The CEU-CEFAS collaborator, José Antonio Pérez Ramos, has made a fruitful visit to different think-tanks and conservative media in Berlin to learn first-hand about their work and to expand CEU-CEFAS relations with other European institutions.

The CEU-CEFAS collaborator, together with the editor-in-chief of the magazine The European Conservative, Mario Fantini, held a meeting with the theologian Wolfgang Fenske, director of the Bibliothek des Konservatismus (BkD), in which they discussed the situation of German conservatism and visited the Library, touring its collections and history. Under the auspices of the Conservative Foundation for Education and Research, founded by the prominent Munich thinker Caspar Freiherr von Schrenck-Notzing (1923-2009), the Library of Conservatism is a meeting place for the study of European conservative thought, offering training seminars and providing researchers with access to books and archives that are difficult to access.

In the tour with Fenske they have been able to enjoy original works dating from the eighteenth century, and from a catalog of more than 35,000 titles, highlighting the conservative literature of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries French and Anglo-Saxon, but special attention is given to the German Conservative Revolution. There is also no shortage of works in Spanish, from Donoso Cortés and his rediscovery of Germany to the philosopher Ortega y Gasset. The Library, which has an extensive collection of periodicals, also has a very important academic collection on the defense of life, bioethics and family policy. The BdK also carries out important editorial and audiovisual work; names such as Roger Scruton, Todd Huizinga, Hans-Christof Kraus, Karlheinz Weißmann or Sophia Kuby have passed through this house, and it has become a nerve center of conservative thought in Germany.

Among the visits they have made also highlights their visit to CATO Magazin magazine, a cultural magazine in which current affairs are intermingled with political philosophy, literature or historical issues, where they have spoken with its director, Ingo Langner, who has a long and rich experience in the world of theater, literary and television production. The motto of the magazine “your ark for today’s storms”, defines well the conception of the magazine: to save the remains of a cultural identity in full shipwreck.

Finally, they visited the editorial office of the Junge Freiheit newspaper, which was founded in 1986 as a hard-working university newspaper with a few pages at the renowned University of Freiburg in Breisgau, and now has a digital edition and a weekly paper edition in broadsheet format. There they met with its director and founder, Dieter Stein, an exceptional connoisseur of German politics and a journalist who has championed freedom of expression. The “Young Freedom” has positioned itself as a solid independent and idealistic conservative newspaper, with a strong commitment to young journalists committed to rigor and culture in a broad sense. A true rara avis in a country where political consensus and consensus among the big media make the work of a discordant voice Herculean.

The Berlin trip undoubtedly opens new avenues of collaboration between CEU-CEFAS and the academic and cultural world of German conservative thought.