February 24th is not only the day of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, it is also the birthday of the Leipzig writer Erich Loest (“Nikolaikirche”), who lived from 1926 to 2013 and in whose memory the Erich Loest prize is awarded. This year it went to the writer, publicist and former GDR competitive athlete Ines Geipel. The laudatory speech was held by the Dresden writer and Büchner Prize winner Durs Grünbein.
Rarely have a prize and its designated prizewinner been the subject of severe published criticism. A tendentious MDR documentary and a similar “Spiegel” report last year must be read as part of a long-running campaign against Ines Geipel – a campaign that shows how highly controversial the interpretation and processing of GDR history is.
For a long time, Geipel was chairman of a doping victim support association. In particular, the historian Ilko-Sascha Kowalczuk, who specializes in dealing with the GDR, had tried to discredit the award ceremony and the prizewinner in an open letter beforehand. His attempt to influence the board of trustees, laudator and jury in advance also seemed encroaching because his request to “postpone the award ceremony” until the allegations about Geipel had been clarified, “in order to avert damage to the Loest Prize”, was so theatrical was formulated. As if it weren’t a literary prize but a historian’s prize for coming to terms with the GDR dictatorship. As if the Media Foundation of the Leipziger Sparkasse, which awards the €10,000 prize, were an Orwellian Ministry of Truth.
The Erich Loest Prize is a literary prize. In the case of Ines Geipel, he rewards a form of reappraisal that is courageous and has literary contours, but above all it is socially relevant because it tells “history based on case histories” in the manner of a sociological-psychoanalytic reportage essay. This is what Grünbein emphasized in his laudatory speech. For Geipel, history is a space of experience that she measures and clears out. Geipel’s topics, namely “competitive sport with the breaking point of doping, education under socialism, violence in the family, the standardization of the body, childhood and generational patterns, politics of memory, censorship and depression, most recently the GDR’s cosmos project, space travel as part of the arms race”. , according to Grünbein, a network of connections which, according to the will of their agents and perpetrators, would have best remained hidden to this day. He himself, said Grünbein, observed from the massive reactions to Geipel that the “Restoration East” was in full swing: “The time seems favorable for a certain GDR revisionism”.
Grünbein also criticized the media that played along. He called Geipel a “researcher who reliably arouses the jealousy of journalists. No wonder it’s always journalists who oppose her. The individual does not have it easy when he is investigating on his own.” The ceremony for Ines Geipel on the media campus of the Villa Ida in Leipzig was also a time of mourning for the GDR civil rights activist Werner Schulz, who died last autumn and was a member of the jury for the Loest Prize.
In her acceptance speech, Geipel formulated three specific points that were important to her beyond the public debate about her person: First, she reminded the public broadcaster MDR of their responsibility not to discredit topics such as the GDR sports victims through “disinformation”. Secondly, she described it as scandalous that a historian like Ilko Sascha-Kowalczuk, who is “tirelessly involved in campaigns”, as a researcher currently on leave in the Stasi records authority, will soon be given access to victim files again. Geipel spoke of the fact that victim files had to be “bulletproof”. This alluded to a 2019 incident showing that the Records Authority has a confidentiality issue with victim files.
Third, Geipel suggested that the city and university of Leipzig create a chair for outlawed artists that should bear the name of Erich Loests. Linde Rotta, Erich Loest’s widow, then recalled that “Erich” always had more enemies than friends. Loest, who was imprisoned in Bautzen for seven years, knew, like Walter Kempowski, how harsh the socialist regime was. And also about his cliques, who are still in competition with the renegades for the sovereignty of interpretation. As sad as it is: Ines Geipel appears – precisely because of the hostility she experiences – as the ideal-typical award winner in the sense of the namesake.
