As part of the Polish Culture Days polenmARkT 2025. Lecture hall 2, Rubenowstr. 1.

A very special border crosser is coming to Greifswald. Professor Karol Kurt Sauerland knows Poland and both German states from the inside better than almost anyone else. Born in Moscow as the son of an emigrant, he himself experienced reprisals due to his commitment - in the GDR and in People's Poland. In addition to his academic work as a Germanist, philosopher and mathematician, the award-winning scholar has repeatedly commented on contemporary issues, for example in the "Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung".

His book "30 Silberlinge" (2012) is based on the personal experiences of a victim of political denunciation, but places them in a universal context. His studies on the relationship between Jews, Poles and Germans also have lifeworld references. In Warsaw, the young academic repeatedly came into contact with people for whom memories of the horrors of the German occupation remained vivid. Karol Sauerland will report from the perspective of those affected and his own experiences.

Sauerland is a professor of German literature and aesthetics at the universities of Warsaw and Thorn. He studied mathematics and German literature in Berlin and Warsaw and has published numerous works on literature, philosophy and current political issues. His books include Dilthey's Erlebnisbegriff (1972) and Einführung in die Ästhetik Adornos (1979). As chairman of the Warsaw Philosophical Society, he is committed to German-Polish dialog. In 1995, he was awarded the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation Prize for German Language and Literature in Central and Eastern Europe.