Akademie Talk with Navid Kermani: Enduring Contradictions
24 Feb 2026, 7 pm

To mark the publication of his new novel Sommer 24, Navid Kermani will be discussing the paradoxes of our time with Diedrich Diederichsen, Eva Menasse and Manos Tsangaris, – a time in which familiar worlds are disintegrating, wars have been drawn nearer and debates are becoming more strident – and how all this is reflected in the perceptions of individual people.

In the novel, Kermani records experiences that are linked by their simultaneity. How do private experiences fit into the global situation, and how are politics and private life connected? Personal experiences shape our capacity for empathy in the face of death in Gaza, Ukraine, and Sudan, the violence in Iran, and the increasingly inhumane refugee policy in Germany. Where does one's own responsibility begin, and where does it come to nothing?

In discussion:
Diedrich Diederichsen, essayist and cultural scholar 
Navid Kermani, writer 
Eva Menasse, writer, Member of the Literature Section of the Akademie der Künste 
Manos Tsangaris, President of the Akademie der Künste and composer