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 21^st-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).

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. 

13. November 2025, 17:00 Uhr
Veranstaltungsort: Valentinská 1, 3. Stock