The Hugo Ball Prize, an award facilitated by the German city of Pirmasens, was this year supposed to go to Hito Steyerl, an acclaimed filmmaker and video artist whose work has been seen the world over. But the award will no longer be given out as planned because there are now internal discussions being had about antisemitic views held by the prize’s namesake.
Steyerl told the German press agency dpa that she had not forfeited the prize. Instead, she said, “there is no prize this year.”
The city of Pirmasens said that Steyerl, along with fellow awardee Olivia Werzel and the committee that nominated them, had made the decision to suspend the award this year.
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“Anti-Semitic ideas were widespread in the early 20th century, and many artists also promoted such resentment,” a description of a panel about Ball’s antisemitic views on Pirmasens’s website reads. “Hugo Ball did the same, for example in his 1919 publication On the Critique of the German Intelligentsia.”
In that book, Ball, a foundational figure of the German Dada movement, explained what he viewed as a period of decline in his country as being caused by the Jews. Parts of the book were removed in the years following World War II, after Ball’s death in 1927; the more controversial segments have only recently been taken up again.
Pirmasens also promised to discuss Ball’s racism. While the event’s write-up does not provide specifics, the city may have been referring to one of Ball’s performances that involved having dancers move to “Negro music.” That work, as critic Barry Schwabsky has written, was meant to draw on “the racial other that concerned the Dadaists”: Black Africans.
The Hugo Ball Prize is a relatively minor award, with only a 10,000 euro ($10,750) purse. It is awarded once every three years, and can be given to artists, writers, and publishers.
Yet the award’s suspension is notable as Germany continues to wrestle with the fallout from an antisemitism controversy that plagued Documenta 15 in 2022. Steyerl herself had played a small part in that fracas, having pulled out of the exhibition amid what she described as a “refusal to accept mediation” and “unsafe and underpaid working conditions for some of the staff.”
Prior to the opening of Documenta 15, Steyerl had written an essay in which she said the famed exhibition, staged once every five years in Kassel, Germany, needed to own up to its own history of antisemitism. She had initially intended to read the essay during a Documenta-run talk that was subsequently canceled, and then published by Die Zeit.