Events Calendar
December 2020
01
Dec
2020
Dec
2020
The Ratline
To mark the publication of the German language version of The Ratline, which follows his prize-winning book East West Street, Philippe Sands explores the ideas that underpin his new work, an account of the lives of Otto Wächter, an Austrian SS Gruppenführer indicted for mass murder, his wife Charlotte, from the moment they met Vienna …
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June 2020
28
Jun
2020
Jun
2020
IWM Summer School:
The Legislature, the Court, and the Streets
Postponed until 2021! In light of the ongoing Covid-19 crisis, the 2020 IWM Summer School has been postponed until next year. It will be held on the same theme at Burg Feistritz at the end of June 2021. If you have answered our call for applications for this year, we can assure you that we …
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May 2020
12
May
2020
May
2020
“WhatsApp Israel?”
There are not many individuals in the world, who do not know Israel. Who did not hear something, good or bad, about it? Many have strong opinions about what is happening in this small country. The country that was once a model society of equality and liberal democracy is now a partner to more conservative …
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April 2020
21
Apr
2020
Apr
2020
The Ratline
Due to the coronavirus outbreak this lecture has been postponed to December 1, 2020. The event will be the launch of the German language version of The Ratline, which will come out on November 25. In his new book The Ratline, Philippe Sands explores the ideas that underpin his new work, an account of the …
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March 2020
26
Mar
2020
Mar
2020
Byzantium as an Argument in the Russian Intellectual Debate
Not long ago, two prominent public intellectuals in Russia – a well-known pro-Kremlin analyst and the liberal thinker Yulia Latynina – wrote articles about Byzantium. Although their attitudes toward Byzantium were diametrically opposite to each other, the two authors were comically unanimous in their belief that this long defunct Empire was responsible for everything that …
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24
Mar
2020
Mar
2020
Contentious Politics in Neoliberal Cities
Cities have become strategic sites for the expansion of the political. They have witnessed the emergence and erosion of new citizenships, popular sovereignties, and democratic interventions. Actors affected by austerity policies struggle against social injustice and for the right to the city. Among them are sections of the middle class whose living and working conditions …
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23
Mar
2020
Mar
2020
Post-Accession Politics and Democratic Backsliding in Eastern Europe
Back in the late 2000s, when all former Soviet satellites in Eastern Europe acquired full membership of the European Union, it appeared as if these countries were on their way to democratic normality. What happened instead was that many of them underwent democratic backsliding. As the region transitioned from the accession to the post-accession era, …
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17
Mar
2020
Mar
2020
The Remains of the Real. Politics after Postmodernism
There was a moment in the 1990ties, in the era of high postmodernism, when it seemed that social reality has had no stable foundations and as such it can be freely and totally transformed by interventions in the registers of symbols and images. Various social, political and economic developments of the last two decades – …
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16
Mar
2020
Mar
2020
The Importance of Being Funny: Jewish Humour in Cabaret and Film of the Weimar Republic
This talk is part of a book project on the cultural history of Jewish artistic presence in German-speaking cabaret and film in the 1920s, 30s, and 40s. (During my fellowship at the IWM, I am researching materials at the Austrian Exile Archive at ÖNB and the Österreichisches Kabarettarchiv in Graz.) In this presentation for the …
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10
Mar
2020
Mar
2020
Berlin Hamlet. Gedichte
Lesung und Diskussion zum Werk des ungarischen Schriftstellers Szilárd Borbély, der vor allem für seinen Roman „Die Mittellosen“ bekannt ist. Erstmals liegen nun in deutscher Sprache zwei Gedichtzyklen des 2014 verstorbenen Autors vor, der als bedeutendster ungarischer Lyriker seit 1989 gilt. 2013 war Borbély Paul Celan Visiting Fellow am IWM. Zweisprachige Lesung: Mercedes Echerer Cornelius …
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08
Mar
2020
Mar
2020
Warum wir am Frauentag auch über Männer reden sollten…
Der internationale Frauentag ist eine gute Gelegenheit, um auch über Männer zu sprechen. Das lange gepflegte Ideal von Männlichkeit, das Stärke und Härte voraussetzt, ist längst nicht mehr gültig. Frauen wehren sich gegen die Ausprägungen dieser „toxischen Männlichkeit“ – mit immer mehr Erfolg. Das hilft auch den Männern. Über das Klischee des starken Mannes …
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04
Mar
2020
Mar
2020
In guter Verfassung?
In diesem Jahr wird das österreichische Bundes-Verfassungsgesetz (B-VG) 100 Jahre alt. Es gründete auf Verfassungskämpfen von 1848, übernahm Grundrechte von 1867 und stellte 1920 die Weichen für einen Aufbruch der jungen ersten österreichischen Republik in eine ungewisse Zukunft. Seither wurde es vielfach diskutiert, reformiert – und zwischenzeitlich sogar demontiert. 1934 wurde das B-VG durch die …
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February 2020
25
Feb
2020
Feb
2020
Liberalism in Crisis: Between Totalitarian Responses and Progressive Dreams
In the past decade, many have spoken of the “crisis of democracy” due to the rise of populism in Europe, both in the East and the West, in the Union’s member states and in the aspiring member countries. But is democracy really what is at stake and in crisis nowadays, or is it a whole …
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24
Feb
2020
Feb
2020
Manufactured Alienation
Boris Johnson turned the recent UK election into a referendum on the character of politics, and won by making democracy miserable. Based on years of investigating the dark money funded institutions which drove Brexit in the UK, undercover reporting across Europe, and street interviews with voters from Hungary to Spain and Scotland to Italy, openDemocracy’s …
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17
Feb
2020
Feb
2020
Freedom and Solidarity
In Poland he is remembered as an intriguing personality and a spiritual leader of the Solidarity movement. Abroad, mostly as co-founder of the Institute for Human Sciences, Vienna. A boy from a Polish village who became a profound interpreter of Husserl, Heidegger and Levinas. A Catholic priest inspired by a Jewish philosophy of dialogue, trying …
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13
Feb
2020
Feb
2020
Award Ceremony for the Inaugural Emma Goldman Awards
The IWM is pleased to announce a collaboration with the FLAX Foundation, a newly founded independent foundation. Starting in 2020, the FLAX Foundation will issue awards to talented and engaged scholars of feminist and inequality issues in Europe, to support their research and development. The IWM will host two Emma Goldman Fellows each year, beginning …
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10
Feb
2020
Feb
2020
Becoming ….
Embraced, helped, distrusted, rejected – the refugees of 2015/16 have endured a vicious cycle of popular opinion. In Austria, young Afghans often carry the worst reputation. Nearly five years on, many are still in the asylum process while claims from other nationalities have long since been finalised. Meanwhile, the rejection rate for Afghan claims has …
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January 2020
27
Jan
2020
Jan
2020
Facing Post-Truth in Central-Eastern Europe
The main challenge that post-truth poses, as the concept itself suggests, is the alleged end of centrality of the idea of truth in politics. Central and Eastern Europe finds itself in a political culture where claims, ideas and utterances must no longer necessarily be grounded in proven empirical facts, in order to be held true …
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26
Jan
2020
Jan
2020
The Dangers of Digital Democracy
All over the world, elections are manipulated by fake news, public opinion is radicalized via social media and electronic voting processes are subject to hacker attacks. The Internet was once seen as an opportunity for more democracy, but today concerns about the future of free elections prevail. Eric Frey, editor of Der Standard, will speak …
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23
Jan
2020
Jan
2020
Religion and Revolution
While the “Russian religious renaissance” at the beginning of the 20th century and the political fervour, which culminated in the October Revolution of 1917, took place at the same period, these two developments are rarely studied alongside each other. In their joint book presentations, the two speakers are going to consider a tradition of religious …
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20
Jan
2020
Jan
2020
Debating Citizenship and Emancipation during the Long 19th Century
Holly Case has called the period spanning the late-18th to the second half of the 20th century “The Age of Questions,” which included the Eastern question, Jewish question, social question, and countless others. In his recent book Liberalism, Constitutional Nationalism, and Minorities: The Making of Romanian Citizenship, c. 1750–1918 (2019), Constantin Iordachi shows how the …
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14
Jan
2020
Jan
2020
Rebuild Trust in Politics Why People Turn Away from Politics and How to Rebuild Trust
Ivan Krastev Head of the Centre of Liberal Strategies in Sofia and IWM Permanent Fellow; Author of After Europe and The Light that Failed. David Goodhart political scientist, journalist, historian and author of The Road to Somewhere. The Populist Revolt and the Future of Politics; former IWM Visiting Fellow Sylvia Kritzinger political scientist from Austria, …
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13
Jan
2020
Jan
2020
The Anthropologists’ Problem with Barter
The standard story of economists about the origins of money is that it came from barter. For most modern anthropologists this story is about as reasonable as the story that babies are brought by the storks. It has become such a big problem that many prominent anthropologists have recently turned against economics as a discipline …
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13
Jan
2020
Jan
2020
Democracy Is (No!) Fiction
Kick-off Event of the Jean Monnet Project “From Fictional to Functioning Democracy Developing Concepts and Strategies for an Inclusive and Participatory Europe” (FIFUDEM) with a keynote speech by Ivan KRASTEV (Permanent Fellow at the Institute for Human Sciences (IWM), Vienna, Chairman of the Centre for Liberal Strategies, Sofia) Liberal democracy appears to be at risk …
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08
Jan
2020
Jan
2020
The Light That Failed. A Reckoning
Why did the West, after winning the Cold War, lose its political balance? In the early 1990s, hopes for the eastward spread of liberal democracy were high. And yet the transformation of Eastern European countries gave rise to a bitter repudiation of liberalism itself, not only in the East but also back in the heartland …
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