Monday, 04. December 2017, 18:00 – 19:30 h
At the University of Zurich, Rämistrasse 71, 8006 Zurich, KOL-G-201 (Aula)
In cooperation with the Europa Institute at the University of Zurich (EIZ)
On the occasion of the fiftieth anniversary of Sir Winston Churchill’s speech in Zurich, the first Churchill Symposium took place in 1996. Since then, the EIZ has organized an annual conference in cooperation with the Swiss Institute for Foreign Cultural Studies, the British Swiss Chamber of Commerce (BSCC) and with support from Swiss Re.
Joachim Gauck, born in 1940 in Rostock, studied theology and is a former protestant pastor. He co-initiated the clerical and public resistance against the SED dictatorship in East Germany, and from March 1990 was a deputy for ‘Alliance 90’ in the East German People’s Chamber when it was freely elected for the first time. For around ten years he was Federal Commissioner for the Files of the State Security Service of former GDR, also known as the ‘Gauck Commission’. On 18 March 2012, the German Federal Assembly elected Joachim Gauck as the eleventh president of the Federal Republic of Germany (until 2017). ‘For grown-ups, freedom has another name: responsibility’, according to his guiding principle.