29^th Leukerbad International Literary Festival

Authors

Jens Balzer

Germany

Born in 1969, Jens Balzer is an author, music critic, comic book writer, and cultural critic. With Tobi Müller, he is co-curator of the Popsalon at the Deutsche Theater Berlin and he teaches pop culture criticism at the Berlin University of the Arts. He studied computer science, philosophy, and German literature at the University of Hamburg, where he inaugurated the post for graphic literature in 1990. Since the mid-1990s, Balzer has lived in Berlin.
In his non-fiction writing, Balzer addresses complex topics of modernity. His topical essay After Woke charts cognitive dissonance resulting from reactions to the massacre by the Islamo-fascist terrorist group Hamas on 7 October 2023 across the spectrum of progressive politics and asks how, after this “declaration of moral bankruptcy”, the true democratic essence of what was once meant by ‘wokeness’ can be saved in an era in which, in the face of a clearly tangible ‘vibeshift’ to the right, it is perhaps more urgently needed than ever before. Balzer finds answers in Jürgen Habermas’ discourse ethics and elsewhere.
For Jens Balzer it is clear that a new understanding of identity politics is necessary, one with more fluidity and noticeably less essentialism, which ultimately engages many mechanisms of exclusion that do not differ significantly from those on the identitarian right.

After Woke. Matthes & Seitz 2024
No Limit. Die Neunziger – das Jahrzehnt der Freiheit. Rowohlt 2023
Ethik der Appropriation. Matthes & Seitz 2022

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