SELF-DESTRUCTION OF DEMOCRACY, TENDENCIES AND RECURRENCE IN THE SHORT 20TH CENTURY.

Philipp Blom in conversation with Wolfgang Müller-Funk

SELF-DESTRUCTION OF DEMOCRACY, TENDENCIES AND RECURRENCE IN THE SHORT 20TH CENTURY.
In memory of Manès Sperber

Manès Sperber, born in 1905 in Zabolotiv, Ukraine, became known as a sceptical humanist and relentless critic of totalitarian systems. He taught at various universities in Berlin. He received numerous literary prizes for his books. Manès Sperber died in Paris on 5 February 1984. In recent years, his works have only been available in second-hand bookshops. With an annotated three-volume reading edition, which was published in April 2024, the publisher Special number Sperber's writings are now accessible again.

Editor Wolfgang Müller-Funk on the question of why it is worth reading Manès Sperber today and discussing his texts:

„... because he is an author who has literarily and analytically penetrated an era that stretches from the October Revolution to the decline and end of Soviet socialism.
... because his analysis of power and dictatorship, which runs through his literary-essayistic work, provides invaluable help in understanding the psychological and social mechanisms that underlie today's right-wing and left-wing populism.
... because he developed individual psychology further and applied it to political phenomena like hardly anyone else.“

Wolfgang Müller-Funk, Germanist, cultural philosopher, essayist, studied German, philosophy, history and Spanish in Munich. He was Professor of Cultural Studies in Birmingham and Vienna and a Fellow at the New School for Social Research in New York and at the Institute for Human Sciences in Vienna. He is the author of books, essays and reviews in various German-language newspapers and magazines. He is also President of the Manès Sperber Society.

Philipp Blom studied philosophy, history and Jewish studies in Vienna and Oxford. He lives as a writer and historian in Vienna and writes regularly for European and American magazines and newspapers.