Die Empörungsfalle: Wie wir wieder streiten lernen

Saba-Nur Cheema and Meron Mendel in Conversation: How New Outrages Keep Arising, Who Benefits from Them, and How We Can Escape Them

Our times are marked by constant agitation and knee-jerk outrage. Instead of objective dialogue, entrenched positions and ideological echo chambers dominate, causing public discourse to lose its democratic function.

For years, Saba-Nur Cheema and Meron Mendel have been bringing people with fundamentally different views into dialogue. Their experience shows that the problem of our time is not controversy itself, but rather an exaggerated social hypersensitivity that perceives every difference as a threat or an offense. Calls for boycotts, demands for “safe spaces” in public areas, and the politicization of emotions make productive debate impossible and undermine democratic coexistence.

*The Outrage Trap* powerfully demonstrates how a resilient culture of debate remains possible—one that withstands conflict, allows for ambivalence, and takes the other person seriously as a responsible dialogue partner. It is a call not to leave the public sphere to the loudest or most outraged voices, but to revitalize it through genuine exchange.

Saba-Nur Cheema, bornin 1987, grew up in Frankfurt as the daughter of Pakistani refugees. A political scientist with a Ph.D. in education, she conducts research at the Institute for Social Research. She was a member of the German federal government’s expert panel on Islamophobia and serves on the executive board of the Goethe-Institut.

Meron Mendel, born in 1976, grew up on a kibbutz in Israel. The historian is a professor of social work and director of the Anne Frank Educational Center in Frankfurt.