Tractatus Prize goes to Maria-Sibylla Lotter for a cool look at the victim as self-image

The Tractatus, the essay prize of the Philosophicum Lech and at 25,000 euros one of the best-endowed awards for philosophical writing in the German-speaking world, goes this year to Maria-Sibylla Lotter, professor of ethics and aesthetics at the Ruhr University Bochum, for Opfer. Über Verwundbarkeit als Selbstbild (Hanser, 288 pages), published on 17 March. The announcement came on 31 August. The prize will be presented at nine o'clock on the evening of Friday 25 September in the Lechwelten hall at Lech am Arlberg, with the laudatio by the jury member Daniela Strigl, in the middle of the twenty-ninth Philosophicum, whose theme this year is Betreutes Denken. Die neue Lust an der Unmündigkeit: supervised thinking, and the new appetite for the condition Kant called Unmündigkeit, the tutelage from which enlightenment was supposed to be the exit.

The book is untranslated, and its title is the first problem for a translator. Opfer means both victim and sacrifice, and Lotter's argument depends on the fact that the second meaning has drained out of the first. The jury noticed this too, and built its citation around it.

A prize for essays, run by people who read reviews#

The Tractatus was founded in 2009 at the suggestion of the novelist Michael Köhlmeier, who also had the idea for the Philosophicum itself, and is paid for by private sponsors. This is its eighteenth year. Its remit is "outstanding essays or essayistically oriented non-fiction books that discuss philosophical questions intelligibly for a broader public," judged on originality, on the quality of the writing and on the topicality of the subject. Its list is a fair index of two decades of German public philosophy: Hartmut Rosa's Resonanz (2016), Thomas Bauer's Die Vereindeutigung der Welt (2018), Lisa Herzog on the rescue of work (2019), Christoph Möllers's Freiheitsgrade (2021), Isolde Charim on narcissism (2023), Philipp Hübl's Moralspektakel (2024) and, last year, Eva Weber-Guskar's Gefühle der Zukunft on emotional artificial intelligence. Weber-Guskar holds a Heisenberg professorship at Bochum, so the same faculty has now taken the prize two years running.

Three voting members, all in place since 2023, make up the jury: Strigl, the Austrian literary scholar and critic; Catherine Newmark, the Swiss philosopher and journalist; and Ijoma Mangold, the German literary critic. Konrad Paul Liessmann, the Philosophicum's scientific director, chairs without a vote. A small-world detail follows. Liessmann reviewed Lotter's book in Cicero on 1 June, six weeks before the shortlist was announced, and found that she "argues unexcitedly, soberly, knowledgeably and even-handedly". The publisher now prints the sentence on its website. Nothing irregular: the chair has no vote. The pool of people who write, judge and review serious German non-fiction is simply not large.

Published on 14 July, the shortlist of six put Lotter alongside Andreas Dorschel's poetics of the manifesto, Die Welt verändern (Klostermann); Philip Manow's Spaltungslinien (C.H. Beck), on Europe's party systems; Richard Schuberth's Vom Antisemitismus, der keiner sein will (Edition Tiamat); Martin Warnke's Large Language Kabbala (Matthes & Seitz), a short history of the large language models; and Stefan Weidner's Yoga oder Die sanfte Eroberung des Westens durch den Osten (Hanser).

The argument, for a reader who cannot read it#

Hanser's description is candid about the book's ambivalence. Showing weakness was long taboo; today, "whoever sees themselves as a victim can count on attention and empathy," and winners and heroes "no longer serve, as a matter of course, as models." Lotter explains the shift by two developments: the spread of psychotherapeutic ways of thinking into ordinary moral vocabulary, and the many forms of public remembrance of the victims of political violence. Society becomes more humane by it, the blurb concedes, "but runs the risk that people in the victim role forfeit agency and autonomy."

According to the reviews in Spektrum and on socialnet, the book opens with the case of Gil Ofarim, the musician whose 2021 account of antisemitic abuse at a Leipzig hotel was widely believed, amplified and later withdrawn in court. Lotter's interest is not in the man but in the speed of the public reflex: the accusation carried authority before any examination, and to examine it was itself suspect. From there she follows what the Australian psychologist Nick Haslam called concept creep. "Trauma" once meant a physical wound; it became a psychiatric category with the entry of post-traumatic stress disorder into the diagnostic manuals in 1980 and 1991; it now describes an ordinary bad experience. "Violence" and "hate speech" have travelled the same road. Each, she argues, shrinks the room a person or a group is credited with for acting on their own behalf.

Her name for the resulting ethic is Therapiemoral, therapy-morality: a public morality that treats every claim of injury as a symptom to be affirmed rather than a statement to be assessed. Later chapters take up the sacralisation of the victim in the mobilisations after the killing of George Floyd, the politics of linguistic injury, and a chapter on the "tyranny of values" whose title echoes Carl Schmitt's essay of 1960. Her closing diagnosis is that the emancipatory impulse of the past decades has, in the jury's summary, "migrated from real conditions into language": the work of changing how people live has been replaced by the work of policing how they are described.

The thesis has an Anglophone cousin in Bradley Campbell and Jason Manning's "victimhood culture". What distinguishes Lotter, and what the jury rewarded, is that she comes to it from two decades of work on the moral emotions rather than from the culture war. Her habilitation, published by Suhrkamp in 2012 as Scham, Schuld, Verantwortung, was on the cultural preconditions of responsibility; Schuld und Respekt (Suhrkamp, 2024) was on revenge and reconciliation. Her Bochum research page lists vulnerability in the image of the human and the migration of concepts between academic and everyday discourse among her current interests; Opfer is those interests written for a general reader.

What the jury said#

The citation is worth quoting at some length, because it is a better summary of the book than most of the reviews. "If the current discourse is determined by a moral upgrading of the victim and of its dramatised complaint," the jury begins, "the question arises of the consequences for social life together." Lotter approaches "this explosive problem with a cool head and sober engagement on three levels": the authority of the victim, "which makes it almost sacrosanct"; the logic of outrage, "dynamised in particular by social media, which proceeds as a matter of principle from a presumption of guilt"; and above all the therapy-morality "derived from an increasing pathologisation of psychological conditions". The sentence on which the title turns follows: "The concept of the victim, from which every aspect of self-determination, of sacrificing oneself, has gone missing, tends to fix those who suffer racist or sexual discrimination in a self-image of inferiority."

Its chief praise is methodological. "That she consistently takes aim at the history of discourse as the history of concepts is the greatest merit of her crystal-clearly formulated book." And the last line: "Precisely, and with the relevant vocabulary, Maria-Sibylla Lotter sharpens our view of the dangers of an image of the human being that knows only victims and perpetrators and leaves no room for ambivalence and self-empowerment."

The reviews were warmer than they were convinced#

On the whole the German press has admired the tone and quarrelled with the sociology. Oliver Pfohlmann in the Neue Zürcher Zeitung (4 June) called it "a clever and differentiated book" that cuts "illuminating swathes" through an overheated debate. Helene Rösch in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung (14 March) welcomed the analysis of therapeutic language and the "inflation" of clinical terms, but observed that Lotter's own analysis sometimes falls short of the ambiguity she demands of others. Renate Kraft in the taz (16 May), reviewing the book alongside Alice Hasters's Anti Opfer (Ullstein), which argues almost the opposite thesis, granted that Lotter "does no victim-bashing" and that her pages on hate-speech accusations would persuade a sceptic, and then made the objection that will follow the book into any English discussion: "Lotter proceeds from mature individuals and an ideal-typical democratic public. For the hegemonic relations that exist beyond formal structures she shows little interest."

Kraft's objection is the serious one. A book about the loss of agency has to assume that agency is there to be lost; a critic who thinks the structures are the story will find the assumption question-begging. The reply available to Lotter, though the reviews do not record her making it, is that the structural account is precisely the vocabulary whose spread she is describing, so that to demand it is to ask her to write the book she is criticising.

Lotter was born in Kassel in 1961, studied philosophy, religious studies and ethnology at Freiburg, Berlin and St Louis, took her doctorate at the Technical University of Berlin in 1994 on Whitehead, her habilitation at Zürich in 2010, and has held the Bochum chair since April 2014. She translated Stanley Cavell's Cities of Words into German.

Around her ceremony the Philosophicum runs from 22 to 27 September, with the lecture programme opening on the afternoon of the 24th. The Saturday session includes Frauke Rostalski of Cologne on "the vulnerable society" and the end of personal responsibility, and Newmark on whether a public "too tired for maturity" can sustain authority at all. The prize, in other words, has been placed inside a week built on its own question, and Lech is a small enough place that the laureate will have to sit through the answers.