Hannah Arendt, Karl Jaspers, and the Nobel Prize: Examining the Archival Record

To reconstruct the history of the Nobel Prize and its impact would be a task of staggering dimensions. Nevertheless, letters and archival documents offer a glimpse into its workings. Taking recent scholarship in the sociology of literature as a starting point, the workshop will examine Hannah Arendt’s efforts to secure a Nobel Prize for Karl Jaspers as a case study in the globalization of literary life following the Second World War.

Carlos Spoerhase is Professor of Modern German Literature at Bielefeld University and has written on contemporary literature and the humanities for the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, Süddeutsche Zeitung, Merkur, and New Left Review. His most recent book is Das Format der Literatur: Praktiken materieller Textualität zwischen 1740 und 1830 (Göttingen, 2018)