We would like to cordially invite you once again to the lectures that Barbara Stollberg-Rilinger will give as part of her International Visiting Lectureship at the Jakob Fugger Centre.

Her lectures in Augsburg are dedicated to the overarching theme of tyranny, despotism, violence. In her lectures, she will take us into her latest book project.
Trump, Bolsonaro, even more so Putin - the terms tyrant and despot are booming again. Current autocrats are thus placed in a millennia-old discourse. The question is: Are there structural commonalities across epochs, from antiquity to today? Or is this a mere question of perspective? Is one man's tyrant another man's hero? And what role does the use and threat of physical violence play in this context? This will first be addressed using the example of the Prussian "soldier king" Frederick William I, who described himself as a tyrant and was posthumously transformed by historians into the "educator of the German people to Prussianism", and then placed in a larger context.