The Waterloo Centre for German Studies promotes research into any and all aspects of the German-speaking world. As part of this mandate, the WCGS encourages the communication of research findings to both academics and the broader public. The Waterloo Centre for German Studies Book Prize has been established to recognize first-time authors whose scholarly work provides a substantial contribution to our understanding of any aspect of German-speaking society.
Present and Past Winners
2023 Winner - Andrea Rottmann
Queer Lives across the Wall: Desire and Danger in Divided Berlin, 1945–1970 (University of Toronto Press) by Andrea Rottmann has been awarded the Waterloo Centre for German Studies Book Prize for first books published in 2023. The prize consists of a cash award of CAD $3,000 and an invitation to speak at a public lecture in 2025.
2023 Shortlist
Deborah Barton. Writing and Rewriting the Reich: Women Journalists in the Nazi and Post-War Press . (University of Toronto Press)
Writing and Rewriting the Reich tells the complex story of women journalists as both outsiders and insiders in the German press of the National Socialist and post-war years. From 1933 onward, Nazi press authorities valued female journalists as a means to influence the public through charm and subtlety rather than intimidation or militant language. (University of Toronto Press).
Ina Linge. Queer Livability: German Sexual Sciences and Life Writing. (University of Michigan Press)
Queer Livability: German Sexual Sciences and Life Writing shows that individual voices of trans and queer writers had a significant impact on the production of knowledge about gender and sexuality during this time and introduces lesser known texts to a new readership. It shows the remarkable power of queer life writing in imagining and creating the possibilities of a livable life in the face of restrictive legal, medical, and social frameworks. (University of Michigan Press).
Ambika Natarajan. Servants of Culture: Paternalism, Policing, and Identity Politics in Vienna, 1700-1914. (Berghahn Books)
Servants of Culture provides an account of Habsburg servant law since the eighteenth century and uncovers the paternalistic and maternalistic assumptions and anxieties which turned the interest of socio-political players in improving poor living and working conditions into practices that created restrictive gender and class hierarchies. (Berghahn Books).
Andrea Rottmann. Queer Lives across the Wall: Desire and Danger in Divided Berlin, 1945–1970. (University of Toronto Press)
Queer Lives across the Wall examines the everyday lives of queer Berliners between 1945 and 1970, tracing private and public queer life from the end of the Nazi regime through the gay and lesbian liberation movements of the 1970s. Andrea Rottmann explores how certain spaces – including homes, bars, streets, parks, and prisons – facilitated and restricted queer lives in the overwhelmingly conservative climate that characterized both German postwar states. (University of Toronto Press).
Jeffrey Schneider. Uniform Fantasies: Soldiers, Sex, and Queer Emancipation in Imperial Germany. (University of Toronto Press)
Drawing on a vast trove of materials ranging from sexological case studies, trial transcripts, and parliamentary debates to queer activist tracts, autobiographies, and literary texts, Uniform Fantasies uncovers a particularly modern set of concerns about such topics as outing closeted homosexuals, the presence of gay men in the military, and whether men in uniform are more masculine or more insecure about their sexual identity. (University of Toronto Press)
Jonas Tinius. State of the Arts: An Ethnography of German Theatre and Migration. (Cambridge University)
Jonas Tinius' fieldwork with professional actors, directors, cultural policy makers, and activists unravels how they constitute theatre as a site for extra-ordinary ethical conduct and how they grapple with the pervasive German cultural tradition of Bildung, or self-cultivation through the arts. Tinius shows how anthropological methods provide a way to understand the entanglement of cultural policy, institution-building, and subject-formation. (Cambridge University Press).
By the Numbers for 2023
Learn about previous WCGS Book Prize Winners and Finalists
Click through each year to learn more about that year's Winner and Finalists.
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