In June 2026 the philosophy festival phil.COLOGNE reported about 21,000 visitors at 47 events. It was the festival’s fourteenth edition. About 4,000 school students attended 13 events for schools. The festival describes itself as a place for kontroverse, aber sachliche Auseinandersetzung, controversial but objective debate.
A Newspaper Section Called Dispute
On 5 September 2019, Die Zeit appeared for the first time with a new section called Streit, dispute. The weekly advertised it with lines such as Ohne Streit keine Versöhnung, no reconciliation without dispute, and Ohne Streit keine Zukunft, no future without dispute. Its head of marketing and sales said the section stands for constructive debates in which a broad range of opinions has its say.
Luther’s Table Talk
At Luther’s table in the Black Monastery, his former monastery and later his home, students, friends and visiting scholars ate with him and talked. Johannes Mathesius described how the meals went. Luther opened the conversation with Was höret man newes? What news do we hear? When someone once took the other side, kondt ers auch leyden vnd mit geschickter antwort widerlegen, he could bear it and refute it with a skillful answer. In 1566 Johannes Aurifaber printed the conversations as Tischreden, Table Talk. Their topics range from Luther’s own life to his conflicts with the pope.
Trigger Points
In 2023 the sociologists Steffen Mau, Thomas Lux and Linus Westheuser published Triggerpunkte. Konsens und Konflikt in der Gegenwartsgesellschaft, Trigger Points: Consensus and Conflict in Contemporary Society. Their finding is that on many big questions there is a fair degree of consensus. Conflict breaks out at particular points. Mau calls them Sollbruchstellen der öffentlichen Debatte, the built-in breaking points of public debate. One example from the book: Gleichstellung ja, aber bitte keine „Gendersprache“! Equality yes, but please no gender language! The authors doubt that two clearly defined camps have formed.
Does It Upset You?
In March and April 2026 the Allensbach Institute interviewed 1,057 people in Germany. It asked: when you deal with someone whose opinions are very different from yours, does that often upset you, or is it usually no problem for you? 61 percent said it was no problem. 21 percent said it upset them. In a larger group of friends, 30 percent said they like to give their opinion, and 28 percent prefer to let others talk. 57 percent said that there are people in their family or among their friends with whom it makes no sense to talk about certain political topics, because their opinions are too far apart. The FAZ published the results on 17 April 2026.
The Wehrmacht Exhibition
In 1995 the Hamburg Institute for Social Research opened a traveling exhibition in Hamburg: Vernichtungskrieg. Verbrechen der Wehrmacht 1941–1944, War of Annihilation: Crimes of the Wehrmacht 1941–1944. Between April 1995 and October 1997 it was shown in 33 cities in Germany and Austria. The debate peaked in Munich in February 1997. On 13 March 1997 the Bundestag debated the exhibition in an Aktuelle Stunde, a session on a current issue. Some photos turned out to be wrongly captioned, and critics used them against the exhibition. It was shown for the last time in the autumn of 1999. A revised version opened in Berlin in November 2001.
The Episode Bavaria Did Not See
Scheibenwischer, Windshield Wiper, was a political Kabarett show on ARD, created and hosted by Dieter Hildebrandt. Its episode of 22 May 1986 dealt with the reactor accident at Chernobyl. It could be seen everywhere in Germany except Bavaria. The Bayerischer Rundfunk had decided to withhold it from its viewers. People brought recordings into Bavaria for private screenings, and the Munich Abendzeitung printed parts of the script.
The Academy at Bad Boll
In September 1945, Pastor Eberhard Müller organized a conference for men of law and business in the Kurhaus at Bad Boll. It became the founding event of the oldest Evangelical Academy in Germany. Müller saw the academy as a Ort des Gesprächs, a place of conversation, and as a mediator between opposing positions that takes neither side. In 2019 the academy held 120 to 150 conferences a year, with about 10,000 participants. It invited even representatives of right-wing populist parties from Poland and Hungary, um das Verstehen zwischen konträren Positionen zu ermöglichen, to make understanding between opposing positions possible. Sixteen more Evangelical Academies exist across Germany.
Disputes With Names
Der Pantheismusstreit — the pantheism dispute. It became public in 1785, when Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi published his letters with Moses Mendelssohn on whether Lessing had been a follower of Spinoza.
Der Positivismusstreit — the positivism dispute. It began in 1961 in Tübingen, with a lecture by Karl Popper at a conference of the German Sociological Association. Popper and Hans Albert stood on one side, Theodor W. Adorno and Jürgen Habermas on the other. In 1969 Adorno published the papers in a book titled Der Positivismusstreit in der deutschen Soziologie.
Der deutsch-deutsche Literaturstreit — the German-German literature dispute. In 1990 Christa Wolf published her story Was bleibt, What Remains. Critics in the West German feature pages attacked it before most readers had even seen it.
Germany Abolishes Itself
At the end of August 2010, Thilo Sarrazin, then a member of the board of the Bundesbank, published Deutschland schafft sich ab, Germany Abolishes Itself. The book was about falling birth rates, immigration and integration, especially of immigrants from Muslim countries. By February 2011 it had sold 1.25 million copies, and by 2012 about 1.5 million. The Deutschlandstiftung Integration published a volume of the texts that major German newspapers printed about it in the first six weeks. Sarrazin left the Bundesbank board. The SPD began proceedings to expel him and finally did so in 2020. ARD’s chief pollster Jörg Schönenborn said that there had never been a majority among the population for Sarrazin’s theses.