Konrad Adenauer, »Briefe über Deutschland 1945–1955« und George Orwell, »Reise durch Ruinen. Reportagen aus Deutschland und Österreich 1945«. Doppelporträts und exemplarische Texte

In the organizer's words:

In the spring of 1933, the Centre Party politician Konrad Adenauer, a native of Cologne with a doctorate in law, was ousted by the Nazi regime from the office of Lord Mayor of Cologne, to which he had been elected for the first time around a decade and a half earlier. Some time later, the then 57-year-old retired with his large family to Rhöndorf, not far from Bonn. There he remained in the regime's sights without Adenauer being directly involved in any resistance activities. After the failure of the coup attempt by Colonel Count Stauffenberg and others in July 1944, Adenauer was nevertheless arrested by the Gestapo, and his wife Auguste was also temporarily detained. As no direct connection to the resistance could be proven, Adenauer was released at the end of November 1944. At the beginning of May 1945, he was reinstated as Lord Mayor of Cologne by the US occupying forces, but was dismissed by the British military government at the beginning of October 1945. Shortly before the end of the war, Adenauer (re)established contact by letter, which he hoped would help with the necessary reconstruction and urgent supply issues. His letters reveal his assessment of the situation and political prospects for Germany at the end of the Second World War and shortly afterwards.

George Orwell was born under the name Eric Arthur Blair in 1903 as the son of a British colonial official in Motihari, India. Growing up in Great Britain, Orwell attended the prestigious Eton College, where he developed an early interest in poetry and literature. In 1922, he joined the British colonial police in Burma (now Myanmar), which was still under British rule at the time. He resigned in the summer of 1927 after numerous oppressive experiences, some of which he later wrote about. Back in Great Britain, he worked as a journalist for various politically left-wing media, at times under miserable living conditions. Since then, he has used the pseudonym "George Orwell" for his literary works. During the Spanish Civil War in 1936/37, Orwell fought as a volunteer with an anarchist group in Catalonia against the troops of General Francisco Franco, who were supported by Nazi Germany and fascist Italy. His key experience there was the covert, brutal actions of communist forces, which were also directed against Franco's opponents who were not prepared to bow to the leadership of the Spanish Communist Party, which was controlled by the Stalinist Soviet Union. After being seriously wounded, Orwell returned to Great Britain in 1937, where he worked as a journalist again. From 1941, he worked for the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC). In the spring of 1945, Orwell traveled to the occupied Rhineland and other parts of Germany as a correspondent for the left-liberal British newspaper "The Observer". This was reflected in impressive reportages in which Orwell, as before, also took a decidedly political stance. Almost at the same time, Orwell's fable "Animal Farm" ("Farm of the Animals", first published in German in 1946) was published in the summer of 1945, which paints a picture of a totalitarian dictatorship. Since the novel "1984" followed in June 1949 with a similar theme, Orwell has been considered one of the most important literary authors in the English language in the 20th century.

As part of the event series "80 years since the end of the war in Europe"

UNEQUAL WORDS. Victors and vanquished, liberators and liberated in Germany in 1945 - double portraits and exemplary texts

With Dr. Katja Schlenker and Prof. Dr. Winfrid Halder

When in the first months of 1945 the forces of the anti-Hitler coalition, led by the United States of America, Great Britain and the Soviet Union, completely conquered the territory of the then German Reich, finally defeated the German Wehrmacht and crushed the criminal Nazi regime, their soldiers and war correspondents encountered members of a nation at the political and moral low point of its entire history. Conversely, the Germans were confronted with the victors and liberators, most of whom seemed foreign to them after twelve years of dictatorship and widespread isolation. Initial impressions were recorded from both sides, the unfiltered directness of which is still impressive today. They also show that the subsequent path of "Western integration" of at least part of Germany, which was embarked upon with significant help from the USA and which opened the way to democracy and self-determination, was neither self-evident nor easy.

The series presents two people who met each other indirectly, less often directly, and recorded their experiences of the supposed "zero hour".