It's turning into a hot summer in Europe. France is burning in protest after the killing of an ethnic teenager by the police. A Koran was torched in Stockholm, inflaming tensions with Turkey about Sweden's membership in NATO. The far-right AFD party won a local election in East Germany, stoking anti-immigrant tensions. And Ukraine continues to burn after 500 days of war. Andrew Sola and Günter Danner discuss these issues and many more in their summer politics update.

The past is present and the present is personal. With her guest, German American author and illustrator Nora Krug, Stefanie Schäfer talks about visualizing Timothy Snyder’s "On Tyranny: 20 Lessons from the 20th Century," about flowered wallpaper and swastika trees, and about dealing
with German Vergangenheitsaufarbeitung as a West German 40-something in this day and age.

Narratives of immigration and identity formation are never fully told,
and they change as we mature. In this episode, Stefanie Schäfer talks to
author and activist Oksana Marafioti about her Romani-Armenian-Ukrainian background, her personal American success story, as well as her memoir project "All of Us Fragile and Brave." Touching on the "what" and the "how "of identity assemblage, they also turn to a recent example of the immigration-identity narrative, Nora Krug's "Heimat /Belonging" (2018).

In this episode, Lady Fiction returns to the First Lady mystique with a particular glance at 'the Jackie moment' with Oline Eaton, the author of "Finding Jackie. A Life Reinvented" (Diversion Books, 2023). They discuss the link between biography and 'capital H' historiography, the American craze around Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, and the need for “just one more story” to
get to the essence of this famous cultural icon.
Link to Finding Jackie: https://diversionbooks.com/books/finding-jackie/

In this episode, Douglas Cowie and Adrienne Brown (University of Chicago) discuss the life and poetry of Pulitzer-Prize-winning poet Gwendolyn Brooks. They talk about her poems that document life in Chicago, "Kitchenette Building," "In the Mecca," "Chicago Picasso," and "The Wall," and unpack the social, economic, racial, cultural, and political history that informs her life and work.

Please see these links for further information about topics mentioned in the episode:

Gwendolyn Brooks and others reading her poetry:

The Library of Congress Audio: https://www.loc.gov/item/85755182/
YouTube: We Real Cool (Short Film produced by the Poetry Foundation): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0USvSvhue70
LP (Caedmon Records, 1968): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N9XlIR-SzVg

The Wall of Respect (City of Chicago, Department of Cultural Affairs):

https://www.chicago.gov/city/en/depts/dca/supp_info/wall_of_respect.html

History of The Mecca and IIT (Segregation by Design):

https://www.segregationbydesign.com/chicago/iit-and-the-mecca-flats

Andrew Sola provides a new introduction to this episode, originally published in 2021 to mark the end of the War in Afghanistan, by reflecting on the 20-year anniversary of the War in Iraq.

What lessons can we learn from America's blunders in Iraq and Afghanistan? Has Russia avoided the same mistakes in its war against Ukraine? And if Russian has learned nothing, are there reasons for Ukraine to be hopeful?

Our first politics podcast of 2024 begins on a tragic note after the mass shooting in Hamburg, which claimed the lives of at least 7 victims and injured many more. The Amerikazentrum would like to express its heartfelt condolences to the victims' families and friends, as well as to the all of the citizens of Hamburg. After a discussion of gun laws in Germany, Sola and Danner turn to the concept of feminist foreign policy and describe its place in wider foreign policy debates about power-based approaches and humanitarian approaches. Lastly, they provide analysis of recent developments in Ukraine and discuss the situation in Bakhmut, Chancellor Scholz's visit to DC, and the simmering crises in Moldova and Georgia.

In this special Women's History Month episode, Stefanie Schäfer discusses gossip
with American Studies Scholar Katrin Horn, head of the research project www.archivalgossip.com. Following the trajectories of American artists in Rome, and specifically the making of actress Charlotte Cushman's celebrity persona, they read the functions of gossip in 19th-century US magazines between the intimate and the political, between escapism and nation building, and they also ponder the question of how gossip became gendered.

In Episode 2 of A Better Democracy Is Possible, Antoine Vergne from Missions Publique and our sortition expert Ahmed Radi Teleb continue the conversation about new democracy initiatives. They highlight current efforts by the European Commission to engage citizens throughout the European Union in the EU decision-making process regarding issues such as the reduction of food waste and the future of the internet. Other topics include the feeling of democratic euphoria that results when citizens participate in citizens assemblies as well as the evolutionary basis for democratic deliberation.

The year 2022 proved to be a hard test for the resilience of democracies, and 2023 continues to test the strength of democracies worldwide. Threats are both external and internal. Authoritarian governments seek to undermine democratic societies with disinformation campaigns from the outside. Or, as in Russia's case, they simply seek to conquer and obliterate their democratic neighbors. Meanwhile, home-grown groups seek to attack democracy from within, through election denialism, conspiracy theories, and political violence.

However, there is good news for democracy! It can be seen in a number of new and innovative democratic practices developing throughout the world. The two most important of these are sortition and deliberation, the practice of randomly selecting citizens to meet, learn, and discuss an issue of public importance, and then giving them the power to shape the solution to the problem.

In the first of this two-episode miniseries, deliberation expert Antoine Vergne from Missions Publique and sortition expert Ahmed Radi Teleb provide you with an introduction to these new democracy initiatives.