On Monday evening, Stephan Malinowski's monograph "The Hohenzollerns and the Nazis" was awarded the German Non-Fiction Prize.

Well, a polished analysis of the role of the ruling house in building the "Third Reich" - that is worthy of an award.

The jury emphasized that the treatise combines "social and political contemporary history with a family portrait and is at the same time a brilliant milieu study of conservative and right-wing hostility to the republic".

There were further plus points for the stringent argumentation and knowledge of the sources.

Now you can read on the homepage of the non-fiction book prize, among other things, the relevance of the topic and the quality of the research would be awarded.

But how relevant is, for example, Bettina Baltschev's beautiful book "On the Edge of Happiness"?

It was also among the nominees and is about beaches in Brighton, Hiddensee or Ostend.

How much research is needed to come up with such sentences: “I let myself be blown south, to the fishing village that Scheveningen was for a long time.

I keep bouncing the word around in my head, beach, beach, beach, beach.”

Different shapes for different purposes

Another aspect that the jury uses in their assessment is "the narrative power of the text".

Should this category actually play a role when the biologist Ludwig Huber tries to clarify whether something like consciousness can be conceded to non-human beings?

Wouldn't it be a misunderstanding to rely on narrative power in the following explanations: "They trained squirrel monkeys one after the other with four pairs of stimuli: A+ B-, B+ C-, C+ D- and D+ E-, where the letters stand for different, random stimuli and the signs indicate whether the choice of stimulus was rewarded (+) or not rewarded (-) in the respective pairing.”

One could ask the bold question of whether the most explosive material will be awarded in the end.

And whether some titles only end up in the pool of nominees, so that there is a colorful mixture.

Did Baltschev and Huber even have a chance of winning the first prize, which is endowed with 25,000 euros?

The jury, too, as spokeswoman Tania Martini could understand, noticed that the wide range of topics in the final selection affected any comparability.

A “search for clues in cognitive biology” and the “German-Russian century”, how could one measure one against the other?

Both books have different purposes and therefore need different forms.

If you contrast a novel with a story, the focus is on the literary quality itself, on narrative structures and style.

But whether non-fiction book A or B is better depends to a large extent on which topic you are more interested in.

And one thing is certain: the gain in knowledge itself cannot be evaluated.