I – 5 – friends

when we conduct research in a zone of denial, we need friends – 

Only a few have managed to free themselves from the influence of extremes—which seek to eliminate  freedom –  by raising their voices. Among them were the theorist Hannah Arendt, as well as artists such as Claude Lanzmann, psychiatrists such as Henry Crystal and William G. Niederland, writers and historians such as Imre Kertész, Primo Levi, Saul Friedländer, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Alexander Mitscherlich, Osip and Nadezhda Mandelstam, and the Belgian filmmaker Chantal Akerman. Akerman died by suicide in Paris on October 5, 2015, at the age of 65.

@picture alliance /akg images / Marion Kalter

Chantal Akerman in the year 1985

The works of these people have enlightened us about real-world events and provided us with moral guidance. We do not stand helpless today as new dictatorships emerge and modern totalitarianisms take root. We have a remedy to cure this disease.

Photo right: @faz / French filmmaker and director of the documentary “Shoah,” Claude Lanzmann (1925–2018), in 1985