55 Voices for Democracy – The Podcast

While his government has long been a promise for reconciliation and development, Rwanda's President Paul Kagame is facing increasing international criticism. Human Rights Watch and other institutions accuse his government of mistreating opposition members or making them disappear. At the center of the criticism is, among other things, the kidnapping of Paul Rusesabagina, a central figure in the film Hotel Rwanda and recipient of the U.S. Presidential Medal of Freedom. In this episode, hosts Tom Zoellner and Aida Baghernejad talk with David Himbara, a Rwandan political scientist and economist, about the threatening developments in Rwanda and the human rights situation in his country.

Irish novelist, journalist and scholar Colm Toíbín talks about Thomas Mann's formation as a democrat and the historic circumstances that formed his political thinking. Toíbín's highly anticipated upcoming novel "The Magician" (Simon & Schuster, 2021) tells the life of Thomas Mann, an epic family saga set across a half-century spanning World War I, the rise of Hitler, World War II, and the Cold War. Toíbín discusses Mann's relationship to the United States, his admiration for Franklin D. Roosevelt and how Mann turned from a "nonpolitical man" into an important advocate of social democracy. Tóibín is currently Irene and Sidney B. Silverman Professor of the Humanities at Columbia University, professor of creative writing at the University of Manchester and Chancellor of the University of Liverpool.

Poet and writer Max Czollek talks about why German remembrance culture seems staged to him, and what a radically diverse society might look like. Czollek's recent books "Gegenwartsbewältigung" (Coping with the Present) and "Desintigriert Euch!" (De-Integrate Yourselves!) have been widely discussed in Germany. Through his books and daily tweets, Max Czollek has become one of Germany's most important voices on issues such as contemporary Jewish identity in Germany, racism and integration. Czollek completed his dissertation at the Center for Research on Antisemitism at the Technical University Berlin.

How can societies and states reinvent themselves after the pandemic? Andreas Reckwitz, sociologist, cultural theorist and one of Germany's most eminent contemporary scholars, talks about what the COVID-19 pandemic means for late modern society from a sociological point of view. While the pandemic highlighted structural problems such as inequality, can it also bear hope for societal transformation? With our hosts Tom Zoellner and Aida Baghernejad, he discusses the emergence of a new middle class and the meaning of the terms "left" and "right" today. Reckwitz is the author of Society of Singularities (2017) and The End of Illusions (2019), and will be a fellow at the Thomas Mann House in 2022.

Historian Keisha N. Blain, Professor at the University of Pittsburgh and President of the African American Intellectual History Society, recently co-edited the acclaimed book Four Hundred Souls: A Community History of African America 1619-2019 with her colleague Ibram X. Kendi. In this episode, Blain talks about how to commemorate the 400 year anniversary of the pivotal moment in 1619, when the first group of twenty African captives arrived on "The White Lion" in Jamestown, Virginia. In her conversation with hosts Tom Zoellner and Aida Baghernejad, Blain reflects on the history of Black America and issues of racism, voting rights, and social justice today. Blain's articles have appeared in The Guardian, The Atlantic and the Washington Post.

55 Voices for Democracy is modeled after the BBC radio speeches, through which Thomas Mann in the mid 1940s pleaded to thousands of listeners to resist the Nazi regime. In this podcast series, intellectuals, artists, and activists engage in conversations about how to renew democracy today.

The societal state as a crisis of imagination? German climate activist Luisa Neubauer is one of the main organizers of Fridays for Future in Germany, an international student movement demanding political action against climate change. In this episode, Neubauer talks about her activism and the momentum of the movement, climate awareness in the U.S. and Germany, and dreaming as a tool for change.

"On the one side, we have to accept the catastrophes that are going to unravel. But on the other, we need to allow ourselves to dream big."

Neubauer is the co-author of the book Vom Ende der Klimakrise – Eine Geschichte unserer Zukunft (On the End of the Climate Crisis - A History of Our Future).

In this episode, U.S.-German writer Deborah Feldman engages in a conversation with hosts Tom Zoellner and Aida Baghernejad about contemporary Jewish culture in Berlin, political participation by religious communities and the meaning of trust in democracies: "We need to establish the kind of personal trust we have as individuals with each other in the public sphere." Feldman is the author of Unorthodox: The Scandalous Rejection of My Hasidic Roots (2012), in which she tells the story of her escape from an ultra-Orthodox community in Brooklyn, New York. The book was the basis of the Netflix miniseries Unorthodox (2020).