das goethe - Tell me about Europe

In the 1980s, Bartolomeo Sorge, an Italian Jesuit, became politically active in Palermo: “We wanted to change the world and we started with the people in the street.” His solution, then as now in Europe’s current crisis, is education. He explains why to philosopher and theologian Jörg Nies.

After the fall of the Iron Curtain, “We thought we’d finally become part of the West,” says Slovakian philosopher Egon Gál. He tells author Tereza Reichelova, who studied philosophy and political science in Prague, why the reality was a whole different story and why he experienced the 1960s as a decade of reflection.

Iceland’s Vigdís Finnbogadóttir was the first woman in the world to be elected head of state. Although she grew up in a cosmopolitan environment and went on to study in France, “We are on an island, bordered by the sea,” she says of her native country. In an interview with the writer Kristof Magnusson, she looks back on her life in Europe.

Jazz singer Karin Krog was just a little girl when Germany marched into her native Norway. “When a bomb struck nearby,” she recalls, “I simply slept right through it." She later recorded an album in Berlin. She talks about her love of jazz and Europe with Norwegian journalist and literary critic Erle Marie Sørheim.