Masha Gessen, who began contributing to the New Yorker in 2014 and became a staff writer in 2017, was set to travel to Bremen, Germany, to accept an award on November 15, 2023, named after political philosopher Hannah Arendt, whose writing on totalitarianism made her a celebrated thinker of the 20th century.
According to the Hannah Arendt Association for Political Thought, which confers the prize, the two sponsors of the event, the Heinrich Boll Foundation (HBS), associated with the Green Party, had pulled out, and the administrators of Bremen’s town hall withdrew the venue for the prize ceremony, citing Masha Gessen’s December 9, 2023, New Yorker essay titled “In the Shadow of the Holocaust,” a reflection from Berlin on what’s happened since the October 7 Hamas attack on Israel.
In their critique of Germany’s policies relating to Israel, Gessen also looks at the nation’s laws governing Holocaust memorials and draws comparisons between the suffering of Palestinians in Gaza and that of Jews living under Nazi occupation in Eastern Europe.
Gessen wrote, ”Berlin never stops reminding you of what happened there. Several museums examine totalitarianism and the Holocaust; the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe takes up an entire city block. In a sense, though, these larger structures are the least of them. The memorials that sneak up on you—the monument to burned books, which is literally underground, and the thousands of Stolpersteine, or “stumbling stones,” built into sidewalks to commemorate individual Jews, Sinti, Roma, homosexuals, mentally ill people, and others murdered by the Nazis—reveal the pervasiveness of the evils once committed in this place.”
“Presumably, the more fitting term ‘ghetto’ would have drawn fire for comparing the predicament of besieged Gazans to that of ghettoised Jews,” Gessen stated. “It also would have given us the language to describe what is happening in Gaza now. The ghetto is being liquidated.”
Gessen perceived the politics of memory in Europe to conceal what we see in Israel and Gaza today.
Gessen is still scheduled to receive the Hannah Arendt Prize for political philosophy, according to a story in the German newspaper Die Zeit. But with the ceremony now set for Saturday rather than Friday as originally intended, the dynamics have changed significantly. Whether Gessen will be present at the ceremony, who will present it, what will be presented, and whether other guests still want to attend are all unknown at this time.
Meanwhile, the German-Israeli Society Bremen said: “The recent remarks made by Masha Gessen in an essay in the New Yorker have made it clear that this would be a tribute to a person whose thinking stands in stark contrast to Hannah Arendt’s thinking. Such an honour would run counter to the necessary resolute stance against growing antisemitism.”
HBS stated that Gessen implied in their essay that Israel wanted to “liquidate Gaza like a Nazi ghetto” and that “we reject this statement.”
