In 1998 Walser was awarded the Peace Prize of the German Book Trade . His acceptance speech , given in the former Church of St. Paul ( Paulskirche ) in Frankfurt , invoked issues of historical memory and political engagement in contemporary German politics and unleashed a controversy that roiled German intellectual circles . Walser 's acceptance speech was titled : ( " Experiences when writing the regular soapbox-speech " ) : At first the speech did not cause a great stir . Indeed , the audience present in Church of St. Paul received the speech with applause , though Walser 's critic Ignatz Bubis did not applaud , as confirmed by television footage of the event . Some days after the event , and again on 9 November 1998 , the 60th anniversary of the Kristallnacht pogrom against German Jews , Bubis , president of the Central Council of Jews in Germany , accused Walser of " intellectual arson " ( ) and claimed that Walser 's speech was both " trying to block out history or , respectively , to eliminate the remembrance " and pleading " for a culture of looking away and thinking away " . Then the controversy started . As described by Karsten Luttmer : Walser replied by accusing Bubis to have stepped '' out of dialog between people '' . Walser and Bubis met on 14 December at the offices of the to discuss the heated controversy and to bring the discussion to a close . They were joined by Frank Schirrmacher of the and Salomon Korn of the Central Council of Jews in Germany . Afterward , Bubis withdrew his claim that Walser had been intentionally incendiary , but Walser maintained that there was no misinterpretation by his opponents
Kristallnacht
Kristallnacht
Martin Walser