Landschaft ohne Zeugen

Hannah Arendt
Reading and discussion with Ines Geipel, moderated by Matthias Bormuth

Even 80 years after the liberation of Buchenwald, the memory of the Holocaust has not arrived in the democratic center. The attacks on the country's culture of remembrance no longer come only from the right. Why? In her new book "Landschaft ohne Zeugen" (Landscape without Witnesses), Ines Geipel searches for the sources of the camp world and questions the legends after 1945: from the reappraisal in the West to the anti-fascist state myth of the GDR. In the spirit of Hannah Arendt, the discussion with Matthias Bormuth also addresses the question of the significance of political ideologies for perceptions of social reality in totalitarian times. And Geipel's study of the camp world before and after 1945 in Buchenwald also shows what Arendt's topos of "organized guilt" still contributes to the understanding of human responsibility today. Ines Geipel, born in Dresden in 1960, was Professor of Verse Art at the Ernst Busch Academy of Dramatic Arts in Berlin until 2025. Matthias Bormuth is curator of the "Ach! Hannah Arendt" series and Professor of the History of Ideas at the University of Oldenburg.
Supported by the Baden-Württemberg Foundation, as part of the Stuttgart Science Festival