
Journalist Masha Gessen curates provocative 2018 Festival Albertine.
“To be a democracy,” writes courageous and prodigious journalist, Masha Gessen, “a country has to be engaged in the pursuit of imagining a democracy. In times of crisis of democracy . . . we need to be doing the work of imagining.
“The insistence that ‘it can’t happen here,’ betrays a failure of the imagination,” counters Russian-American Gessen. “The experience of seeing a country turn away from democracy trains the imagination to know that ‘it’ can happen anywhere. But the demagogue dangles a carrot for the imagination: he traffics in what the social psychologist Erich Fromm called “the imaginary past.” The antidote for the appeal of the imaginary past is a vision of a glorious future, and this is where we fail… [T]ragically.” As we see – daily.
“. . . Can we come back from tragic failure?” At the behest of the French Embassy Cultural Services and their Albertine bookstore, Gessen imagined six Festival programs to inspire our vital effort.