Corinne Michaela Flick and Wolfgang Ischinger receive the Prize for Understanding and Tolerance

The Prize for Understanding and Tolerance

Since 2002, the Jewish Museum Berlin has awarded the Prize for Understanding and Tolerance to individuals from the realms of culture, politics, and business who have rendered outstanding service to the promotion of human dignity, international under­standing, the integration of minorities, and the coexistence of different religions and cultures. The prize, presented at a gala dinner, is awarded jointly by the JMB and the FRIENDS OF THE JMB.

Reporting and accreditation

If you wish to report on the event, please register by emailing presse@jmberlin.de by 12 noon on 9 November at the latest. You will receive further information when we confirm your accreditation. Because of the strict security requirements and limited spaces for media representatives, there will be personalized accreditation by the JMB press office. We regret that media representatives without accreditation cannot be granted access on 11 November.

Guests from the spheres of politics, business, culture, and the media

Including Iris Berben, actor; W. Michael Blumenthal, founding director of the JMB; Michel Friedman, journalist; Felix Klein, Federal Government Commissioner for Jewish Life in Germany and the Fight against Antisemitism; Christian Lindner, Federal Minister of Finance; Ron Prosor, Ambassador of Israel to Germany; Friede Springer, publisher and Kai Wegner, Governing Mayor of Berlin.

Prizewinner Corinne Michaela Flick

In their statement explaining the award of the prize to Dr. Corinne Michaela Flick, the jury wrote: “When she founded Convoco in 2004, Corinne Michaela Flick opened up a space for a fruitful dialogue between science and society to unfold. At events held in Salzburg, Berlin, Munich, and London, the foundation creates forums for the interdisciplinary exchange of ideas. As the executive director and creative head of the Convoco Foundation, Corinne Flick poses questions that touch the very core of our global society: What does equality mean in an unequal world? What challenges to our freedom arise from pandemics, climate change, digitalization, and intensifying systemic competition with authoritarian states? Every topic raised by this trained lawyer takes the German Basic Law as its reference point. With her Convoco foundation, Corinne Flick shows an active commitment to shaping the future Germany, Europe, world in which we wish to live, asking questions, and changing things for the better through a shared quest for answers.”

Dr. Corinne Michaela Flick studied law and literature at Ludwig Maximilian University, Munich. She was awarded her doctorate in 1989. After her studies, she worked as a lawyer at Bertelsmann Buch AG in London and Amazon.com in Munich. In 2004, she founded the interdisciplinary think tank Convoco, a foundation that tackles a new aspect of the future of society every year and presents a range of platforms for the exchange of ideas. She has led the Convoco Foundation and edited the book series Convoco Edition since 2004, and has also been a general partner at Vivil GmbH und Co. KG of Offenburg since 1998.

Prizewinner Wolfgang Ischinger

As the jury commented: “Wolfgang Ischinger not only masters the art of diplomacy, but links it to the aim of helping to create a more peaceful and therefore safer world. Few people know better than he does that there are no simple recipes in an era marked by the Russian invasion of Ukraine and its global political consequences. A diplomat through and through, he is unafraid of plain speaking and uncomfortable questions. Wolfgang Ischinger offers an important voice of reason whenever the world’s flashpoints are at stake. Constructively and knowledgeably, he endeavors to contribute to finding peaceful solutions to conflicts. He does so not only through inspiring ideas, but also by bringing together people who have the potential to find shared paths out of the crisis despite holding positions that sometimes seem irreconcilable.”

Wolfgang Ischinger can look back at a diplomatic career spanning many decades. After studying law and international relations in Bonn, Geneva, and Boston, he worked in the UN Secretary-General’s cabinet in New York before entering the German Foreign Service in 1975. There, he was private secretary to the then Federal Minister of Foreign Affairs Hans-Dietrich Genscher from 1982 to 1990. From 1993 to 1995, he was head of the Federal Foreign Office’s policy planning staff, then its political director from 1995. From 1998 to 2001 he was deputy foreign minister, from 2001 to 2006 the German ambassador in Washington, DC, and from 2006 to 2008 the ambassador in London. In 2008, Wolfgang Ischinger took on the unsalaried chairmanship of the Munich Security Conference. Under his leadership, the MSC grew from a team of two to more than seventy employees and became the world’s leading informal forum for foreign and security policy. In parallel, he was Global Head of Government Relations at Allianz SE from 2008 to 2014. Wolfgang Ischinger represented the EU in the troika negotiations on Kosovo in 2007 and the OSCE in Ukraine in 2014. In 2015, he chaired the “Panel of Eminent Persons” set up by the OSCE to strengthen the European security architecture.

Prizewinners 2002–2022

Berthold Beitz, chair of the Alfried Krupp von Bohlen and Halbach Foundation board, and Heinrich von Pierer, former CEO of Siemens AG (2002); Otto Schily, Federal Minister of the Interior, and Friede Springer, publisher (2003); Michael Otto, entrepren€, and former Federal President Johannes Rau (2004); Heinz Berggruen, collector and patron of the arts, and Otto Graf Lambsdorff, politician (2005); Daniel Barenboim, pianist and conductor, and BMW executive Helmut Panke (2006); former Federal Chancellor Helmut Kohl and historian Fritz Stern (2007); Roland Berger, business consultant, and Nobel laureate in literature Imre Kertész (2008); Franz Fehrenbach, Bosch manager, and Christof Bosch, member of the Robert Bosch Foundation board, and Michael Verhoeven, film director (2009); Jan Philipp Reemtsma, literary scholar, and business executive Hubertus Erlen (2010); Federal Chancellor Angela Merkel (2011); Klaus Mangold, chair of the supervisory board of Rothschild GmbH, and former Federal President Richard von Weizsäcker (2012); Berthold Leibinger, head of the TRUMPF group, and actor Iris Berben (2013); publisher Hubert Burda and Federal Minister of Finance Wolfgang Schäuble (2014); W. Michael Blumenthal, founding director of the JMB (2015); writers Renate Lasker Harpprecht and Anita Lasker Wallfisch and businessman Hasso Plattner (2016); Joe Kaeser, CEO of Siemens AG, and former Federal President Joachim Gauck (2017); Susanne Klatten, entrepren€, and David Grossman, writer (2018); Federal Minister of Foreign Affairs Heiko Maas and artist Anselm Kiefer (2019); former US Secretary of State Madeleine Albright and Igor Levit, pianist (2020); Charlotte Knobloch, president of the Israelitische Kultusgemeinde München und Oberbayern, and architect Daniel Libeskind (2021); Herta Müller, Nobel laureate in literature, and Barrie Kosky, theater and opera director (2022).

For the latest information on the event, visit: https://www.jmberlin.de/en/prize-for-understanding-and-tolerance. Press images are available for download with full acknowledgment from 12 November 2023, 11 am, at https://www.jmberlin.de/en/press-images.