“Fear not!“ – how did we come to believe that anyone who speaks these words must be adorable or harmless? Every angel is terrifying, according to the poet Rilke. The first angels were terrifying creatures, heavily armed, multi-winged, beset with countless eyes. It was only over time that they were trivialized to become the blond and chubby-cheeked cherubs smiling at us from Christmas cards. Angels always seem to fall on the wrong side, like buttered toast. And not all of them are as sweet as candy, Philosophy scholar Fabian Bernhardt and writer Laura Lichtblau set out to follow the paths of the Wings of Desire to map out the places and spaces inhabited by angels in our present time

The event will take place in German.

Laura Lichtblau is a freelance writer and translator. Her debut novel Schwarzpulver (Black Powder) was published in 2020, followed in 2024 by the highly acclaimed novel Sund, which deals, among other things, with the ghosts of Germany's Nazi past. For her work on her new novel, she received the Berlin Senate Scholarship for Literature in 2025 and a residency at the Vienna Museumsquartier. Raised in a Protestant family in Catholic Bavaria and leaving the church as soon as she could, she feels both a strong affinity for and skepticism toward manifestations of religion. Laura Lichtblau is particularly interested in angels' significance in pop culture and esotericism—and the use of these elusive beings as tools or figures of thought.

Dr. Fabian Bernhardt is a philosopher and author. He is a research associate at the Collaborative Research Centre Affective Societies at Freie Universität Berlin, a regular contributor to Philosophie Magazin and other journals, and a founding member of the Affect and Colonialism Web Lab. His research focuses on how societies deal with painful pasts, as well as questions of guilt, injustice, and violence. Following a 2014 monograph on the concept of forgiveness, his second book Rache. Über einen blinden Fleck der Moderne (Revenge: On a Blind Spot of Modernity, Matthes & Seitz, 2021) was awarded a non-fiction book prize.