Peace Prize and the Ukraine War: Harald Welzer’s permanent error

opinion Awarding of the Peace Prize

The permanent error of Harald Welzer

Status: 09:25 a.m | Reading time: 2 minutes

Harald Welzer vents at the lit.Cologne

Source: pa/dpa/Rolf Vennenbernd

You can listen to our WELT podcasts here

In order to display embedded content, your revocable consent to the transmission and processing of personal data is required, since the providers of the embedded content as third-party providers require this consent [In diesem Zusammenhang können auch Nutzungsprofile (u.a. auf Basis von Cookie-IDs) gebildet und angereichert werden, auch außerhalb des EWR]. By setting the switch to “on”, you agree to this (which can be revoked at any time). This also includes your consent to the transfer of certain personal data to third countries, including the USA, in accordance with Art. 49 (1) (a) GDPR. You can find more information about this. You can withdraw your consent at any time via the switch and via privacy at the bottom of the page.

When the Ukrainian writer Serhij Zhadan received the Peace Prize, there were standing ovations and applause lasting several minutes. The sociologist Harald Welzer didn’t like that. He criticized the confusion of Germany as a war party. It is he himself who constantly confuses something.

EOne has to give credit to Harald Welzer: since the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the prominent sociologist has not only talked about reason and decency, he has also done so openly. After Serhij Zhadan was awarded the Peace Prize of the German Book Trade, Welzer criticized the long standing ovations that the Ukrainian writer and musician received in Frankfurt’s Paulskirche – which, by the way, I was there, were actually extraordinarily long and fully deserved.

Germany is not a war party, Welzer commented at the LitCologne literature festival, “but a third party with all the possibilities that this opens up for the benefit of Ukraine”. “This permanent confusion” but leads to an “ethical overexertion”. Welzer’s thing, on the other hand, is the intellectual underexertion and callous lack of spirit, with which he himself constantly confuses something: that Ukraine is not waging a war against Russia, but is defending itself against an aggressor. Or, to paraphrase Zhadan: “We don’t support our army because we want war, but because we absolutely want peace.”

also read

For Welzer, this is “not a contribution to civilisation, but part of a decivilizing process”. For a German intellectual like him, civilization means admonishing wolf and lamb alike to be peaceful – and telling the victims of a war of annihilation what they have to do. For their own “good”, of course. After all, Harald Welzer knows that what serves the well-being of Ukraine is not something that some Ukrainians know.

But he is not a closeted Putin supporter, just like Jürgen Habermas or Alice Schwarzer. Their peers only have a grudge against the Ukrainians for not capitulating, so that the Germans no longer have to worry about the world war and the price of gas. That they will not allow themselves to be slaughtered and driven out without a fight in order to receive the crocodile-tearing care of immoral moralists. That they are not as cowardly as themselves. The Welzers will not forgive the Ukrainians for this war.