Tali Nates awarded the 2022 Goethe Medal
- Wits Alumni Relations
Alumna honoured for her commitment to international cultural exchange.
The Goethe Institut announced that Wits alumna and director of the Johannesburg Holocaust and Genocide Centre, Avital “Tali” Nates (BA Hons 1994) has been awarded the 2022 Goethe Medal.
Nates receives the prestigious medal along with multimedia artist Mohamed Abla from Egypt, and two artists from the Sandbox Collective Nimi Ravindran and Shiva Pathak from India.
“I feel honoured and humbled by this recognition. I've dedicated my life to education about the prevention of atrocities which is so needed in today’s world,” she said via email.
The Goethe Medal is an official badge of honour of the Federal Republic of Germany and the most important prize in its foreign cultural policy. It was donated in 1954 by the board of directors of the institute. The medal honours personalities who are particularly committed to international cultural exchange or teaching the German language. The candidates are nominated by the Goethe-Instituts around the world in close coordination with the German missions abroad.
The Goethe Medal will be awarded at a ceremony on 28 August 2022 – the birthday of the eponymous Johann Wolfgang von Goethe – in Weimar. The award winners will present their work at the Kunstfest Weimar from 26 to 28 August 2022.
According to a press statement released by the institute, Carola Lentz, President of the Goethe-Institut, said: “Cultural artists and civil society actors are present in many parts of the world and actors under massive pressure. With the Goethe Medal, we honour personalities who work for the freedom of art and cross-border cultural and intellectual exchange.”
Nates’s work in Johannesburg deals with the past and present of genocide in a new way and looks with scientific precision at the roots of the Holocaust and genocides such as that in Rwanda in 1994.
“She looks at the roots of the two events and asks what we can learn from them with regard to current wars and human rights issues. In carefully curated exhibitions and in clear public positions, Nates makes it clear that racist crimes and genocides can happen again and that remembrance, education and education are important means of preventing them,” Lentz said.
Nates was born in Israel in 1961 to Holocaust survivors rescued by Oskar Schindler. She studied history at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem but has lived in South Africa since 1985 and completed her degree at Wits.
In 2008 she founded the Johannesburg Holocaust and Genocide Centre. She teaches on topics such as human rights, prejudice, racism, “othering”, anti-Semitism, homophobia and xenophobia.
In 2016 she received the KIA Community Service Award. In 2021 she was the first South African to receive the Gratias Agit Award from the Czech Republic as well as the Austrian Holocaust Memorial Award.
As a proud Witsie, she fondly remembers her time on campus: "I enjoyed the campus. I loved spending time in the library and archives, going on field trips for my research and interacting with students and professors. I remember the many lively discussions with Prof Lawrence Hamilton and my time at Wits certainly shaped my love for history and the conviction that there is much to learn from it if we just listen".