Approximate 1965 Peace Prize of the German Book Trade to Sachs, making her the prize’s first female laureate.
In 1965, Nelly Sachs received the Friedenspreis des Deutschen Buchhandels (Peace Prize of the German Book Trade) in Frankfurt and became its first female laureate.[7][9][14][16][18] Sources record only the year, so the 1 January date is approximate and does not represent the actual ceremony day.
The Peace Prize, awarded by the German Publishers and Booksellers Association, honors individuals who contribute to peace, humanity, and cultural understanding. Bestowing it on Sachs—a Jewish woman writer living in Swedish exile whose poetry memorialized the Holocaust—was a powerful gesture in West Germany’s ongoing reckoning with its Nazi past.[7][14][16]
As a genuine gender "first," the award marked a breakthrough in the male-dominated sphere of major European cultural prizes. Sachs’s selection affirmed that a woman’s poetic witness to genocide could be considered a foundational contribution to ethical and intellectual life. Her acceptance speech emphasized responsibility, remembrance, and the spiritual transformation of suffering, themes that resonated widely in a divided, Cold War Europe.
For women’s history, this recognition signaled the growing visibility of women as central voices in debates over memory and peace. For Jewish history, it showed a key cultural institution in Germany publicly honoring a Jewish survivor whose texts refused to separate the German language from its history of persecution yet transformed it into a vehicle of mourning and hope. The prize significantly enhanced Sachs’s international profile and prepared the symbolic ground for her Nobel recognition the following year.