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    Friends of the WZB Award

    The "Friends of the WZB Award" was initiated in 2015 by young researchers at the WZB. It is endowed with a free prize money of one thousand Euros. Each year, the jury, consisting of researchers and members of the Förderkreis, selects well-written texts for the prize that are also understandable for non-scientists.

    The Friends of the WZB Award 2025 in the postdoc category goes to Berenike Firestone, Ph.D., Research Fellow in the Research Department Transformations of Democracy, for her interview “Aktives Erinnern” (Active Remembrance) on Deutschlandfunk Kultur on May 6, 2025. In this contribution, she explains the results of a large-scale randomized study on participation in the #everynamecounts project of the Arolsen Archives, the world's largest archive on Nazi persecution. In collaboration with the archive and two other researchers at the Hertie School, she spent three years investigating the impact of the project, in which volunteers from around the world help digitize original documents from concentration camps. The result: Participation in this project increases motivation to work for the remembrance of Nazi persecution as well as for democracy and an open society.
    The commission, consisting of WZB researchers and members of the Friends of the WZB, praised the thematic relevance of the interview, especially in light of the fact that the voices of the Holocaust generation of witnesses will no longer be heard in a few years. This makes it even more important to keep memories alive through alternative approaches and methods and to awaken personal concern and motivation in the younger generation, who will no longer encounter eyewitnesses. The study to which the interview refers was published in April 2025 in the prestigious psychology journal Psychological Science. According to the commission, the interview conveyed the most important findings in a comprehensible, clear, and structured manner, making it a good example of how results from high-profile publications can be made easily accessible to a wider audience.

    The Friends of the WZB Award 2025 in the doctoral candidate category goes to Christin Jänicke, Research Fellow at the Center for Civil Society Research, for her article “Entwicklung rechter, rassistischer und antisemitischer Gewalt in Deutschland” (The Development of Right-wing, Racist, and Anti-Semitic Violence in Germany), which appeared in 2024 as an online-first version in the Handbuch Rechtsextremismus (Handbook of Right-wing Extremism) and provides a comprehensive interdisciplinary analysis of right-wing violence in Germany. The article makes it clear that right-wing violence is not a post-reunification phenomenon in eastern Germany, but has been continuously present in both post-war German societies. Furthermore, it reveals a significant underreporting of right-wing extremist attacks by state authorities, which classified only half of the attacks documented by civil society counseling centers in 2024 as politically right-wing motivated.
    The commission, consisting of WZB researchers and members of the Friends of the WZB, praised the extremely accurate and at the same time easily understandable description of the facts. The identification and description of the gap between state and non-state counts highlights a current social problem of great relevance. The format of an article in a handbook, which is a standard work in the field, also leads to greater visibility and a broader impact, which is not always the case with individual publications.

     

    The previous award winners were:

    • The winner of the ‘Friends of the WZB Award’ 2024 was Carla Hornberg, Research Fellow in the Skill Formation and Labor Market. She is being honoured for her article "Strengthening the labour force participation of low-qualified individuals in Europe", co-authored with Jan Paul Heisig and Heike Solga, which deals with the labour market problems of employees with low formal qualifications. This lack of formal qualifications severely restricts the job prospects and training opportunities of these people. Employers should therefore consider changing their recruitment procedures so that greater consideration is given to actual skills in addition to formal qualifications. The jury praised the article as highly relevant and practice-orientated. It also encourages people to think fundamentally about their own biases. Especially at a time when the selection of candidates in recruitment processes is supported by artificial intelligence, standard qualifications are increasingly favoured in algorithms. This reduces the chances of applicants without formal qualifications.
    • Gesine Höltmann (Center for Civil Society Research) receives the award in the Pre-Docs category for her discussion paper "Solidarität und Protest in der Zeitenwende. Reaktionen der Zivilgesellschaft auf den Ukraine-Krieg (Solidarity and Protest at the change of times. Civil society reactions to the war in Ukraine)."
    • Benjamin Edelstein (President's Research Group) receives the award in the postdoctoral category for his article "Bildung und soziale Ungleichheit (Education and social inequality)" in the online dossier on education of the Federal Agency for Civic Education.
    • Teresa Völker (Center for Civil Society Reserach) for her article in the WZB-Mitteilungen „Terror und Öffentlichkeit. Auf rechtsextreme und islamistische Anschläge wird unterschiedlich reagiert“.
    • Tobias Burst, Juliane Hanel, Sarah Hegazy, Christoph Ivanusch, Pola Lehmann, Marvin Müller, Sven Regel, Leonie Schwichtenberg, Leila van Rinsum and Lisa Zehnter for #ManifestoMonday - a collection of blog articles and an article in ZEIT online on the election programs of the Bundestag parties in the run-up to the 2021 federal elections.
    • Jelena Cupać and İrem Ebetürk, research assistants in the Department of Global Governance, for their text "Backlash advocacy and NGO polarization over women's rights in the United Nations".
    • Sönke Matthewes (Skill Formation and Labor Markets) for his publication on the early allocation of students to different types of schools and its consequences for their competence development.
    • Julia Pohle (Politics of Digitalization) for her paper on the urgency of digital policy issues and the importance of adequate decision-making structures and financial resources,
    • Werner Krause (Democracy and Democratization) for his analysis of the question whether and how parties of the political center react to electoral successes of radical right-wing and populist parties,
    • Tine Hanrieder (Global Humanitarian Medicine) for her contribution on the failure of reform efforts in the World Health Organization (WHO),
    • Anselm Rink-Hager (Migration, Integration, Transnationalization) for his evidence that German social welfare offices give better advice to people who are supposedly of German origin,
    • Maja Adena (Economics of Change) for her paper on the effect of radio propaganda on the electoral success of the NSDAP at the end of the Weimar Republic, and
    • Aiko Wagner (Democracy and Democratization) and Heiko Giebler (Democracy and Democratization) for developing a measurement concept for right-wing populism.