Dresden (dpa/sn) – The American architect Daniel Libeskind will receive the “Dresden Prize” 2023, which is endowed with 10,000 euros. The peace prize will be awarded to him on February 19 next year at a ceremony in the Semperoper, as the Friends of Dresden announced on Thursday. Then the award for the year 2022 will also be presented to the Dutch climate advocate Roger Cox. Because of the corona pandemic, the award was postponed by a year. The “Dresden Prize”, sponsored by the Klaus Tschira Foundation, is awarded by the Friends of Dresden Germany and will be awarded for the 14th time in 2023. Cooperation partner is the Semperoper.
Libeskind is honored above all for his “memorial architecture”. “Like hardly any other architect, the artist has created such an appropriate architectural framework for remembering the victims of the Holocaust, war and terror in recent decades,” said the award jury. The form, the architecture itself determines the direction of remembrance. Examples include the Jewish Museum in Berlin, the 9/11 Memorial in New York, the Imperial War Museum in Manchester and the Holocaust Memorial in Amsterdam. In Dresden, Libeskind had redesigned the Bundeswehr Military History Museum.
The Dutchman Cox received the “Dresden Prize” for his contribution to the fight to meet global climate targets. In May 2021 he had won a trial before a Dutch court in The Hague. The oil company Shell has been committed to reducing its CO2 emissions by 45 percent by 2030 compared to 2019. In addition, the former Federal Interior Minister Gerhart Baum (FDP) is honored with the honorary award of the Friends of Dresden. The now 90-year-old politician has been committed to human rights and peace all his life, it said.
Previous winners have included Mikhail Gorbachev, the Duke of Kent, whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg and peace activist Kim Phuc Phan Thi, who is seen as a napalm victim in a famous photo from the Vietnam War. In June 2021, the prize was presented to the Spanish doctor Cristina Marín Campos on behalf of doctors and nurses who have done outstanding work worldwide in the corona pandemic.
