Marlboro, is plagued by a guilty conscience, seeks answers from his former professor Pohlmann.

And you know what?

Ever since I received the news of the award, I have thought that this imaginary professor from Remarque's novel, with all his wise judgements, his unwavering attitude, his love of truth, is no longer an imaginary person, as I still believed when I first read the novel in the seventies. No, since 14 December 2014, he has been very clearly in front of my eyes. It is none other than the wise old Kreisky with his progressive politics, his clever ideas, to whom we still turn for advice, however far away he may seem today. My Viennese companion told me how he became a second father to her, who had no father. When he was on television, she was as happy as a child and how often she would have a silent dialogue with him before falling asleep!

Now you will say: Oh, here comes this Wali with another one of his interwoven, convoluted stories, he's pulling something out of his fingers and drawing us two completely different pictures of Kreisky: one as a young man, as Hans Scholl's soul mate, and one with a reference to Pohlmann, Remarque's professor! I can only reply: But why not? Freedom fighters like Kreisky live scattered all over the world, at different times in different places and belong to different ethnicities, nations, skin colours and religions. Men and women united by the spirit of freedom. They fought against evil, went to prison or into exile, some even died in the process, and they are not very numerous, but they will go down in the memory of mankind. Today, gruelling wars are raging everywhere. In the Middle East, Africa, at the gates of Europe, the drums of war are being beaten everywhere. Everyone is calling for arms, inciting war, including fellow writers. The mood is reminiscent of the First World War. Some openly denounce it, others sit back and do nothing. How much we need peace activists of Kreisky's calibre in this turmoil of battle!

One more story, the last one. It happened as follows: A year ago, I discovered by chance that Goethe's works had not been translated from German into Arabic at all. Of all people, the author of the "West-Eastern Divan", this collection of rhyming poems inspired by the works of the Persian poet Hafiz, Goethe, whose Divan is a mixture of Western and Middle Eastern culture, German-Persian language and Islamic-Christian religion, who was even interested in pre-Islamic Arabic poetry, especially the so-called al-Muallakat - all his works translated into Arabic were translated from French! What an irony! When I searched for Kreisky's biography on Wikipedia, I found that it was available in 38 languages, with the exception of one: Arabic. Of all languages, there is no entry in Arabic for this friend of the Arabs, one of the first politicians in the world to campaign for a just solution to the Middle East conflict? Is that because he is of Jewish origin? Or is it because anyone who calls for peace, for a two-state solution, is a thorn in the side of warmongers and racist agitators?

On my last trip to Baltimore, which, according to statistics from the US Federal Police, has the eighth highest crime rate among US cities due to the gang wars among the drug cartels - strangely enough for a city that is only a few kilometres away from Fort Meade and the NSA! In Baltimore, which resembles a ghost town with its deserted neighbourhoods, you come across "Red Emma's" in the north of the city, in the university district, an idyllic oasis of peace, a bistro with an adjoining bookshop and event room where readings are held every evening. Thanks to Google, the biography of "Red Emma", the anarchist whose struggle caused an uproar throughout America at the time, is easily accessible. One sentence from her has stuck in my mind in particular, which is why I have served up this interwoven story to you without any warning. The quote is: "There is no greater crime than ignorance". Look with me: now they are trying to erase Kreisky's memory in Arabic. The language of one of the two parties to the conflict ignores him. what a crime! As in the Greek tragedies, according to Aristotle, the philosophy of ironic drama does not arise from the weaknesses in the personality of the protagonist, but precisely from his strengths. People do not find themselves in a dilemma because of their faults, but because of their merits. The irony of fate is precisely what strengthens the depth of personality in our eyes, in contrast to what those who penalise them for their merits assume!

All of these are interwoven human destinies. Can you blame me if I don't tell the story in a straight line, but always interwoven and intertwined, so that some people get dizzy with confusion? Doesn't that remind you of a favourite dance from your childhood, the waltz? A reader wrote to me a few days ago, not realising that I would be giving a speech in the capital of the waltz, Vienna: "In the end, I saw you as a dancer who asked me to dance and from whom I let myself be led away. I'm thinking of a waltz like the one I loved in my childhood and youth, not a straightforward dance, but full of twists and turns and dragging steps. It sends you into ecstasy and the dancer certainly has to like the dancer. He, on the other hand, must have complete mastery of the dance so that both can surrender to it. And since the entire hall is traversed in length and width during the dance, the dancer gets to know the space well, as if she is engaging in visual mediation or measuring the area. That's exactly how I felt when I read your book. Now that I am writing these lines to you, I am thinking about how I could not pause while reading it, and I can say that I got to know you and your country in the same way as waltz dancers get to know a hall. Of course, I only remember dates, names and events in a confused way, but that doesn't matter, because in the end you can understand much more on the other level than through your head."

The waltz dancer now bows to you, this was his last spin here with you tonight. I would like to thank the jury once again: it is so wonderful that you have chosen me. This prize is not only an honour and recognition for me and my works, but above all an incentive and a mandate to continue writing, to continue working for international understanding and peace.

And also an opportunity for me to learn to waltz well, if you don't mind?

Translated from the Arabic by Nicola Abbas