Karl Schlögel (born 1948) is one of the most famous German historians, a specialist in Eastern European countries, a publicist, and a professor.
He studied Russian at a monastery school in Bavaria, as well as history, philosophy, sociology, and Slavic studies at the Free University of Berlin and at the universities of Moscow and Leningrad (he first visited the Soviet Union in 1966).
His research interests include Russian and Ukrainian modernity and Stalinism, the Russian diaspora and dissident movements, the cultural history of Eastern and Central European cities, and theoretical problems of historical narrative. He is the author of the books "The Soviet Century" and "The Scent of Empires: Chanel No. 5 and Red Moscow." As DW noted in 2024, "Karl Schlögel knows Russia like no other German historian."
Schlögel's books have been translated into English, French, Italian and other languages, and he has been awarded numerous prizes.
The annexation of Crimea prompted him to intensively study Ukrainian history. In 2014, in the context of Russia's attack on Ukraine, he refused the Russian Pushkin Medal awarded to him.
In 2019, he signed the "Open Letter against Political Repression in Russia."
In light of Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine, Schlögel has been speaking out against the historical and political justifications for this attack since 2022. In his acceptance speech for the Peace Prize of the German Book Trade in 2025, he also criticized the long-standing distorted perception of Putin's Russia in Germany.
He said it took Germany a surprisingly long time to "realize what it's really dealing with in Putin's Russia." Whether the reasons were "historical dependence on previous paths of development, cultural sympathies, nostalgia and sentimentality, economic interests," or "even corruption," "this is a vast field for historical education and for understanding the past—and this honest understanding should spare no one."