Democracy can be a great stabilizer, but it also gives people the right to change their minds over time. That holds great opportunities.
In the autumn of 1940 the British radio broadcaster BBC asked the German Nobel Prize for Literature, Thomas Mann, to write short radio lectures in his exile in California, which were broadcast to Nazi Germany. By the end of the war, Mann had written 55 speeches. The sponsoring association of the Thomas Mann House meeting place in Los Angeles has taken up the idea of radio speeches again and is organizing the “55 Voices” series with speeches for democracy, which the SZ publishes and Deutschlandfunk broadcasts.