Speeches

Jürgen Habermas is a famous German sociologist, social theorist and public intellectual, and he was doing a turn at the conference. He's a big draw, so the place was packed. The presentation itself was quite remarkable in the sense that Habermas has amazing energy and stamina for a man of 89. If you want to get a flavour of what he is about, this excellent interview and dialogue from El Pais is a good place to start. He touched on most of the issues discussed in the interview in his presentation and the subsequent Q&A, being pretty harsh in his criticisms of Germany and its failure to lead effectively. So I guess his criticisms were mostly aimed at Germany's political class. As he is now rather deaf, I think the organisers were quite surprised that he agreed to participate and to give a presentation, because - as it says in the interview - he doesn't like large halls and audiences any more, as being deaf it's hard for him to know what's going on. During the Q&A and when participating in earlier sessions he used a headset and volume amplifier (I assume) in order to enable him to follow the questioners. He himself is hard to understand (not just as he was speaking in German) because of a cleft palate. However, the man who was chairing that session was very easy to understand - clearly articulated and short sentences. So all in all, I got most of the gist, including from my colleague who gave me a short summary afterwards.

Earlier on I walked around the park, and saw the Russian Orthodox Church (see extra), which was quite a surprising thing to find here. However, it was originally built for the many aristocratic visitors to the spa in the 19th century. The international character of spa cures at that time also contributed to the fact that tennis was introduced to Germany via British visitors to Bad Homburg, who played lawn tennis in the park.