Herder Prize

The Herder Prize (in German: Gottfried-von-Herder-Preis) was a respected international award. It was named after the German philosopher Johann Gottfried Herder (1744–1803). The prize was given every year from 1964 to 2006 to scholars and artists from Central Europe and Southeast Europe. It honored people whose work helped bring better understanding and peaceful relations between European countries.

The prize was created in 1963, and the first winners were announced in 1964.^[1]

The jury included members from German and Austrian universities. The prize was worth 15,000 euros and was funded by the Alfred Toepfer Foundation from Hamburg. The award ceremony was usually held at the University of Vienna, where the President of Austria gave the prizes. Each winner could also choose a young student, who received a one-year scholarship to study at an Austrian university.

The Herder Prize was open to people from the humanities and the arts, including ethnographers, writers, architects, composers, poets, folklorists, painters, historians, archaeologists, theatre directors, music experts, museum professionals, linguists, and playwrights. Some winners later received the Nobel Prize in Literature, such as Wisława Szymborska (Herder: 1995, Nobel: 1996), Imre Kertész (Herder: 2000, Nobel: 2002), and Svetlana Alexiévich (Herder: 1999, Nobel: 2015).

At first, the prize was given to people from seven countries in Central and Southeast Europe, many of which were communist at the time: Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, Greece, Hungary, Poland, Romania, and Yugoslavia. After the fall of communism and the breakup of countries like Yugoslavia and Czechoslovakia in the 1990s, scholars from the new countries that formed were still eligible. New countries such as Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Belarus, Ukraine, and Albania were also included.

Usually, seven people received the prize each year, except for special cases:

• 1964: four winners
• 1977: eight winners
• 1993: nine winners
• 2006: five winners (the last edition)

In 2007, the Herder Prize ended. It was combined with other awards from the Alfred Toepfer Foundation to create a new European prize called the Kairos Prize, worth 75,000 euros, which is given to only one person each year.