Democracy can never be taken for granted, but is always under threat and has to be won anew every day. Michele Barricelli explores the question of what jeopardises democratic communities today and what can be done to protect them. The historian and educator is not concerned with the formal framework of democracy, but with its socio-cultural prerequisites – a historically founded democratic awareness and the willingness to say no to anti-democratic developments at the right time and to decide in favour of democracy. The protests against right-wing extremism in Germany, but also the social liberalisation of Spain after the Franco dictatorship, which was based on a deep-rooted democratic consciousness, are just two of many examples for Barricelli. He argues that democracy can and must be learnt but that this learning is not an easy undertaking. After all, every democracy is character- ised by contradictions: contradictions that have grown historically and contradictions that arise from the different interests of those living in a democracy. The challenge is to utilise these contradictions productively and to constantly renegotiate them in order to strengthen civil society. This is the only way to create a learning democracy that points into the future.
Michele Barricelli, born in 1966, holds the Chair of History Didactics and Public History at LMU Munich. From 2009 to 2016, he was Professor of History Didactics at Leibniz Universität Hannover. Barricelli is chairman of the Germany Society for History Didactics. His research focuses on narrativity and historical learning, National Socialism and the GDR in the culture of remembrance, working with contemporary witnesses and the history of democracy as a learning history.
