Racism, fanaticism, anti-democratic sentiment – our increasingly polarised world is dominated by a type of thinking that questions the positions of others, but never its own. The “others” are not perceived as individuals, but as members of a group that must be rejected: the foreigners, the refugees, the Muslims, the Jews, the disbelievers, the homosexuals, etc. In this lecture, Emcke will show that we can stand up against this dogmatic thinking of hate and successfully combat religious and nationalist fanatics. A lecture for everyone who wants to defend an open society.

Carolin Emcke reported from war and crisis zones like Kosovo, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq, Gaza and Haiti, and has been a freelance journalist since 2007. In October 2016, she received the German Book Trade’s Peace Prize, standing next to formerly honoured authors like Svetlana Alexievich, Orhan Pamuk and Susan Sontag.