AKADEMIE FORUM: HUGH EAKIN & ANJA WEHLER-SCHÖCK

Still Talking? The United States, Europe, and the Transatlantic Conversation in a Time of Turmoil

Still Talking? The United States, Europe, and the Transatlantic Conversation in a Time of TurmoilPanel DiscussionAs transatlantic relations face unprecedented strain and the boundaries of acceptable speech are contested on both sides of the Atlantic, the role of journalists and intellectual journals in sustaining open, rigorous public debate has never been more consequential—or more precarious. This panel brings together two distinguished voices in transatlantic journalism to explore the challenges and opportunities facing international public discourse today. Hugh Eakin, Editor at Large at Foreign Affairs and former senior editor at The New York Review of Books, has spent two decades shaping how Anglophone audiences understand geopolitics, culture, and international affairs. Anja Wehler-Schöck, a member of the Tagesspiegel’s editorial board and founder of its International Politics department, brings deep experience in European and transatlantic policy debates, having worked as a journalist, diplomat, and practitioner of international developments across Washington, Amman, and Berlin. Together, they will discuss how publications like Foreign Affairs and Tagesspiegel navigate growing political polarization and its chilling effects on free expression increasingly visible in both the United States and Europe, as well as what responsible, ambitious journalism can—and must—contribute to sustaining the cross-border conversations on which democratic life depends.Hugh Eakin is Editor at Large at Foreign Affairs, where he commissions and edits analysis on geopolitics, economics, and international politics, and has helped shape the magazine's coverage of the wars in Ukraine and the Middle East. Previously, he was a contributing writer and senior editor at The New York Review of Books, where he reported on immigration and right-wing politics in Norway, Sweden, and Denmark, as well as on conflicts in the Middle East. He also founded NYR Daily. He holds a BA from Harvard University and an MPhil in Political Thought and Intellectual History from Cambridge University and was a Fulbright Scholar at Humboldt University in 2002–03. A fellow at the American Academy in Berlin, he is the author of Picasso’s War: How Modern Art Came to America (2022) and currently working on his second book, Genocide by Other Means: Cultural Destruction and Why It Matters, which traces the connection between cultural and human violence in 20th- and 21st-century conflicts, from the German Kunstschutz in the World Wars to the destruction wrought in Iraq, Syria, and Ukraine.Anja Wehler-Schöck has been a member of the Tagesspiegel’s editorial board since 2025. In 2022, she established the new International Politics department there, which she has headed ever since. Prior to that, she was editor-in-chief of the IPG Journal, a platform for debate on issues of international and European politics. Earlier in her career, she worked in Washington, D.C., where she served as a social affairs officer at the German Embassy during the first Trump administration, and in the Middle East, where she headed the Friedrich Ebert Foundation’s office for Jordan and Iraq in Amman from 2012 to 2017. Every Friday, she writes about the week’s most important international topics in her newsletter Thank God It’s International Friday.Event presented in EnglishFeaturing a musical performance by students of the Barenboim-Said Akademie

Artists/Collaborators: Anja Wehler-Schöck, Prof. Dr. Jacob Eder

Next date:

• Date Monday, 22/June/2026 18:00
• Venue Pierre Boulez Saal - Mozart Auditorium
• Address Französische Straße 33, 10117 Berlin-Mitte