Intellectuals and Culture in the Time of Monsters: A Conversation with Yassin al-Haj Saleh

What can and should intellectuals do in times of fundamental transformation, when “monsters” rule and fall, when genocide is rampant but dictatorships surprisingly collapse? We will discuss this question with speaker Yassin al-Haj Saleh.

Yassin al-Haj Saleh (born 1961) is the best known Syrian political writer and dissident of our time. In his youth, he spent 16 years, from 1980 to 1996, in the prisons of the Syrian dictatorship under Hafez al Assad. After Bashar al Assad took over, he became a journalist and author. From 2011 he accompanied, analyzed, and explained the sources of the “Arab Spring” in Arabic as well as Western media, and became a central figure in the democratic, human rights-oriented resistance in Syria. Yassin al-Haj Saleh fled to Turkey in 2013 and came to Germany in 2017. Since then, he has written several books: about Syria and the failure of the revolution, about jail and torture, violence and genocide, absence and disappearance, and politics of culture. He now also writes about the Israeli question and the dynamics of Palestinian and Arab (mis)representation in Germany.

The conversation will be conducted by Hesham Moadami and Ahmad Mustafa.

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For more information, e-mail [email protected].

Time: 7:00 pm – 9:00 pm CET/GMT+1

Location: W15 Cafe at Bard College Berlin (Waldstrasse 15, 13156)

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