‘Fire & Bread’ – Alice Hasters talks to Maximiliane Häcke about her new book ‘Anti-Victim’

In their podcast ‘Feuer & Brot’, Alice Hasters and Maximiliane Häcke analyse political, pop-cultural and personal topics in a relaxed atmosphere. During ‘Zürich liest’, the pair discuss Alice Hasters’ new book ‘Anti Opfer’ and why we look down on vulnerability. 

Everyone is talking about victims. Yet increasingly, this doesn’t refer to people who have suffered injustice. Rather, it refers to those who disrupt harmony, who are considered soft, who drag others down or who seek to place themselves above them. People say that if they didn’t whinge so much, we wouldn’t have so many problems. Being tough on others is increasingly seen as something to aspire to – and whilst inhumanly high demands are placed on victims, powerful alliances of patriarchal complicity are changing our world for the worse.

Alice Hasters describes a cultural shift that is no coincidence that goes hand in hand with a resurgence of authoritarianism and fascism. What happens to a society in which sensitivity is regarded as elitist? And the right of the strongest as authentic? With intellectual restlessness, she contrasts the spread of this new harshness with the political power of solidarity.