55 Voices for Democracy – The Podcast

Award-winning director, screenwriter, and producer Patty Jenkins joined Aida and Tom at the Thomas Mann House for this special episode. Jenkins is best known for the films Wonder Woman (2017), Wonder Woman 1984 (2020), and her Oscar-winning debut Monster (2003). Wonder Woman smashed box office records and became the highest-grossing live-action film directed by a woman at the time. During their insightful conversation at the Thomas Mann House, the three talked about the universal power of storytelling, superheroes, and the future of film in a changing media environment. 

“Physically putting your body in a place where history happened gives you a different sense of intimacy, a different sense of proximity to that history.” In the final episode of our podcast, author, poet, and scholar Clint Smith speaks about the importance of collectively reckoning with history, the legacy of slavery in U.S.-American identity, and cultures of remembrance in the U.S. and Germany. He is the #1 New York Times bestselling author of How the Word is Passed: A Reckoning With the History of Slavery Across America, and the best-selling poetry collection Above Ground, as well as the award-winning poetry collection Counting Descent. Smith is a staff writer at The Atlantic. 

“Going through a crisis and having a positive vision of the future are not the same thing. You need to have a positive vision of the future to get through the crisis.” Our hosts, Aida Baghernejad and Tom Zoellner, interview politician and publicist Marina Weisband for this special episode, recorded live at the international literatur festival berlin. After an introduction by political scientist and Thomas Mann Fellow Christine Landfried, they discuss the digital revolution and the ongoing war in Ukraine, among other things. Marina Weisband is a politician, psychologist, and participation educator. Together with Frido Mann, she is the co-author of the book Was uns durch die Krise trägt. Ein Generationengespräch (2023).

“There is an understanding that between humans we have this one thing called language and it brings us - or can bring us - together.” Writer and poet Lynne Thompson talks with hosts Aida Baghernejad and Tom Zoellner about her journey to becoming a poet, the role of “truth“ in poetry and its meaning for democracy. Lynne Thompson is the 2021-2022 Poet Laureate for the City of Los Angeles, and her poetry collections include Beg No Pardon (2007), Start With A Small Guitar (2013), and Fretwork (2019). Her work has appeared in Ploughshares, Poetry, Poem-A-Day (Academy of American Poets), New England Review, Colorado Review, Best American Poetry, to name a few.

Host Tom Zoellner sat down with professor William Wiggins to discuss the ongoing importance of African-American history within the larger context of US history. Professor Wiggins has written on numerous subjects dealing with revolutionary figures and movements in U.S. history. He has taught at the University of Connecticut, St. Olaf and Allegheny Colleges, Hampton University and Columbia University, where he also served as an Assistant Dean. 

“Time is a political resource. How time is distributed is a question of structures we find within a society. It’s structured by the economic system we have; it’s structured by gender, by race,” states journalist and author Teresa Bücker. In this conversation, Bücker describes her vision for a feminist and just approach to time. Her book on the topic, "Alle_Zeit. Eine Frage von Macht und Freiheit" was published in German in 2022. Bücker has been a regular contributor to Süddeutsche Zeitung, and is a sought after voice in conversations on politics, gender, and social change in Germany.

“I’ve been through war. I’ve witnessed the workings of genocide. I have gone to mass graves across the entire continent (…) We have to un-forget to get past the present fear.” In this episode, writer and journalist Roberto Lovato speaks about overcoming personal and collective trauma. Lovato's work has been published in The New York Times, The Guardian, Foreign Policy, Der Spiegel, and other national and international media outlets. In 2020, he published his first book, Unforgetting: A Memoir of Family, Migration, Gangs and Revolutions in the Americas. Lovato is a Visiting Assistant Professor of English at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, and received a grant from the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting.   

“Part of what has led the movement against fossil fuels is the increased number of people being confronted with the effects of oil drilling and fracking,” argues energy analyst and investigative journalist Antonia Juhasz. The Senior Researcher in the Environment and Human Rights Division at Human Rights Watch talks about how our dependency on fossil fuels impacts the environment, politics, social justice and human rights worldwide. What can be done to bring about a just transition to renewable energy more quickly? Juhasz regularly writes for outlets such as The New York Times, The Guardian and National Geographic, and is the author of Black Tide: the Devastating Impact of the Gulf Oil Spill (2011), among others.

In an encore presentation, Adam Phillips joins Kate Wolf to discuss his two latest books, both published this year, On Wanting to Change and On Getting Better. The series looks at the very human impulse toward transformation, from religious and political conversion, and the conversion to family life from which one must ultimately emerge, to the aims and practices of psychoanalysis, along with more quotidian ideas of self-betterment. As always in his work, Phillips attends in these books to the aspects of ourselves that can be hardest to bear, and that can lead us to desire more rigid structures — intellectual or otherwise — or desire to be someone else, while also quietly petitioning for a more complex and thoughtful mode of change in which, as Socrates encouraged his pupils, we learn only to be ourselves. How might we get better, Phillips wonders, at talking about what it is to get better?

Also, Pankaj Mishra, author of Run and Hide, returns to recommend Josep Pla’s The Grey Notebook.

“I realized that everything I learned in terms of communication, creativity, strategy and planning at university can also be used for good...for the rights of people with disabilities,” states Raul Krauthausen. The inclusion activist and podcaster compares inclusion and accessibility laws in the US and Germany, and explains how Germany's reckoning with its fascist past still affects institutional structures today. Raul Krauthausen is the founder of a series of initiatives focusing on diversity and inclusion, among them SOZIALHELD*INNEN (Social heroes), which advises individuals and businesses on considering people with disabilities as a target group for their products and services. He is also the host of several podcasts.