Academy Lecture with Eva von Redecker "Nowhere to Stay: Who will we be if the swallows do not come back one day?"

“Nowhere to Stay”: “Who will we be if the swallows do not come back one day?”

What happens to us when the world no longer promises us a home? The figure of the swallow runs throughout Eva von Redecker's work and reappears in Ece Temelkuran's A Nation of Strangers. Swallows migrate over long distances, returning year after year – until they don’t. When swallows no longer return, it is not because they have chosen another home, but because the conditions that once sustained their return have been damaged. Perhaps this is what swallows remind us of: that we can become strangers not because we have left home, but because home itself has become uninhabitable.

As our ability to stay, return, belong, and feel at home erodes, another impulse is gaining strength: the desire to hold on to what remains using exclusion, borders, and violence. In her recent work, The New Fascism: Entitlement and the Urge to Destroy (Dieser Drang nach Härte), Eva von Redecker explores the conditions under which a new fascism takes hold, fueled and shaped by entitlement, exclusion, and destruction.

How can we respond? Alongside Eva von Redecker’s reflections sits Ece Temelkuran's recent book, A Nation of Strangers, which explores building a shared home in a world marked by exile, displacement, and growing authoritarianism.

Together, they explore what forms of home, belonging, and democratic coexistence remain possible under these conditions.

Following the lecture, Eva von Redecker will be joined by Ece Temelkuran in conversation. 

Opening remarks will be given by Grzegorz Nocko, Director of the Robert Bosch Academy.

Eva von Redecker is a philosopher and freelance author. After periods spent at Humboldt University, Cambridge University, University of Verona and the New School for Social Research in New York, she now writes articles for publications including Die Zeit. Eva von Redecker’s work focuses on critical theory, feminism, and critiques of capitalism. Her most recent publications are The Freedom to Stay (2023) and Revolution for Life (2020), she also provided the foreword to the German anniversary edition of  Dialectic of Enlightenment. She grew up on an organic farm, and now lives in rural Brandenburg.

Ece Temelkuran was born in Izmir in 1973. She studied law and worked for many years as a journalist. Due to her critical stance toward the Erdoğan regime and her reporting on Kurdistan, she lost her job and was forced to leave Turkey in 2016. She is the author of several novels and non-fiction books. Her work has received numerous awards, including the International PEN Piece Award, the Edinburgh International Book Festival Award, the Ambassador of New Europe Award, and the El Mundo Journalism Award (Spain’s most prestigious journalism prize). She has given TED Talks and published in international media outlets such as The Guardian, Der Spiegel, The New York Times, and Le Monde. Ece Temelkuran was a fellow at The New Institute in Hamburg and a fellow of the Robert Bosch Stiftung in 2023/24. She lives in Berlin.