After Theatre of Reconciliation and Overcoming the Present, the third season of Max Czollek’s series of talks, entitled The Beginning is Near, looks to the future. Considering the calamities of recent years and those currently looming, this may seem counterintuitive, but that’s the point: to take these crises as a starting point from which to move forward to different and better things. It requires a twofold insight: firstly, recognizing that current developments radically question previous political and economic conditions and social mores, and secondly  acknowledging that things must therefore start anew in order to change for the better. The question of what has not worked and is currently not working is closely linked to the question of the future. It forms the context for Czollek’s conversations with people who, in one way or another, are dealing with the question of how things can and must continue. These interlocutors  develop ideas and provide stimuli for the motto of this third season: The Beginning is Near.

Manja Präkels, born in 1974, is an author and musician. She lives in Berlin and Brandenburg, where she documented the many upheavals of the 1990s as a reporter. Her debut novel Als ich mit Hitler Schnapskirschen aß was published in 2017 and won awards including the German Youth Literature Prize and the 2018 Anna Seghers Prize from the Academy of Arts, Berlin. She conducts writing workshops in schools and forms alliances with neighbours at Mehringplatz in Kreuzberg. In 2022, Welt im Widerhall oder war das eine Plastiktüte? was published, a collection of essays from her ongoing observations of East German life in transition.