American Academy Lecture at the Fritz Thyssen Foundation

Demokratische Vielfalt und Neurecht “Metapolitik”: wie die Demokratie ihre Fassung bewahrt

On May 23, 2024, Germany’s Basic Law celebrates its seventy-fifth birthday. Spring 2024 fellow Johannes von Moltke takes this milestone anniversary as an opportunity to talk about contemporary challenges democracy is facing on both sides of the Atlantic. His focus is on the social and cultural prerequisites of democracy and the challenges posed by a emboldened New Right. This “cultural revolution from the right” sees itself as a “metapolitical” struggle for culture and education, language and concepts, ways of life and community spirit. In this competition, the New Right uses basic democratic assumptions in its arsenal and turns them against democracy itself. How can it defend itself against the use of freedom, pluralism, and the right to resistance as pretexts for exclusion, authoritarianism, and “regime change from the right”?  Following his lecture, von Moltke will be in conversation with historian Till van Rahden.

The event is part of the Joint Visiting Speakers Series of the Fritz Thyssen Foundation, American Academy in Berlin, and Amerikahaus NRW e.V.

This talk will take place in German.

Registration with the Fritz Thyssen Foundation: https://www.fritz-thyssen-stiftung.de/veranstaltungen/liste-veranstaltungen/

Johannes von Moltke is Professor of German Studies and Film, Television and Media at the University of Michigan. His research and teaching focus is on film and German cultural history of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. In his current research project, “The Identitarian Reflex: Critical Theory and the ‘Metapolitics’ of the New Right,” he examines how the New Right mobilizes art and ideas in the contemporary culture wars.

Till van Rahden teaches European history at the Université de Montréal in Canada with a focus on European history since the Enlightenment. His particular research interest is the tension between the elusive promise of democratic equality and the ubiquity of cultural diversity and moral conflict.