Paul Reitter on translating Marx’s Capital, in conversation with Arne Höcker

Paul Reitter is Professor in German Languages and Literatures at The Ohio State University. He is the author of Bambi’s Jewish Roots and Other Essays on German-Jewish Culture (Bloomsbury, 2015), On the Origins of Jewish Self-Hatred (Princeton, 2012), and The Anti-Journalist: Karl Kraus and Jewish Self-Fashioning in Fin-de-Siecle Europe (Chicago, 2008). He collaborated with Jonathan Franzen and Daniel Kehlmann on The Kraus Project: Essays by Karl Kraus (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2013), named an Editors’ Choice by the New York Times Book Review and finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award in Criticism. For his translation of the first volume of Karl Marx’s Capital: Critique of Political Economy (Princeton University Press, 2021) he won the 2025 Helen & Kurt Wolff Translator’s Price from the Goethe Institute.

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 (forthcoming 2026).