75 Jahre Republik und keine Bundespräsidentin

It was always possible, yet unthinkable for many. Seventy-five years after the founding of the Federal Republic, the highest office is still not held by a woman. With the 2027 federal presidential election, the question arises anew: What must a society first be able to imagine before it can realize it politically?

Transit 64 by Heinz Bude, Bettina Munk, and Karin Wieland begins precisely here. The starting point is a historic moment: January 1964, East Berlin. Marlene Dietrich lands at the airport, en route to Warsaw. She has broken with Germany. Yet Willy Brandt and his spokesman Egon Bahr are waiting for her—with a request that could have changed the country: she is to run for office. Federal President, against the former Nazi Heinrich Lübke.

Drawing on facts, fiction, and images, BudeMunkWieland weave a story of freedom, exile, resistance, and conformity—and an invitation to political imagination: What might have been possible? What is possible today? And who decides what we are even allowed to imagine?

Heinz Bude, Bettina Munk, and Karin Wieland in conversation with Swantje Karich (Der Spiegel).

Welcome by Jan Philipp Albrecht (Executive Board, Heinrich Böll Foundation)