It’s that time of year again, so that this week the world awaits the series of announcements about those famous Scandinavian awards that people in various fields of the arts and sciences are just dying to win: the Nobels.

Except wait: scientists, writers, economists, etc. are in fact not dying to win their respective Nobel prizes (as they are doing, for example, to be buried in a certain renowned or favorite cemetery) since it’s in the rules that they can only be awarded to living people! That stipulation, however, as we read in this piece from Belgium’s La Libre Belgique, is increasingly causing problems.

“The Nobel requires patience, perhaps too much.” Put plainly (and alliteratively), the perceived problem is that too many who deserve the prize are dying before they can be awarded it. It’s hardly a new concern: perhaps the most famous case was that of Leo Tolstoy, acclaimed as one of the world’s best novelists of all time, including during his own lifetime, who nonetheless never was recognized by the Nobel committee by the time he died in 1910.

Then again, that was the Literature Prize (first awarded, along with most of the others, in 1901), for which the relevant authorities have wielded through the years rather unfathomable selection criteria that, if anything, seem to have most to do with spreading that prize most broadly around the world – after Scandinavian writers are first covered most generously – rather than with more reasonable considerations such as general literary acclaim (example: Philip Roth). With the Nobel prizes for the sciences one might assume a more straightforward process. (more…)

Still interested in President Obama being awarded this year’s Nobel Peace Prize? Hope so, because I’ve got some revelations here about what went on behind-the-scenes. They come from a Ritzau report taken up in Berlingske Tidende (Nobel committee was split about Obama). “Split”? It seems that, for most of the time, three of the Peace Prize committee’s five members definitely did not think Obama should be awarded the Prize – he had only been in office as President for nine months, for Heaven’s sake!

Actually, the Ritzau/Berlingske coverage here is really at-one-remove, as they basically pass on original reporting that appeared in the Norwegian newspaper VG. That article you can find here (“Nobel-majority argued against Obama”), and even if you don’t understand Norwegian you really should click through to take a look, because it offers a great prize: there you can see in a photograph, sitting around a table, the actual group of Norwegian notables (“socialists,” “muddled-headed Europeans,” “Obama-groupies,” “Devil’s spawn,” however you want to characterize them) who were directly responsible for him receiving the prize. The three ladies with their heads circled were actually the doubters; in fact, Berlingske quotes the right-most of them (i.e. turning to her left to address the camera) as remarking later to the press “I had expected more debate, especially over the fact that I myself regard as problematic, namely the war in Afghanistan.”

By the way, the committee doesn’t have six members, but five, so that one of the gentlemen off to the right is not actually a voting-member and doesn’t belong there. I’m guessing that the bona fide guy is probably with the red necktie, and that would be the committee chairman, former Norwegian prime minister and current Secretary-General of the Council of Europe, Thorbjørn Jagland. He’s really the one Obama can thank for his Prize (assuming that Obama is actually grateful for the Prize; there are reasons for thinking that he isn’t): despite the three nay-sayers dismissing the President’s candidacy from early in the selection-discussions, Jagland persevered as chairman (with some support from the one lady whose head is not circled, Sissel Rønbeck) and finally got his way. “The rest,” as they say, “is history” – but one can still speculate on what the outcome would have been had the three dissenters been male and the committee chairman female.

Let’s take a quick look at what they’re saying in the Danish press about the awarding today to President Barack Obama of the 2009 Nobel Peace Prize – “Danish” because that is as close as I can come linguistically to the Swedish deliberations behind its awarding (and the Norwegian arrangements for the conferring ceremony on December 10).

– From the Danish Christian newspaper, Kristeligt Dagblad (Obama gives Nobel money to a good cause): Nobel Peace Prize winner Barack Obama intends to give the 10 million Swedish kroner prize-money to a good cause, which he has not yet had time to specifically identify, according to a White House spokesman. He will also travel to Oslo on December 10 to accept the award there; Norwegian prime minister Jens Stoltenberg has already discussed this with him. Ah, but you may also be asking: How will this sudden new Scandinavian appointment affect the US president’s involvement at the UN’s climate-change conference in Copenhagen which will be going on at the same time? According to this report, it does not necessarily increase the chances that Obama will actually decide to attend that climate change conference.

(Note: This is a report from the Ritzau news agency, so the identical text appears in several other Danish newspapers as well. But in one of those we get the added detail that the “expert” behind the above calculation that Obama’s appointment in Oslo in December won’t necessary mean he shows up for the climate conference in Copenhagen – which, by the way, I don’t believe for a second – is namely Aarhus University Professor of Contemporary History Thorsten Borring Olesen.)

– The daily Berlingske Tidende offers some commentary in one article (Obama: Both a certain and a controversial choice), but doesn’t bother to credit the journalist(s) involved. Anyway: Awarding the prize to Obama was certain (sikkert): he is popular everywhere on this Earth, the nearest thing to every man’s friend. Awarding the prize to Obama was, however, controversial: Obama has been all about promises so far, not results. Maybe the Nobel committee was impressed with the resolution calling for the elimination of nuclear weapons that he managed to have the UN Security Council pass a few weeks ago while he functioned as its Chairman – on the other hand, in reality none of the nuclear powers, including the US, has done anything to fulfill the promise they made to the rest of the world at the time of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, back in 1968, that they would work to reduce and then eliminiate their nuclear arsenals, in exchange for that rest of the world giving up any idea of developing nuclear weapons of their own. Or perhaps it’s about his efforts to counteract climate change, or to shut Guantánamo – except, again, there actually hasn’t been tangible progress in these areas, either. No, the purposes the Nobel committee had in giving this prize to the President was both to give him “a tremendous moral pat on the shoulder” and to pointedly remind other countries (the exact Danish phrase is “hint with a wagon-pole”) that the American president is going to need some help from them if what he has promised is going to come true – so that that Nobel committee doesn’t find itself embarrassed a few years down the road at what it did today.

– The preeminent Danish opinion weekly, Information hasn’t yet gotten around to providing its own judgment or study of the awarding of the Nobel Peace Prize to Obama. For now, it presents an analysis (again from Ritzau) from Prof. Peter Viggo Jacobsen, of the Copenhagen University Social Sciences Faculty (Obama is a highly surprising choice). Along with about a billion other people around the world, he interprets the prize as being awarded in anticipation of future achievements, not of past accomplishments since “he has not been able yet to carry out anything at all.” Further Jacobsen:

Normally there should be more then words [behind the award]. There should also be some action. And action is what we haven’t seen much of yet. This has to be in anticipation of something later, that the [Nobel] committee believes that he is capable of realizing some of the good intentions he has.

Yes, and the German weekly Die Zeit is already on the ball and ready with its coverage. To start with, the schedule of prize-announcements is here; it lets us know that the Medicine, Physics, and Chemistry prizes will be announced around noon on Monday (today), Tuesday, and Wednesday, respectively. As perhaps befits subjects not belonging to the exact sciences, the Peace and Literature prizes are simply supposed to be out sometime by the beginning of next week (meaning presumably by next Monday). That is also when the winner of the Economics Prize will be announced – also not an exact science, many will say, but in any case the one “Nobel Prize” that is not a Nobel Prize, since Alfred Nobel never provided for any economics prize in his will and it was rather set up in parallel to the Nobel Prizes by the Swedish Central Bank in 1968.

If you’d like a scorecard to follow along with as the award-announcements proceed through the coming days, the Die Zeit piece links to this survey of potential winners, in English, from Thomson Reuters. This time it’s the “exact sciences” plus economics about which the (unnamed) Thomson Reuters reporters speculate, not the “softer” subjects that are more interesting for this observer, namely Peace and Literature. Still, it should be interesting to see whether anyone on their candidate-lists actually wins the respective prize.

Back to Die Zeit, it tops its pre-coverage off, in the hope that the next week will swell the ranks of German winners, with this picture-gallery of the German Nobel winners since 1979. Or at least what it wants to label as such – they somehow neglect to include Günter Grass, winner of the Literature Prize in 1999. In setting that arbitrary cut-off year they also exclude probably the most famous German Nobel prize-winner of them all, namely Willy Brandt, winner in 1971 (for his Ostpolitik reconciliation policy).

One final complaint I have to add is that, although that 1979 cut-off does allow the possibility of the German winners being East German winners, the descriptions of each person don’t usually provide enough information for one to be able to assume or to exclude that possibility, at least in many cases. On the other hand, the 18th winner in the picture-series (out of 21), Ernst Ruska who invented the electron-miscroscope, is described as having done his most important work “five decades ago,” i.e. in the 1930s under the Nazi regime. This hardly invalidates the magnitude of his achievement, of course, nor would any connection on the part of any of the other prize-winners to the DDR; it just would be interesting to know.

The Danish daily Morgenavis-Jyllandsposten (famous for those “Danish cartoons” a few years back) and its Moscow correspondent Niels Jürgensen have what looks like to be an exclusive concerning an interesting slice of Cold War history: CIA stood behind Pasternak’s Nobel Prize. That would be the Nobel Prize for Literature for the year 1958, awarded to the Russian author Boris Pasternak basically on the strength of his magnum opus, the novel Doctor Zhivago.

You’re probably more aware of this work in the form of the 1965 movie, starring Omar Sharif and Julie Christie. I never saw it myself (nor, alas, have read the book yet), but am given to understand that the film played up the lovey-dovey aspects of the tale so that the sharp criticisms it contained of the take-over of power in Russia by the Bolsheviks of 1917 and their rule since then were pushed somewhat to the margins. But it was just that criticism, from a native writer of note, that made the publication of Doctor Zhivago in the West, and especially its winning its author a Nobel Prize, such a propaganda coup against the Soviet Union back during those intense Cold War days. (more…)

It turned out I was just as unprepared as most everyone else for the Swedish Academy’s selection of Doris Lessing to receive the 2007 Nobel Prize for Literature. But the award has, as always, turned the just-turned-88 British/Rhodesian authoress into a hot property: her books are now in greater demand, and so are her opinions. And the Spanish newspaper El País has turned up as the big winner in the latter sphere, scoring the exclusive, (somewhat) extensive interview “War and Memory Never Stop” that the world’s other papers can only quote snippets from. (Yes, I don’t usually track the content on El País; I was alerted to the article by Le Nouvel Observateur’s treatment of such interview snippets.) Why El País? It’s nowhere totally clear, although it seems that Lessing has been thinking back quite a lot these days to the Spanish Civil War, something that is of course discussed in the interview. (more…)

Perhaps it is a bit strange to begin one of my earliest posts for the new incarnation of EuroSavant with a limitation – i.e. a reminder of what I don’t cover – but it’s unfortunately the case that Sweden lies outside our press-review purview. This is especially inconvenient this time of year, for the on-the-scene-and-connected Swedish press, it seems, can be counted upon to provide the hottest tips about the year’s crop of Nobel Prize laureates, just before they are all announced to the world roughly in mid-October.

Fortunately, Germany’s Die Zeit is also willing to survey Swedish sources to cast its own look ahead (Literatur-Nobelpreis: Macht DeLillo das Rennen? = “Literature-Nobel Prize: Is DeLillo in the Running?”), and it is interesting material, if rather too brief. (more…)

Traipsing through the Polish press lately, I found an interesting piece of commentary in Rzeczpospolita on The Spoiling of the Nobel Prize for Literature, by Waldemar Zyszkiewicz, a member of the Polish Writers’ Association. (You can read a history of that Association – in Polish – by following the link. It looks like yes, it was your standard Communist state writer’s union during most of the post-war period, but that its members offered quite a bit of resistance – and suffered quite a few arrests – during the Solidarity/martial law period of the 1980s.) You might recall my posting of not so long ago in which I commented on the Nobel Prize for Literature, as a contrast to the Nobel Peace Prize which was my principle object of discussion. It seems I was too optimistic even in my evaluation of the Literature Prize; according to Zyszkiewicz, the rot also set in there some time ago. (more…)

Nobel Peace Prizes are awarded not in Stockholm but in Oslo, and so that is where this past Friday the 2004 winner, the Kenyan vice-minister for the environment Wangari Maathai, was the honored guest of the Norwegian royal family for her awards ceremony. Naturally, she was given the floor in Oslo’s City Hall, and made use of it to deliver various remarks, reported by among others Germany’s Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (Maathi [sic]: Africans Must Resolve Conflicts Themselves). The first African woman ever to win the prize, and at the same time the first environmentalist, whose organization is credited with planting more than 30 million trees on that continent, asserted in her remarks the tight relationship between conservation of the environment and conservation of peace. But ultimately, solutions for Africa’s many conflicts, and for its poverty, must come out of Africa itself. She also expressed her hope that her accomplishment inspire other African women and girls to fulfill their own potential.

The Berliner Morgenpost account (Nobel Prize for Peace to African Woman) added further interesting details. For the first time the awards ceremony there in Oslo featured African rhythms and dances. The 64-year-old Mrs. Maathai declared that “Industry and international institutions must understand that economic justice and ecological soundness are worth more than profit at any price,” and that “much still remains to leave a world full of beauty and wonder to our children.” (Oh, words of absolute music to the left-wing German audience to which the Berliner Morgenpost caters!)

I’m glad to see this coverage, as it offers me another chance that I missed back in October when all the Nobel prize-winners were announced – namely the chance to pronounce my own judgment on the Peace Prize search committee’s work, which is: “Not bad – but.” (more…)