Andreas Petersen - Der Osten und das Unbewusste - Buchvorstellung

In the organizer's words:

Self-realization and the promise of happiness through individualization became the defining social model for post-war societies. And the East?

Andreas Petersen traces the historical lines of the unconscious in East and West. He describes how depth psychology was initially promoted in the Soviet Union and then completely discarded in the 1930s. While there was a "psychological turn" in Western Europe after the Second World War, the unconscious remained officially taboo in Eastern Europe. This remained the case until 1989 - with consequences right up to the present day. Ernest Wichner will moderate the evening.

Andreas Petersen studied General History, Eastern European History and German Studies in Zurich. He is a lecturer in contemporary history at the University of Applied Sciences Northwestern Switzerland and director of the history agency "zeit&zeugen" in Zurich and Berlin. He was part of the research team at the Free University of Berlin that investigated the infiltration of the West Berlin police by the GDR State Security. In 2019, his book "Die Moskauer. How the Stalin trauma shaped the GDR" about the founding generation of the GDR was published in 2019.

Ernest Wichner, born in 1951 in Guttenbrunn, Romania, has lived in Germany since 1975. He studied German and political science in Berlin, where he worked at the Literaturhaus Berlin from 1987 to 2017 and was its director from 2003 to 2017. He was awarded the Johann Heinrich Voß Prize in 2020 for his unique services to Romanian literature.

Price information:

Admission: 8 €, reduced: 5 €, members: 3 €