Harold M. Williams Auditorium, The Getty Center

  On the conference “The Struggle for Democracy” “Throughout the world it has become precarious to take democracy for granted“, Thomas Mann observed after the rise of National Socialism and the end of the Weimar Republic. Eighty-five years after Mann’s escape, the realization that democracy is vulnerable has become a shared experience on both sides of the Atlantic. The cohesion of democratic polities is endangered both in Europe and the United States. Segregation threatens to supersede exchange; confrontation supplants compromise.…