Program 2025 (engl)

In the shadow of terror and oppression, Karwan Rauf Hama Amin tells his moving story as a Kurdish resistance fighter in northern Iraq in the 1980s. In the midst of a brutal fight against Saddam Hussein’s regime, he is taken prisoner. For three years he is imprisoned in the notorious prisons, marked by harsh detention, torture and a daily struggle for dignity and hope. With penetrating honesty, he describes very explicitly the merciless struggle for survival behind the prison walls and the silent solidarity that unites him and his fellow prisoners despite their unbearable torment.

This book is a testimony to resistance, the quest for freedom and a memorial against forgetting.

In “Letter to Mother”, Bela Winkens writes to her mother, who was murdered in the Auschwitz concentration camp and whom she never really got to know. She tells her about her childhood, her memories of the Theresienstadt concentration camp, which she survived as a four-year-old, and how she learned to deal with the pain and grief in the course of her life as a survivor.

Bela Winkens was born Bela Heymann in Berlin on February 5, 1941. Her grandparents and parents were deported to concentration camps in 1942/1943 and murdered. Before that, her grandfather brought her to relatives in the Ruhr region and in June 1943 she was placed in a Catholic children’s home in Bochum. The home was bombed the following night and Bela, who was presumably anonymous, was evacuated with the other children. She remained in North Hesse as “Elisabeth”, but her identity was discovered and she was taken to the Jewish Hospital in Berlin, from where she was deported to Theresienstadt. In 1946, a couple took her in in Düsseldorf and adopted her.

It has been 175 years since it was first mentioned by name: the spectre of communism haunting the present and whispering from the future. In recent years, more and more such spectres have reappeared, whispering of radically different futures. They appear above all in films, novels and artistic works, but are not so easy to recognize because they do not adhere to traditional forms of haunting. We need new tools to track them down, enter into a conversation with them and find out what they can tell us about our time, its abolition and possible other times.

“Abolish Time” enters into a dialog with ghosts of the present and the recent past. It seeks a conversation with them with the aim of making their whispers audible not as a threat, as is so often the case, but as a promise. The end of work, the abolition of the family and the abolition of time emerge as related, even mutually dependent desires. They all revolve around the goal of putting an end to the artificial production of the present and transforming past struggles into collectively determined futures.

The book describes the moving fates of Afghan women after the Taliban came to power and the collapse of the NATO-backed government system. It sheds light on the challenges and fear that gripped Afghan society, especially the women who suffered most under the repressive religious rules. These women, including wage laborers, journalists and political activists, were forced to look for ways to escape the threat of violence and oppression.

The End of Women’s Rights in Afghanistan. Refugee Women Report gives women a voice and thus archives the events experienced from an economic, political and social perspective. It gives a deep insight into the struggle of these women against corruption and polarization and shows their courage and determination to seek a free life despite new threats and challenges. Weaving together personal memories and experiences, the book sheds a harsh light on NATO’s twenty-year presence in Afghanistan and the resulting long-term impact on society.

Sur Esrafil studied at Herat University and worked as a lawyer in Afghanistan for many years. She was a member of the Afghan Pen Association and initiated the hashtag campaigns #MeAndPregnancy and #WhatsMyName. She has migrated to different countries since her childhood. She works as a PR officer at YAAR e. V., an Afghan NGO in Berlin.

Totality describes the problem of whether and how it is even possible to understand society as a whole. With the “end of the grand narratives”, this question seemed to have become superfluous. But in the multiple crisis, climate catastrophe and the global strengthening of the right, the need to determine the context of the whole is returning. With the critique of capitalism, class analysis and social theory, the repressed problem of totality is also returning.

Current theories must now fill this void of totality. From the concept of populism to the new class politics, from the rediscovery of critical theory and authoritarianism to the philosophy of history, there is once again speculation about the structure and the whole of society. But these definitions necessarily remain abstract – and thus part of the problem.

So is totality always a bad generalization or does it exist in reality? 

Alex Struwe explores this question in his book “Totality”. In his lecture, he explains why, despite all the difficulties, a critical concept of totality is needed. Without this, there can be no objection to the prevailing conditions.

„It’s already half past ten. Someone suggests ‚going out for ice cream together! Everyone agrees. There’s a small café on Bergstrasse where a portion of ice cream costs ten pfennigs. The whole gang heads there. The ice cream tastes delicious! […] But a storm could also arise here. The café owner didn’t pay his employees the going rate! When we got wind of this, we decided to boycott it. The boycott lasted a week until the business owner gave in because he was afraid of losing his most important customers with us. The employees were paid the standard wage and we went back to the restaurant.“

Olga Benario wrote this at the age of 20 in Moscow, where she had fled after the sensational liberation of Otto Braun. Her book, which describes the everyday life of Berlin’s Communist Youth, is published in Russian in Moscow in 1929.

As there is very little literature on the organization and working methods of the KJVD, and Olga Benario’s stories about night-time billposting, fundraising or the party offices are as beautiful as they are insightful, this book is an important testimony. Verbrecher Verlag publishers Kristine Listau and Jörg Sundermeier tell the story of Olga Benario’s life based on the biographical approach published by her daughter Anita Leocádia Prestes and present her often self-deprecating reports on the political work of the working-class youth of the 1920s.

The novel Geheimnis und Gewalt (1951) by Georg K. Glaser (1910-1995) is a breathtaking account of his life. It is about growing up in the Weimar Republic, characterized by poverty, social discord and the devastation that the First World War left behind in people and their relationships. The protagonist Valentin Haueisen – in whom Glaser himself can be recognized, even if he is not identical to him – politicizes himself in the vagabond and wandering movement and becomes a member of anarchist and communist youth groups. As a proletarian youth writer, he became close to the KPD, in whose ranks he organized resistance against the Nazis who were striving for power: also known as “Haueisen”, in fierce clashes on the street. The novel also depicts the turmoil of the Second World War, in which Haueisen, like Glaser, fought with the French army against the Germans. The “autobiographical account of a lone fighter” works through the ideals that the protagonist once followed. Behind the lines lies a sadness about the failed attempt at a new beginning, which promised a comprehensive renewal, but became entangled in the contradictions of its time and in relations of violence. This mourning also contains a disappointment with party communism, which was unable to find answers to the phenomenon of National Socialism as a mass movement or only provided false ones.

As a mixture of lecture and reading, the event will present the novel and put forward a few theses for discussion. The commented reading will take place in two parts of 45 minutes each. There will be a break between the two parts. The speaker will be Lukas Holfeld (Leipzig), who produces the (mostly) monthly radio program Wutpilger-Streifzüge, which can be heard on various free radio stations and on the Internet (www.wutpilger.org). He is also responsible for the program of the event series “Kunst, Spektakel & Revolution” in Weimar (www.spektakel.org).

At the end of May 1968, France was on the brink of revolution. At least that was probably President de Gaulle’s assessment when he flew by helicopter from Paris to secret meetings with the commander of the French armed forces in Germany. 

Prior to this, the first wildcat general strike in history had broken out, starting with university occupations. It lasted for several weeks. Against the resistance of the institutionalized left and trade unions. 

Both the ruling class and the traditional left agreed that this movement was unforeseeable. It was not an economic crisis that had created the pre-revolutionary situation, but the actions of the students and workers that had brought it about in the first place. 

Only a numerically small group around the Situationist International found confirmation in the events of their theses, which combined the critique of alienation with the absolute necessity of revolutionary class struggle. Beneath the apparent social peace of post-war society, it smouldered: “We simply put oil where there was fire.”

Even if the ruling class and the organizations of the old left ultimately succeeded in calling the newly awakened proletariat back to order through a combination of repression and cajoling, the events of May ’68 in France resonated worldwide and heralded the beginning of a new era of struggles. Much has seeped into the anti-authoritarian and antagonistic left without its origins still being directly invoked today. 

René Viénet’s hastily written book is at times a description of the scene, at times an analysis, but above all a loud-mouthed announcement of all attempts at recuperation that were already emerging at the time. On the basis of this contemporary document, we want to discuss this evening and, not least, recall the possibility of revolution.

In 2015, debates arose in anti-fascist contexts that all these phenomena could be signs of a development towards impending fascism. And discussions began hesitantly about whether and how it could be stopped and with whom. Since then, numerous magazines and blogs have published articles on the state of the anti-fascist movement, repression against anti-fascists, developments on the extreme right and the authoritarian escalation of state policy. A not insignificant proportion of these contributions revolve around the strategic question of how these developments can be stopped or whether it is necessary to prepare for what is to come. For the double volume „Bis alle frei sind. Antifa Debates 2015-2025“, a number of texts have been selected and compiled. The aim is to document the current state of antifa debates and thus create a basis for translating these debates into practice.

At the event, we would like to give a brief overview of the double volume and, above all, discuss antifascist perspectives with you.

Between 1975 and 1981, Peter Weiss published his three-volume novel “The Aesthetics of Resistance” in West Germany. Shortly after the author’s death, the work was published in the GDR in 1983. The novel traces the history of the anti-fascist resistance between September 1937 and 1945 through an extensive and international network of relationships. The story begins in Berlin with a conversation between three anti-fascist friends. Shortly afterwards, the nameless first-person narrator travels to Spain, where he joins the Republicans in their fight against General Franco’s coup. After the fall of the Republic, he flees to Paris and from there to Stockholm. Parallel to the plot, which is based on historical events, there is an examination of topics such as work, resistance, violence, expulsion, flight and exile. The characters discuss their political convictions and questions on the basis of works from the visual arts and literature, which they interpret as monuments of the struggle against oppression and exploitation.

The first English translation of the novel (The Aesthetics of Resistance) has been available in its entirety since 2025. We talk to one of the translators, Joel Scott, about how it came about that “The Aesthetics” is only now available in its entirety in English. Above all, however, we talk about the text and ask ourselves to what extent Weiss‘ novel is still relevant today.

“Art, Spectacle & Revolution” is the title of a series of events in Weimar and a magazine that has been published at irregular intervals since 2010. KSR deals with the relationship between aesthetics and social criticism and explores the points in history at which (anti-)artistic and revolutionary movements merged.

The ninth print edition of KSR will be published in July – the magazine will be available for purchase for the first time at the Radical Bookfair. It deals with the legacy of the historical avant-gardes – in other words, with those movements that wanted to disrupt the institution of art in order to incorporate the potential of art into the project of a comprehensive reorganization of society. These movements wanted to uncover the roots of the contradictions of the modern age and developed a fascinating formal language in the process. They achieved an astonishing degree of reflection on artistic means, formulated a fierce objection to the prevailing status quo and stood up for the new. At the same time, the avant-gardes themselves were characterized by a series of contradictions – as revolutionary as they all were, this did not always mean humanity in an emancipatory sense. And their endeavor is strangely undeadly present in postmodernism, which has not overcome modernism.

At the Radical Bookfair, some theses on the avant-garde will be put up for discussion and the contents of KSR N°9 will be presented.

How the left should respond politically to the climate crisis and what theoretical analysis is necessary for this is hotly disputed. Many in the climate movement are calling for the relevant experts to be consulted. Others see ecological issues as an ideological hobbyhorse of the privileged middle classes and trivialize the dramatic nature of climate change.

This is now in full swing: in 2024, the average global temperature was 1.6 degrees Celsius above the temperature of the pre-industrial age for the first time, meaning that the Paris Climate Agreement’s magic mark of 1.5 degrees will soon be permanently exceeded. However, fossil capital is still firmly in the saddle and political developments do not give us any hope that this will change any time soon. While the climate crisis continues to escalate, the inhabitants of the most affected regions of the world lack the means to adequately protect themselves against its consequences.

In “Climate and Capitalism – A Plea for Ecological Socialism”, the authors embed scientific findings on climate change in a Marxist critique of the capitalist mode of production and use this as the basis for a plea for ecological socialism: a society in which the how and what of production is decided democratically and human needs take center stage. Only under these conditions can the pressing ecological issues of the present be truly addressed.

„So as of today, open fascism reigned in Germany. We had been prepared for it, we clearly saw the danger, everything had pointed to it. Just yesterday we had demonstrated in the Lustgarten with a hundred thousand Berliners against the threat of fascism.“ The force of violence and persecution that began with National Socialism destroyed all the organizations of the political opponents in a very short time. What caused the jubilation of many who were eagerly awaiting the unleashing of their fantasies of violence, left others apathetic and helpless. Not Lisa Fittko, however. As a resistance fighter, escape helper, communist and Jew, resignation was never an option for her. She became famous for helping the philosopher Walter Benjamin to escape and is honored for her fearlessness and solidarity with the oppressed. Together with her comrades in the German resistance, she resolutely opposed the National Socialist reign of terror and even during her own escape, she helped hundreds to flee certain death. Even in the darkest times, she retained her humanity and ability to act. The staged reading accompanies Lisa at various stages of her resistance. In the early years in Berlin, during her escape and internment in France, on her escape route over the Pyrenees, which saved hundreds of lives, and finally when she saved her own family from deportation. The approximately 90-minute reading in several voices is supported by visualizations that orient us in space and time.

In the theory of the Frankfurt School, labor is both central and marginal in its significance: central, since the workers‘ movement of the 19th and early 20th centuries represents its starting point. Marginal, because the authors of the Institute for Social Research did not place work at the center of their theorizing. Even where Theodor W. Adorno, Max Horkheimer or Erich Fromm build directly on Karl Marx’s critique of political economy, there is no systematic analysis of labor relations. Nevertheless, capitalist society is the subject of their analyses and its transformation is the aim of their critique. In this respect, they are somewhat ahead of today’s social science, philosophical or feuilleton debates on the working society.

The anthology reconstructs the concept of work in critical theory in curated contributions dedicated to the Institute’s working methods, the writings of individual members and related critical theorists. The articles, essays and interviews can be linked along the concepts of mastery of nature, alienation and reification to reconstruct critical labour research today.