19 February 2026, 6 p.m. Fasanenstrasse 25, 10719 Berlin
Admission is free – unfortunately, we cannot guarantee a seat.
About the book
Everyone knows it exists. Everyone thinks they possess it. Yet no one has ever seen it: taste, our sense of beauty, our antenna for happiness and the tactile sense of our longing. Ulrich Raulff explores this competence for beauty and, in his furious new book, takes us on a materialistic journey of vanities, a parcours of likes from Meissen to Mac and from Diderot's dressing gown to Victoria's Secret.
The trail leads to the Rome of Winckelmann and the Washington of Jefferson, to Paris around 1800, to Victorian England and right up to our times of Airbnb and food as an "experience". Great tastemakers from Madame Pompadour to Steve Jobs welcome us as portal figures at the beginning of new eras of taste. But the history of taste and its transformations is not just a history of aesthetic codes. It is also the story of a European invention, of plundering, of the suffering of others and of our own historical guilt. And it is even more than that: in the sense of nuance, an immense cultural achievement unfolds, a human capacity and a wealth of sensations that helps us to perceive difference and transform it into culture.
About the author
Ulrich Raulff was director of the German Literature Archive in Marbach from 2004 to 2018 and president of the Institute for Foreign Cultural Relations from 2018 to 2025. In 2010, he received the Leipzig Book Award in the non-fiction/essay category for his book Kreis ohne Meister (Circle Without a Master) about the afterlife of Stefan George. His most recent book, Das letzte Jahrhundert der Pferde (The Last Century of Horses), was published by C.H.Beck in 2016. It was also shortlisted for the Leipzig Book Award and has been translated into numerous languages.
