Anselm Kiefer Wins German Peace Prize

FRANKFURT—German multimedia artist Anselm Kiefer, 63, whose work often addresses the legacy of World War II, has been named the 2008 recipient of the German book trade's annual peace prize, an honor generally presented to an author, reports Bloomberg.

The €25,000 ($39,000) prize, to be presented at the Frankfurt Book Fair on October 19, honors Kiefer's portrayal of a "destroyed present, chewed up by the past and presented with a pared-down rhetoric," said a statement from the German Book Trade Association. His work raises the question of "whether there could be German artists at all after the Holocaust and the Third Reich's appropriation of the national cultural and artistic tradition."

Previous winners include the Holocaust historian Saul Friedlander, the Turkish novelist Orhan Pamuk, the philosopher Juergen Habermas, and the American writer Susan Sontag.