The Goethe Medal for 2024 is going to three women, honoring their strength and endurance, as well as their faith in the ability of the arts to change society. The winners are theater powerhouse Carmen Romero Quero from Chile, literary translator Claudia Cabrera from Mexico, and cultural manager Iska Geshoka from North Macedonia.

They're three women who "are not discouraged by opposition and obstacles,” said Carola Lentz, president of the Goethe-Institut, told DW.

The most important prize for Germany's foreign cultural policy was awarded at a ceremony on August 28 in Weimar, the city of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe.

A lonely battle in Skopje

When Iskra Geshoska shows visitors the center of her hometown of Skopje, capital of North Macedonia, her outrage returns. She is angered by its set-dressing architecture aiming to simulate a national history through fake neoclassical facades with columns, stucco and sculptures that never existed in the past. The makeover was imposed by the nationalist-conservative government over a decade ago.

The real Skopje, a mixture of Roman-Byzantine-Ottoman history and socialist modernism, is disappearing. "They are stealing our stories," Geshoska told DW, "and we must respond with a strategy of creative resistance." 

The art historian has a lot of experience with creativity and resistance. The NGO Kontrapunkt, which she founded more than two decades ago, and the cultural venue Tocka quickly became platforms for the country's independent cultural scene. They proved so critically-minded and uncomfortable that Tocka had to close in 2010 due to massive political pressure.

"This small community, which fights for independent, contemporary culture, is like a lone tree in the middle of a desert," says Geshoska — and defiantly continues to develop projects such as the Jadro cultural venue and a festival of critical culture.

Geshoska is the daughter of actors. She shares her love of theater with one of her fellow 2024 Goethe Medal winners, Carmen Romero Quero, director of Teatro a Mil, the most important theater festival in South America, founded 30 years ago in Santiago de Chile. 

A fixture on the Chilean cultural scene

From the beginning, Carmen Romero Quero focused on powerful, socially critical theater that addresses the consequences of the Chilean military dictatorship as well as human rights and social inequality. As a result, she became a fixture on Chile's cultural scene and one of the country's most important public intellectuals.

For former Chilean president Michelle Bachelet, who advocated for an active cultural policy during her two terms in office, Carmen is "a visionary and pioneer. She has made it her mission to make culture accessible to people who cannot afford it. I believe this has changed the lives of many people." 

Translation as remembrance

Theater is also a topic for Claudia Cabrera, one of the best literary translators from German into Mexican Spanish.

She has just re-translated a key work by Anna Seghers, the short story "The Excursion of the Dead Girls," for a stage production in Mexico City. For her, this is a completely different experience from translating novels, as she told DW: "When I see plays that I have translated myself, I can experience first-hand whether the translation is right: Are they laughing in the right places? Are they horrified at the right moments?”

New translations of world literature by Seghers, who lived in exile in Mexico in the 1940s, is Cabrera's current project. She's previously translated works by Franz Kafka and Robert Musil, as well as Heiner Müller, Rainer Werner Fassbinder and Cornelia Funke. But her heart is with literature written in exile. "For me, translating anti-fascist literature is a conscious act,” she says. "We are living in a very dangerous time and we must not forget what happened 80 years ago."

This article was originally published in German.