Collegium Carolinum,
the German Historical Institute Warsaw,
and the Leibniz-Institute for History and Culture in Eastern Europe
in collaboration with the Ústav pro českou literaturu AV ČR
cordially invite you to the lecture
PROF. DR. JULIANE PRADE-WEISS (MÜNCHEN)
Challenging Participation:
Memories of Totalitarianism for the Neoliberal Present
Thursday, November 13 2025, 5 p.m.
Valentinská 91/1, 3rd Floor
The lecture will be streamed via Zoom as well, please contact
florian.ruttner@collegium-carolinum.de
Participation appears as a contemporary panacea. It is supposed to grant democracy, freedom, justice, creativity, affluence, sustainability, in short: the good life. Yet, there is an under-addressed ambivalence that challenges the emphatic promise of participation: on the one hand, it is at the heart of liberal democracy, digital media, and consumer capitalism – on the other, promises of attaining a better life motivate people to participate in political and mass violence. Still, the multidisciplinary research on these two strains hardly ever intersects. I approach challenging modes of participation by means of 21st-century literary texts portraying complicity and conformity with totalitarianism and violence in Central and Eastern Europe, notably Jáchym Topol’s Citlivý člověk (A Sensitive Person) (2017).
These texts address convergences between involvement in totalitarian violence and modes of participation in humanitarian, political, ecological, and other wrongdoing in the neoliberal present. What is at issue in both is a fundamental dimension of life: relationality. Neoliberalism champions individual autonomy, while everything that contradicts this ideal is considered as illicit complicity. Renegotiations of the cultural memory of totalitarianism and violence in Central and Eastern Europe provide a more nuanced understanding of participation. Agency, they suggest, is in determining not whether to participate, but how.
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Juliane Prade-Weiss is professor of Comparative Literature at LMU Munich. After studying German literature, Czech literature, and Philosophy in Dresden and Frankfurt/Main, she received her PhD in Comparative Literature in Frankfurt, where she was also assistant professor until 2017. 2017-2019, she was a DFG-postdoc at Yale to finish her habilitation, published as Language of Ruin and Consumption: On Lamenting and Complaining (Bloomsbury 2020). 2019-2020, she held a Marie Skłodowska-Curie grant in Vienna for a project on complicity. She works on the link between language and violence from the Graeco-Roman antiquity to the Western and Eastern European present.