Lesung & Gespräch: Ilko-Sascha Kowalczuk

In the organizer's words:

Reading & discussion with Ilko-Sascha Kowalczuk on the book Freiheitsschock. Eine andere Geschichte Ostdeutschlands von 1989 bis heute, moderated by Mathias Wittmann. Free admission.

In 1989/90 East Germany suffered a "freedom shock", that is the basic thesis of this book. Ilko-Sascha Kowalczuk tells the story of East Germany since 1990 as a struggle for freedom - a struggle whose outcome points the way for the future of the whole of Germany. He wants to shake people up: to take more active personal responsibility, to turn away from their own role as victims and to take a look at history in which the GDR does not become more beautiful the longer ago it was. In this book, the dictatorship remains a dictatorship and unification a success story of freedom: an intervention against the anti-freedom tendencies by one of the most prominent East German intellectuals.

The AfD is an all-German phenomenon, but it is particularly successful in East Germany. How can this be explained? Why is liberal democracy being called into question in the very place where the first successful revolution on German soil took place? East Germany is currently the subject of intense debate, and Ilko-Sascha Kowalczuk is one of the most prominent voices in this debate. The fight for freedom is his life's work. Having grown up under the SED dictatorship himself, he has published standard works on the history of the GDR and communism, but also on the revolution of 1989 and the consequences of the "takeover" of the GDR by the Federal Republic. Kowalczuk wants to get the East Germans out of their role as victims. The West may have "invented" its East. But the East also invented and continues to invent its own West. In the GDR, the West was a place of longing for many, but the SED's anti-Western propaganda also had deep roots. They were reinforced by the frustrations of the unification process. And they now prevent many East Germans from embracing the liberal democracy of the Federal Republic.

"Without freedom, everything is nothing. No peace without freedom."

- Empowerment instead of victimhood: the anti-Oschmann

- An intervention against the anti-freedom movements

- By one of the most prominent East German intellectuals

- Published before the state elections in East Germany

Ilko-Sascha Kowalczuk is a historian and journalist as well as a research associate at the Hamburg Foundation for the Promotion of Science and Culture. He is one of the most renowned German experts on the history of the GDR and communism.