Discourse at the Philharmonie
“AfD on the Rise: Who Holds Back the Right?”

Biographies

Julia Reuschenbach

Julia Reuschenbach is a political scientist for the Research Unit for Political Sociology of the Federal Republic of Germany at the Otto Suhr Institute of the Free University of Berlin, focusing on parties, elections, and political communication. She studied in Bonn and Berlin and received her doctorate in 2022 with a dissertation on politics of history as a policy field. Reuschenbach has worked at the Institute for Political Science and Sociology in Bonn as well as at the Berlin Wall Foundation. She is regularly invited to speak as an expert on the rise of the far-right AfD party – including in the politics podcast Lage der Nation and in Tagesthemen, Die Zeit, and Der Spiegel.

Wolfgang Thierse

Cultural scientist, Germanist, and politician Wolfgang Thierse joined the newly re-established SPD in the GDR in January 1990. Following German reunification, he served as chair of the SPD parliamentary group and deputy chair of the party. In 1998, Thierse – known as the “voice of East Germans” (Das Parlament) – was elected President of the German Bundestag and was re-elected in 2002. After the 2005 federal election, he served as Vice President of the Bundestag until 2013. Thierse has long been active in fighting right-wing extremism and supporting memorials dedicated to addressing the legacies of both the GDR and the Nazi regimes, and was involved in the foundation behind the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, inaugurated in Berlin in 2005.

Christiane Florin

The journalist is head of the “Kultur aktuell” department at Deutschlandradio. From 2016 to 2023, she was editor for religion and society at Deutschlandfunk in Cologne. Before that, she led the editorial team of Christ & Welt, a supplement of the weekly newspaper Die Zeit. Christiane Florin is the author of several books, including Der Weiberaufstand (2017), which addresses the role of women in the Catholic Church. She studied political science, modern history, and musicology in Bonn and Paris.