ON EDGE/UNBEHAGEN - This is the guiding theme of the eighth Vienna Humanities Festival. In three weeks, Vienna will once again become a hub for captivating discussions and critical debates, as some of the world's most brilliant thinkers, researchers, artists, writers, and journalists gather in the city to shed light on the symptoms of the seemingly all-encompassing crisis afflicting our time. Four keynotes at the Wien Museum, Radiokulturhaus, and Volkstheater lead up to the festival weekend at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna.
Oxford historian Lyndal Roper will deliver the first festival lecture at the Wien Museum, exploring the often-forgotten German Peasants’ War of 1525 and its place in history. Following Friedrich Engels, Marxist historians in the German Democratic Republic later assigned exaggerated importance to the war for political purposes. Lyndal Roper reveals the true significance of these dramatic events and their protagonists, which demonstrated the political intelligence of a neglected class that took Martin Luther’s revolutionary teachings at his word. The lecture will be followed by a conversation with IWM Rector Misha Glenny. Wednesday, 24 September 2025, 18:30, Wien Museum.
What is love? Or, more precisely, what is love there to express? Do we become freer through the practice of love? Why and how does it become a powerful vehicle for individual and social transformation? In this keynote, Italian philosopher Federica Gregoratto takes a deep dive into the Western philosophical tradition of thinking about love, embarking on an intellectual journey spanning Plato, Hegel, the Frankfurt School, Simone de Beauvoir, and Audre Lorde. After her lecture, Gregoratto will be in conversation with VHF co-founder Dessy Gavrilova. Thursday, 25 September 2025, 19:00, Radiokulturhaus.
What can the afterlife of the Habsburg Empire teach us about the very meaning of sovereignty and the birth of modern states? Building on the central arguments of her acclaimed book, The Life and Death of States: Central Europe and the Transformation of Modern Sovereignty, historian Natasha Wheatley will examine how the empire’s intricate legal and political frameworks shaped modern understandings of statehood, and how its dissolution provided a model for new nations to assert legitimacy as sovereign states. In conversation with Wien Museum director Matti Bunzl, Wheatley will further untangle some of her central arguments after the keynote. Friday, 26 September 2025, 18:30, Wien Museum.
On Saturday evening, critically acclaimed author and sociologist Didier Eribon will take the stage at the Volkstheater Vienna. In this final festival keynote, Eribon will reflect on the conditions of political voice, agency, and visibility in contemporary social and political life, based on his most recent book The Life, Old Age, and Death of a Working-Class Woman. Following the talk, he will be in conversation with Ivan Krastev, IWM Albert Hirschman Permanent Fellow. Saturday, 27 September 2025, 19:30, Volkstheater.
On the weekend at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna, visitors can—among numerous other topics—look forward to panels on the power and future of technology, European consciousness and conscience, China's role in global politics or AI and its influence on art with Naomi Alderman, Perry Anderson, Jens Beckert, Lydia Cacho, Julián Casanova, Gary Gerstle, Tobias Haberl, Leonie Haiden, Michal Hvorecký, Catrin Misselhorn, Yascha Mounk, Esra Özyürek, Maria Todorova, Sergey Radchenko, Markus Reisner, Rob Riemen, Tomáš Sedláček, Kai Strittmatter, Andrea Tompa and Ayşe Zarakol.
A closing panel with psychiatrist and psychologist Victor Blüml and historian Hannah Zeavin on September 28 will shed light on the effects of the complex, rapid and far-reaching social transformations on the human psyche itself.
The festival will be held in English and German. Admission to the weekend sessions at the Academy is free. They will be translated live. Earphones will be provided at the venue.
For more information and the entire program, visit humanitiesfestival.at. For interview requests, please contact iwm-pr@iwm.at.
In 2025, the festival will be organized by the Institute for Human Sciences (IWM) and Time To Talk (TTT) in cooperation with ERSTE Foundation, the Open Society Foundations, the City of Vienna, Ö1 Intro, the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna, the Wien Museum, and the Volkstheater.
Photo credits: © Isha Photography (Roper), Nina Subin (Wheatley), line Keller-Sørensen (Gregoratto), Pascal Ito/Flammarion (Eribon)
