The Franz Werfel Human Rights Award (German: Franz-Werfel-Menschenrechtspreis) is a human rights award of the German Federation of Expellees' Centre Against Expulsions project. It is awarded to individuals or groups in Europe who, through political, artistic, philosophical or practical work, have opposed breaches of human rights by genocide, ethnic cleansing, and the deliberate destruction of national, ethnic, racial or religious groups.
The foundations of the prize are considered to be the Fourth Hague Convention of 1907, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights of 1948, the International Agreement on Civilian and Political Rights of 1966, the resolution of the United Nations Commission on Human Rights of 1998 as well as the consequences of the meeting of the European Council of the Heads of State and Governments in Copenhagen of 1993 and other statements issued by the European Union. [1]
The award is named after the famous Austrian author Franz Werfel (1890–1945), whose novel The Forty Days of Musa Dagh famously portrayed the displacement of the Armenians from Turkey and the genocide of the Armenians in 1915/16.
The award includes €10,000 of prize money, and is awarded in the Paulskirche in Frankfurt every second year. It was first awarded in 2003.
The Federation of Expellees is a non-profit organization formed in West Germany on 27 October 1957 to represent the interests of German nationals of all ethnicities and foreign ethnic Germans and their families who either fled their homes in parts of Central and Eastern Europe, or were forcibly expelled following World War II.
Franz Viktor Werfel was an Austrian-Bohemian novelist, playwright, and poet whose career spanned World War I, the Interwar period, and World War II. He is primarily known as the author of The Forty Days of Musa Dagh, a novel based on events that took place during the Armenian genocide of 1915, and The Song of Bernadette (1941), a novel about the life and visions of the French Catholic saint Bernadette Soubirous, which was made into a Hollywood film of the same name.
Herta Däubler-Gmelin is a German lawyer, academic and politician of the Social Democratic Party. She served as Federal Minister of Justice from 1998 to 2002, and as a Member of the Bundestag from 1972 to 2009. She currently teaches as an honorary professor of political science at the Free University of Berlin, particularly on international relations and human rights, and was the Hemmerle Professor at RWTH Aachen University in 2011. She is married to the legal scholar Wolfgang Däubler.
Erika Steinbach is a German right-wing politician. She previously served as a member of the Bundestag from 1990 until 2017.
The Centre Against Expulsions was a planned German documentation centre for expulsions and ethnic cleansing, particularly the expulsion of Germans after World War II. Since March 19, 2008 the name of the project is Sichtbares Zeichen gegen Flucht und Vertreibung.
Klaus Werner Iohannis, sometimes referred to by his initials KWI in the Romanian press, is a Romanian politician, physicist, and former physics teacher who has been serving as the president of Romania since 2014. He became the president of the National Liberal Party (PNL) in 2014, after previously serving as the leader of the Democratic Forum of Germans in Romania (FDGR/DFDR) between 2002 and 2013. Prior to entering national politics, he was a physics teacher at the Samuel von Brukenthal National College in his native Sibiu.
Norbert Lammert is a German politician of the Christian Democratic Union (CDU). He served as the 12th president of the Bundestag from 2005 to 2017.
The Society for Threatened Peoples International STPI is an international NGO and human rights organization with its headquarters in Göttingen, Germany. Its aim is to create awareness of and protect minority peoples around the world who are threatened by oppressive governments. The society states that it "campaigns against all forms of genocide and ethnocide." It has consultative status with the United Nations, participatory status with the Council of Europe, and has branches in Germany, Austria, Switzerland, Italy, Bosnia and Herzegovina, and Iraqi Kurdistan.
Gerhard "Gerd" Müller is a German politician of the Christian Social Union in Bavaria who has served as Director General of the United Nations Industrial Development Organization since 2021.
Herta Müller is a Romanian-German novelist, poet, essayist and recipient of the 2009 Nobel Prize in Literature. She was born in Nițchidorf, Timiș County in Romania; her native language is German. Since the early 1990s, she has been internationally established, and her works have been translated into more than twenty languages.
Rainer Hildebrandt was a German anti-communist resistance fighter, historian and founder of the Checkpoint Charlie Museum. He was involved in the resistance to the communist regime of the Soviet occupation zone since the 1940s, as a member of the Kampfgruppe gegen Unmenschlichkeit.
Marianne Birthler is a German human rights advocate and politician of the Alliance '90/The Greens. From 2000 to 2011, she served as the Federal Commissioner for the Stasi Records, responsible for investigating the past crimes of the Stasi, the former communist secret police of East Germany. In 2016 she was offered the nomination of the CDU/CSU and her own party for President of Germany, but after some time decided not to run; the parties would have had a majority in the Federal Convention, securing her the election.
Joachim Wilhelm Gauck is a German politician who served as President of Germany from 2012 to 2017. A former Lutheran pastor, he came to prominence as an anti-communist civil rights activist in East Germany.
An indirect presidential election was held in Germany on 30 June 2010 following the resignation of Horst Köhler as president of Germany on 31 May 2010. Christian Wulff, the candidate nominated by the three governing parties, the Christian Democratic Union, the Christian Social Union of Bavaria and the Free Democratic Party, was elected president in the third ballot. His main contender was the candidate of two opposition parties, the Social Democratic Party and the Alliance '90/The Greens, independent human rights activist Joachim Gauck.
Events in the year 2012 in Germany.
An early indirect presidential election was held in Germany on 18 March 2012, the last possible day following the resignation of Christian Wulff as President of Germany on 17 February 2012. Joachim Gauck was elected on the first ballot by a Federal Convention, consisting of the 620 members of the Bundestag and an equal number of members selected by the states of Germany based on proportional representation.
Freimut Duve was a German journalist, writer, politician and human rights activist. From 1980 to 1998 he was a member of the Bundestag for the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD). He was the first OSCE Representative on Freedom of the Media from 1998 to 2003. He was lesser known on the German literary scene.
The Hessian Cultural Prize is an annual German culture prize awarded by the Government of Hesse. The prize was established in 1982. With a trophy of 60,000 German marks, now 45,000 Euro, it is currently the highest endowed culture prize in Germany.
Gabriel Bagradian is the protagonist of the 1933 novel The Forty Days of Musa Dagh by Franz Werfel and the 1982 film adaptation, where he was portrayed by Kabir Bedi. Gabriel, along with the rest of the Bagradian family, is a wholly fictional character; no piece of historical evidence ever proved their existence. Oliver Kohns, author of "The Aesthetics of Human Rights in Franz Werfel's The Forty Days of Musa Dagh," stated that therefore the Bagradians were "The most significant deviation from the historical record" in the work.
Eugénie Musayidire is a human rights activist and writer who was born in Rwanda. An ethnic Tutsi, she left the country in 1973 after being threatened by Hutu extremists, moving first to Burundi and later to Germany as a political refugee. In 1994, she lost most of her family and relatives during the Rwandan genocide, an event she covered in her 1999 book Mein Stein spricht. In 2007, she was awarded the International Nuremberg Human Rights Prize for her efforts to reconcile the Tutsi and Hutu communities.