Reasons of the jury

The jury appointed by the City of Oldenburg has awarded the City of Oldenburg’s Carl-von-Ossietzky Prize for the year 2024 to the historian, journalist and Pulitzer Prize winner Anne Applebaum.

By this vote the jury wishes to honour an outstanding intellectual who combines scientific and journalistic expertise in her concept of the publicly visible discussion of contemporary history. She has courageously stood up for democracy and human rights with a global perspective and spoken words of warning in the very spirit of Carl von Ossietzky. For her scientific and journalistic work she managed to open up sources in Russia that are no longer accessible these days. Anne Applebaum’s books, articles and interviews, in which she makes committed statements on current topics of politics and contemporary affairs, have met with much international resonance. For many years she has contributed to numerous renowned newspapers and magazines. She was a member of the editorial board of the Washington Post and later of the magazine “The Atlantic”. As a journalist and contemporary historian she is one of the most important intellectual voices of the present.

She was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for her book “Gulag”, in which she gave a comprehensive description of the Soviet penal camp system. Another influential contribution to addressing the suffering under communist dictatorship in the Soviet Union was her book “Red Famine”. She won the Duff-Cooper Prize for this work, in which she deals with the systematic mass crimes against the Ukrainians in the Soviet era.

In 2021 her book “Twilight of Democracy: The Seductive Lure of Authoritarianism“ appeared, in which she investigates the question what makes authoritarian and illiberal forms of power so attractive for many people, and why democracy as a form of government has come under such pressure world-wide. She uses a series of examples – from Trump via Johnson and Orban to the PiS government in Poland – to examine the intellectual pioneers of authoritarian rule and analyzes the reasons why people become receptive to authoritarian and anti-democratic policies. Closely related to this are her studies on the communicative strategies used to make anti-democratic political decisions acceptable to the majority.

Anne Applebaum, who was born in Washington in 1964, is an American and a Polish citizen. She accompanied the campaign for the 2023 parliamentary elections in Poland with critical and sharp-witted analyses and comments.

Anne Applebaum also warned early against Putin and his aggressive anti-Western course. From the very beginning she has unambiguously demanded support for Ukraine against the aggressor in order to send a clear message to Russia. And also in this context her qualified perspective and journalistic competence have been a crucial contribution to the public debate on the Russian war against Ukraine. She calls for the preservation of the rule-based world order and encourages particularly Europe to conduct a clear security policy to ensure peace.

The jury consists of the historian Professor Dr. Dagmar Freist (Carl von Ossietzky University Oldenburg), the journalist and former director of public broadcasting station NDR Schleswig-Holstein Friedrich-Wilhelm Kramer (Hamburg), the journalist and former „Tagesthemen“ news presenter Thomas Roth (Berlin), the journalist and author Shelly Kupferberg and the historian Professor Dr. Martin Sabrow (Potsdam), Senior Fellow at the Leibniz Centre for Contemporary History.