Maxi Obexer, Documentary Radio Play and Discussion: Im Auge des Sturms. Das Kapitol im Januar 2021 (2024)
Maxi Obexer, Co-sponsored by the Center for German and European Studies (CGES) and the Department of German, Nordic, and Slavic +.
Probably everyone is familiar with the images of the attack on the United States Capitol in Washington D.C. on January 6, 2021. But what happened inside the building on that day? In her award-winning documentary radio play Im Auge des Sturms, Maxi Obexer shifts the lens away from the mob outside to focus on the lawmakers inside. The piece centers on the intense verbal battles, panic, and political shifts that occurred among the representatives trapped within the building during and immediately following the siege. Combining real-life documentation with dramatic structure, the play captures politicians scrambling to defend a democratic system they themselves had, in some cases, actively undermined shortly before.
Awarded among other prices with Germany’s prestigious “Radio Play of the Year” award in 2024, Obexer’s work serves as a chilling exploration of political polarization, fragility, and institutional self-preservation. It questions whether laws and facts can withstand mob rule and conspiracy theories when a seemingly secure democracy suddenly begins to fracture from within. In this event, we will listen to the radio play (approx. 50 minutes) and then engage in a discussion with the author Maxi Obexer. Radio Play in German, discussion in English and German.
For more information on the radio play, see https://m-obexer.de/im-auge-des-sturms/ and https://www.ardsounds.de/episode/urn:ard:episode:4db6ab0d0a513ab9/.
Maxi Obexer is a prominent German-language author and playwright whose work examines language, power, and political imagination. Raised in South Tyrol and thus in fact in Italy, and based in Berlin, she has earned numerous accolades, including the Eurodram Prize, the Alice Salomon Poetics Prize, and a Bachmann Prize nomination. Her fundamentally feminist writing addresses issues of migration, European identity, feminist politics, and non-human subjecthood. Co-founder of the New Institute for Dramatic Writing and former interim co-president of PEN Center Germany, Obexer has taught at Dartmouth College, Georgetown University, the University of Arts (Universität der Künste) Berlin, and the Literaturinstitut Leipzig. We are honored to have her at UW–Madison as Max Kade Writer in Residence in the fall of 2026.