AGAINST THE NEW HARDNESS

Cathrin Kahlweit in conversation with Judith Kohlenberger

AGAINST THE NEW HARDNESS

»A clever and important book that will hopefully turn the debate on its head.« Jagoda Marinic

Since Europe's great »refugee crisis« in 2015, a new harshness has emerged in word and deed. The normalisation of suffering and misery at our borders has made us more indifferent, more apathetic and colder towards minorities and the marginalised. The strategy of cutting off „the right“ by adopting their positions and discourses had a fatal effect. After all, it is only by cosying up to the extreme fringes that illiberalism and authoritarianism gain strength and make societies more intolerant and radical.
Migration researcher and cultural scientist Judith Kohlenberger impressively demonstrates the high price we pay for isolating ourselves from others - and counters this with a plea for closeness. Her book is a plea to stand up to the harshness by creating space for exchange, closeness and democratisation at the supposedly hard border to the other; to drill small holes in the walls of the present in order to let in the new, the foreign, the inspiring; to feel more, not less. In other words, to stay close to each other.

Judith Kohlenberger is a migration researcher at the Vienna University of Economics and Business, the Austrian Institute for International Politics (oiip) and the Jacques Delors Centre Berlin. She is a member of the Integration Council of the City of Vienna, co-editor of the Journal for Flight and Refugee Research and host of the podcast Aufnahmebereit. She was nominated for the German Non-Fiction Prize with Das Fluchtparadox (2022).

Cathrin Kahlweit, journalist and publicist, correspondent for the Süddeutsche Zeitung for Central and Eastern Europe