Zukiswa Wanner Did Not Need To Return Her Goethe Medal

Some writers would consider it an honor to win an award whose past recipients have included Ian McEwan, John Le Carré, Imre Kertész, Michel Tournier, and other world-famous literary figures.

But last week, South African author and publisher Zukiswa Wanner, who in 2020 became the first African woman to receive the nonprofit Goethe-Institut’s coveted Goethe Medal, announced her decision to give back the prize.

In a March 6 statement, Wanner explained that she objects to having received an award from the cultural wing of a government that is “on the wrong side of genocide again,” just as it was in the 1940s. Germany and the United States, you see, are the biggest arms exporters to Israel. They back Tel Aviv against Hamas.

The institute, which is based in Munich and has offices around the world, has been giving out the award since 1954. According to the organization’s president, Carola Lentz, the idea is to recognize non-Germans who have helped improve cultural relations among peoples and nations.

Given all the competition, Wanner might have been flattered to receive the award. Writers around the world have spread cross-cultural awareness in ways large and small. Even if we confine ourselves to South Africa, the Goethe-Institut’s selection committee was not starved for choices.

Alan Paton is no longer with us, but Wanner’s beloved country has no shortage of fine authors writing in English or Afrikaans. Lauren Beukes, Breyten Breytenbach, Ken Barris, Rian Malan, and Nobel Prize winner J.M. Coetzee (who now lives in Australia) are just a few contemporaries who spring to mind.

They have raised the international stature of their homeland’s literature and have, in their own ways, fostered understanding and empathy among readers worldwide who might otherwise have believed in a cartoon caricature of South Africa. All would have been defensible choices.

The Goethe-Institute passed over the white names and chose to honor a writer who is both a woman and a member of the country’s black majority. But the loudest objection to this honor has not come from racists and misogynists, but from Wanner herself.

One might make the obvious point that the staff of the Goethe-Institut do not set Germany’s foreign policy, but never mind. The government in Berlin pays their salaries, hence its decisions and actions taint everything they say and do. You might ask Wanner whether she thinks the world would be a better place if regimes gave grants and awards only to people who agree with their opinions on foreign affairs. Based on her public statements, she does not appear to have thought things through to that point.

“On the wrong side of genocide again” is one of the more curious Orwellian constructions that we’ve heard in the months since October 7. Through this rhetorical sleight of hand, Wanner equates support for Israel in her fight for survival against Hamas terrorists—a campaign that Hamas deliberately provoked through its invasion, massacre, and abduction of civilians—with the Nazi genocide that claimed the lives of six million Jewish men, women, and children.

Wanner is not a historian or a legal scholar, and she seems to have little interest in distinctions of even the simplest kind. To her, Israel pursuing coordinated military strikes against a terrorist organization that launched an unprovoked attack against civilians last year, and killed an estimated 1,200 men, women, and children, is on par morally with Nazi Germany racially classifying civilians, deporting them en masse to concentration camps, and murdering six million in gas chambers and through overwork, starvation, and extrajudicial killings.

Like director Jonathan Glazer, who stirred controversy with his Oscars acceptance speech, in which he voiced his objection to “Jewishness and the Holocaust being hijacked by an occupation which has led to conflict for so many innocent people,” Wanner has set the bar rather low for identifying genocide.

Indeed, she has contributed to the dilution and devaluation of that term’s meaning. According to her logic, and that of many others in the literary community who have jumped on the anti-Israel bandwagon, virtually any military campaign, undertaken for any reason, that may incur collateral civilian deaths is, on its face, a repeat of the pre-mediated, systemic, explicitly racially-driven genocide of millions of people.

Without ascribing collective guilt to the German people in 2024, most of whom were born after the war, it’s reasonable to point out that Germans today still feel very bad about what happened under Hitler and share an understandable sense of obligation when it comes to aiding a nation founded in 1948 partly as a sanctuary for the victims of anti-Semitic barbarity.

To suggest that helping a state that provided a refuge from genocide is the same as committing or “being on the wrong side of” genocide is an insult to the intelligence of virtually all sentient people.

Some things in the world today that do come much closer to actual genocide, though not nearly on the scale of the Holocaust, do not appear to bother Wanner much. Does Wanner reject, oppose, and shun the use of any and all goods manufactured by Chinese state-owned firms? If she uses phones, computers, or batteries, drives a car, or utilizes public transportation, the answer is almost certainly no.

According to Observatory of Economic Complexity figures, China exported $1.04 billion worth of computers to South Africa in 2022, along with $1.78 billion worth of broadcasting equipment and $777 million worth of batteries. Of all nations in the world, China is the top exporter of phones to South Africa, accounting for a $309 million trade volume in 2022. China’s dominance of the global semiconductor market is a byword of the times.

The production and export of all these goods are the work of “national champions” that the regime in Beijing owns and cossets. In December 2021, a London-based independent tribunal found that the Communist government has been engaging in a campaign of genocide against the Uighur minority of Xinjiang province.

“Never again should be for anybody,” says Wanner in her statement explaining her return of the Goethe Medal. Perhaps the term anybody does not encompass China and Uyghurs. Yet, through her rejection of one of the world’s most prestigious literary prizes, she considers herself a martyr to the cause of oppressed peoples.