Speakers and Artists

Fikrejesus Amahazion (Eritrea)
Fikrejesus Amahazion is a researcher working on various developments in Eritrea and the Horn of Africa. He specializes in African development, human rights and political economy. In addition to his teaching activities at the College of Arts and Social Sciences in Adi-Keih, Amahazion also regularly publishes texts on current issues. Last year, he summarized his research findings on child mortality in Eritrea in the book »Child Mortality in Eritrea: An Overview of History and Progress«. It offers »a fact-filled insight into the Eritrean child health system, which places responsibility for the well-being of the child on the entire community«, as the Permanent Representative of Eritrea to the United Nations, Sophia Tesfamariam, explained. in his presentation, Fikrejesus Amahazion will focus on Eritrea's independent path, which is based on consistent decolonization and is geared towards the well-being of Eritrean society.

Alev Bahadir (Germany)
Alev Bahadir was born and grew up in Mannheim. The journalist now lives in Nuremberg and is the managing director of the migrant organization DIDF-Jugend Bayern.

Jeremy Corbyn (Great Britain)
Jeremy Corbyn is a British trade union official and independent politician in the House of Commons. His criticism of the Israeli government's occupation policy triggered a right-wing campaign against him, which culminated in unfounded accusations of anti-Semitism. He has represented the North Islington constituency in the House of Commons since 1983. From 2015 to 2020, he was leader of the Labour Party and Leader of the Opposition. The topic of his lecture is: »Bringing the media into line: manipulation before information«.

Sevda Karaca (Turkey)
Sevda Karaca is a member of the Turkish parliament and a member of the General Executive Committee of the Labor Party (Emek Partisi, Emep). She has worked as a journalist for the socialist daily Evrensel since 2007 and as an editor for its women's magazine Ekmek ve Gül (Bread and Roses) since 2017, around which a nationwide solidarity network for working women has formed. Karaca is a co-founder of the television station Hayat TV, of which she is a member of the coordination committee. She is a founding member of the Women and LGBTI Commission of the journalists' union TGS and has written various publications on Marxism and women's liberation. In the parliamentary elections in May 2023, Sevda Karaca was elected to the Turkish Grand National Assembly for the south-eastern Anatolian province of Gaziantep on the list of the Green Left Party.

Torkil Lauesen (Denmark)
Born in 1952, Torkil Lauesen is a communist writer who has been active in internationalism since the late 1960s. In the 1970s and 80s, he was a member of the so-called Blekingegade group, which set itself the goal of supporting national and socialist-oriented liberation movements in the Global South. To this end, the group committed robberies in Denmark. It was not active underground, but »undercover«, as Lauesen explained in an interview with Junge Welt. As an author, Lauesen has written several books. In 2016, he published the book »Det globale perspektiv« about imperialism and resistance, which was published in German by Unrast-Verlag in 2022.

Juan Carlos Marsán (Cuba)
Juan Carlos Marsán is Deputy Head of the International Relations Department of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Cuba. From 2011 to 2015, he was Ambassador of the Republic of Cuba to Austria, Croatia and Slovenia and Permanent Representative to the United Nations.

Mumia Abu-Jamal (USA)
Mumia Abu-Jamal was born in Philadelphia (USA) in 1954. He was already active in the Black Panther Party as a teenager. In 1981, he was framed for the murder of a police officer; Mumia has been in prison ever since. First on death row, from which he was freed by international solidarity. Now, however, he is serving life in prison. Football star Colin Kaepernick, historian and activist Johanna Fernández and US civil rights activist Angela Davis are among those supporting him in the fight for his release. He has been writing texts for his Monday column in Junge Welt for many years.

Żaklin Nastić (Germany)
Zaklin Nastic was born in Poland. She studied Slavic, Western and Southern Slavic studies and is a family caregiver. She is also a member of Verdi, VdK and VVN-BdA. From 2008 to 2023, she was a member of the Left Party, from 2017 as a member of the German Bundestag and as the parliamentary group's spokesperson for human rights policy. After leaving the Left Party, she joined the association »Bündnis Sahra Wagenknecht - Für Vernunft und Gerechtigkeit«.

Gina Pietsch (Germany)
Gina Pietsch was a student of Gisela May and is one of the great Brecht interpreters. With her distinctive voice, with which she brings her audience closer to songs from Mikis Theodorakis to Víctor Jara, she has been delighting her listeners for decades. Her repertoire is international and focused on social struggles. Pietsch herself was active in the Oktoberklub and met well-known musicians from Cuba to Vietnam. She is still committed to a fairer world.

Theodora Pius (Tanzania)
Theodora Pius is the program manager of the National Network of Farmer Groups in Tanzania (Mtandao wa Vikundi vya Wakulima Tanzania, Mviwata) and an activist of the World March of Women. With Mviwata, she is committed to smallholder self-organization in Tanzania. The movement is also active in youth work and thus creates awareness for ecological management, self-reliance and political economy. In her lecture, Theodora Pius will focus on the consequences of neoliberalism and imperialism for the environment, especially in the so-called third world.

Ignacio Ramonet (Spain)
Ignacio Ramonet is a journalist, media scholar and co-organizer of the World Social Forum. He was also appointed Honorary President of ATTAC. From 1991 to March 2008, Ramonet was director of the Paris-based monthly newspaper for international politics Le Monde diplomatique and has been head of the Spanish edition of this newspaper ever since. He is also president of the French association »Mémoire de luttes«, which was founded in January 2000 on the initiative of the German anti-fascist Günter Holzmann.

Shabnam Shariatpanahi (Germany)
Shabnam Shariatpanahi grew up in Germany as the child of politically persecuted parents in Iran. She has a degree in education and is a member of the German Communist Party (DKP). She is active in the Easter March movement and in the alliances »Duisburg stellt sich quer« and »Heizung, Brot und Frieden Duisburg«. She is running for 4th place on the DKP list for the EU elections.

Luca Stüven (Germany)
Luca Stüven lives in Hamburg and is active in »Perspektive Kommunismus«, a nationwide organization of revolutionary and communist groups.

Gerd Wiegel (Germany)
Gerd Wiegel is a political scientist and journalist. He studied in Marburg, where he completed his doctorate under Reinhard Kühnl. From 1997 to 2003, he worked as a research assistant at the Institute for Political Science there. From 2006 to 2023, he was a consultant for right-wing extremism and anti-fascism for the parliamentary group Die Linke in the German Bundestag. In March 2023, he took over as Head of the Department for Democracy, Migration and Anti-Racism Policy at the DGB Federal Executive Board.

Julia Wright (USA)

Wright is the daughter of the American writer Richard Wright and a Mumia activist from the very beginning: In the 1980s, Mumia Abu-Jamal asked her in a letter from prison to join in the fight for his freedom and that of other political prisoners such as Nelson Mandela, and since then this has been one of her main activities alongside her commitment to her father's work. She also works as a publicist and writer.

Cultural program / Manifestation

Calum Baird (Great Britain)
Calum Baird is an independent Scottish singer-songwriter and musician whose songs combine social, cultural and political ideas and themes in a folk style influenced by Neil Young, Bob Dylan, Billy Bragg and others. He began writing songs about his own experiences and observations as a teenager. His debut album »No Right Turn« was released in 2015 and since then he has continued to release music and perform regularly at festivals and events across Britain, the North of Ireland and Europe. Alongside his music, Calum is a passionate advocate for social justice and equality. His lyrics often deal with issues such as poverty, inequality and anti-racism.

Faten El-Dabbas
Faten El-Dabbas is a German-Palestinian spoken word artist from Berlin. Since 2013, El-Dabbas has reached a large audience at numerous guest appearances throughout Germany, especially at cultural and educational events and conferences. Outside of Germany, she has performed at the Tilt Literature Festival in the Netherlands as well as in Basel and Zurich in Switzerland and recently at the international poetry slam festival Flup in Rio de Janeiro as a representative for Germany. Her first German-Arabic text collection »Keine Märchen aus 1001 Nacht« was published by Cosmics-Verlag in 2016, and the second edition has since been published. An Arabic-Italian and an Arabic-Turkish edition are currently in the works.
Faten El-Dabbas completed her master's degree in political science at the University of Potsdam in 2016 after completing a bachelor's degree in politics, administration and public law.

Wieland Hoban (Great Britain)
Wieland Hoban studied composition with Isabel Mundry, Hans Zender and Gerhard Müller-Hornbach at the Musikhochschule Frankfurt am Main. His music is performed internationally. In addition to his compositional work, he works as a freelance translator (German-English) in the fields of music, philosophy and literature, e.g. of several books by Theodor W. Adorno, Peter Sloterdijk and Alexander Kluge as well as numerous essays for anthologies and specialist journals. He has also published his own analyses and other theoretical writings. He has been an interpreter since 2000 and a composition lecturer at the Darmstadt International Summer Courses for New Music since 2018. In his work, he strives for a complexity that on the one hand reflects the ever-changing flow of our perception and consciousness, but on the other points to something that lies beyond it and can only be hinted at.

Ingoma (Germany), drum group Berlin
The members of the drumming group Ingoma, based in Berlin, come from various African countries. Their instrument is a Burundian drum made from the trunk of the Imivugangoma tree (Cordia-africana). The Burundian name of the tropical deciduous tree means »trees that make drums speak«. They are representatives of Burundian culture and folklore. Their ritual dance is unique in the world and forces the drummers to follow the movement of the dancer, with the drums being carried on the head at the beginning.

»Mummies. Cantata for rock band« by Floh de Cologne (Germany) in a cinematic adaptation, followed by a discussion with Dieter Klemm (Floh) and Claudia Opitz, Sebastian Köpcke (filmmaker)
Floh de Cologne was founded in 1966 as a cabaret. They were world-famous, at least in Cologne, but disbanded forty years ago. Over the course of the turbulent 60s and 70s, they blossomed into a left-wing, dialectically gifted political rock group. Offending was not an end in itself, but necessary. Anyone who took aim at the undiplomatic and precise capitalist exploitation of nature and mankind, who stood up to the big stupid machine, would sometimes receive 17 criminal charges. A long time ago. But not long enough for just posthumous fame: on November 21, 2023, Floh de Cologne received the Holger Czukay Prize for Lifetime Achievement. Their Chile cantata »Mumien« was re-released on film in memory of September 11, 1973, and a re-release of their early works on CD and vinyl is in preparation. Dieter Klemm from the Flöhen and filmmakers Claudia Opitz and Sebastian Köpcke will be guests at the conference.

Daniel Osorio (composer from Chile) and Musikandes
»Musikandes« is a cultural project founded in 2008 that revives the tradition of Latin American music. Music that speaks about the daily struggles for survival and dreams of Latin American society. The songs achieve their resonance by picking up on the social problems of the listener, condensing them aesthetically and thus inviting them to take a political stance. The forms of this musical message are diverse. In addition to the singer's voice, there is the traditional playing of the guitar, the kena, the charango or the cuatro. European instruments such as the cello, double bass or recorder are also integrated. The musical development of the musicians is based on their Latin American heritage, but continues to develop in the tradition of political songs by Eisler, Weill and others. In addition to the vocals, the group plays the guitar, recorder and panpipe, as well as instruments such as the tiple, cuatro, kena, moxeño and charango, which are rarely heard.

Wenzel (Germany)
Wenzel is offensive. A harsh voice, sometimes soft, sometimes loud. He does not want to please everyone, especially not those who support the system of rule and profit from it. People and life are at the heart of his work. This was already the case when he entered the stages of the GDR in the 1970s and won people over. The Liedertheater »Karls Enkel« was his launch pad, and he continued with Steffen Mensching and their unforgettable clown plays. Wenzel has released 52 albums to date and earned numerous awards. In 2023, the documentary »Never believe what I sing« was released, making him known to an even wider audience. Extensive tours have taken Wenzel through France, Austria, North America, Nicaragua and Turkey. He has performed on stage with Arlo Guthrie, Randy Newman, Ferhat Tunç, Konstantin Wecker and many others. His latest solo live CD »Noch verschont von großen Kriegen« is a plea against the propaganda battles and hysteria of the time.