Approximate 1961 founding of the Nelly Sachs Prize in Dortmund, with Sachs as its first recipient.
In 1961, the city of Dortmund created the Nelly Sachs Prize, a biennial literary award dedicated to writers who foster understanding between peoples, and named Nelly Sachs its first recipient.[9][15][18] The precise day of the award ceremony is not given in current sources; the 1 January date is an approximate placeholder for year-only data.
This was a genuine "first": a major German city not only instituted a new international peace‑oriented literary prize but immediately conferred it on the Jewish refugee poet after whom it was named.[7][9] The decision signaled an active effort by Dortmund to honor a woman whose work confronted Nazi crimes and articulated a postwar ethics of remembrance and reconciliation.
Historically, the event is significant because the prize’s very statute—promoting understanding between peoples—mirrored Sachs’s poetic mission. Her work intertwined testimonies to Jewish suffering with aspirations toward spiritual metamorphosis, refusing both revenge and forgetfulness.[10][14][16] By enshrining her name in an institutional award, Dortmund linked local cultural policy to global human-rights values.
In women’s history, Sachs’s position as the inaugural laureate of a prize bearing her own name highlights the expanding recognition of women as moral and artistic authorities in the 1960s. The Nelly Sachs Prize has subsequently been awarded to numerous international writers, sustaining her legacy. Its foundation and first conferment on her demonstrate how a woman’s literary response to genocide became a benchmark for later generations of authors working on conflict, exile, and cross-cultural dialogue.