Jan Philipp Reemtsma

The literary scholar and social scientist Jan Philipp Reemtsma was born in Bonn in 1952. He lives and works mainly in Hamburg, where he founded the Foundation for the Promotion of Science and Culture in 1984 and remains managing director to this day. In the same year he established the Hamburg Institute for Social Research, which he headed until 2015. His work mainly deals with civilizational theory and the history of human destructiveness, as well as the literature of the 18th and 20th centuries. A particular area of focus is the works of Christoph Martin Wieland and Arno Schmidt, as demonstrated by his founding of the Arno Schmidt Foundation and co-editing of Schmidt’s complete works.

Jan Philipp Reemtsma has received many awards, including the Lessing Prize of the Free and Hanseatic City of Hamburg in 1997, the Teddy Kollek Award of the Jerusalem Foundation in the Knesset in 2007, the Prize for Understanding and Tolerance awarded by the Jewish Museum Berlin in 2010, and the Gutenberg Prize of the City of Leipzig in 2015. He has also served as Honorary Consul of the Republic of Slovenia in Hamburg and Schleswig-Holstein from 2012 to 2015 and was a member of the German Council of Science and Humanities from 2013 to 2016.

In addition to his writing on Christoph Martin Wieland and Arno Schmidt, Jan Philipp Reemtsma has authored numerous publications including Das unaufhebbare Nichtbescheidwissen der Mehrheit. Sechs Reden über Literatur und Kunst (The Majority’s Unalterable Lack of Understanding: Six Lectures on Literature and Art, 2005), Vertrauen und Gewalt. Versuch über eine besondere Konstellation der Moderne (Trust and Violence: An Essay on a Modern Relationship, 2008), Gewalt als Lebensform. Zwei Reden (Violence as a Human Condition: Two Lectures, 2016), Was heißt: einen literarischen Text interpretieren? (What Does it Mean to Interpret a Literary Text?, 2016), and Helden und andere Probleme. Essays (Heroes and Other Problems: Essays, 2020).

In 1996 Jan Philipp Reemtsma was the target of a kidnapping in which he was blackmailed and held captive for 33 days. He addressed this traumatic experience in his 1997 book Im Keller (In the Cellar).