The Frankfurt Book Fair is currently running. As part of our FridayPodcasts, we present you with four conversations with authors whose books we atFridayhave moved that focus on important topics or open up new perspectives.
Rising rents are the social issue of our time. Many politicians have said this sentence in recent years. And it’s true too. Rents are rising steadily, especially in the big cities, entire districts are gentrified and people are displaced. The question of whether you will soon no longer be able to afford your own apartment is one of the greatest worries in metropolitan areas.
The Green politician Florian Schmidt also sees the housing issue as the social issue of our time. As a building councilor for the Berlin district of Friedrichshain-Kreuzberg, he fights against the sell-out of the city. In his new book We’re bringing the city back: How we can defend ourselves against the maddening of rent and land speculation Florian Schmidt shows which ways there could be out of the rent crisis.
Friday-In a podcast, editor Benjamin Knödler spoke with Florian Schmidt about what gentrification means for a district, the strength of the rent movement and the question of what housing that is geared to the common good might look like.
Storms, floods, extinction of species: the climate crisis shows us as a society that we are dealing with problems of finitude. At the same time, our culture has no concept of quitting, says sociologist and futurologist Harald Welzer. That is why we are not changing our way of life or our economy, even though it is urgently needed. So what to do
Among other things, talks about it Friday-Editor Pepe Egger in a podcast with Harald Welzer. It’s about the life lie of our present, the absurd longing for more and more growth and the grudge that Harald Welzer harbors against economics.
Stella Leder comes from a large Jewish family. She is the granddaughter of the writer Stephan Hermlin, a communist who emigrated to Palestine in 1936, lived in France, among other places, and went to East Berlin in 1947, where he also supported critical poets. Her mother later left the GDR. Stella Leder, born in 1982, tells the story in the bookMy mother, the man in the garden and the right ones(Ullstein 2021) about her family, in which there is also a Stasi story, about her school days in Hesse and the Nazis who hunted her.
Speaks in the podcastFriday-Editor Maxi Leinkauf with the author about her book – about GDR images in West Germany, but also about anti-Semitism and racism in German society.
Of the 13.5 million people under 18 in Germany, 2.8 million grow up in poverty, 2.4 million are younger than 15 years old. What is behind these numbers? Carolin and Christoph Butterwegge have also dealt with this question – and have written a book about it. In Children of inequality. How society robs itself of its future look not only at poverty, but also at wealth, especially among children and young people.
Sebastian Puschner, deputy editor-in-chief of Friday speaks to them in a podcast about what child poverty means for children and young people, but also for society, how poverty can be combated, and what role the Left Party can play in this.
Another conversation with Florian Schmidt will be heard in the coming days.
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