Arne Höcker on paranoia and the totalitarian drift of modernity, featuring Lilla Balint and Benjamin Kunkel

Arne Höcker is Associate Professor of German Studies at CU Boulder. His publications include The Case of Literature: Forensic Narratives from Goethe to Kafka (Cornell UP 2020), and Paranoia and the Totalitarian Drift of Modernity (Cornell UP 2026).

Lilla Balint is Assistant Professor of German at the University of California, Berkeley. She specializes in twentieth- and twenty-first-century German literature, culture, and thought in its transnational European contexts. Her work has appeared in venues such as Critical Quarterly, German Quarterly, Gegenwartsliteratur: A German Studies Year Book, and Studies in 20th and 21st Century Literature, among others. She is coeditor of Text + Kritik 244—Judith Schalansky (2024). Her monograph The Contemporary: History and Temporality after 1989 is forthcoming with De Gruyter.

Benjamin Kunkel is the bestselling author of Indecision and Utopia or Bust, and a co-founder of n+1. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, the New Yorker, the New York Review of Books and the London Review of Books.

This event is made possible by CU Boulder’s 2026 Kayden Book Award.