An interview with Christian Joerges

Abstract In this interview Christian Joerges reconstructs his intellectual biography. A childhood marked, like that of his entire generation, by the Second World War, a harsh post-war period and, from an early age, a complex relationship with German identity on the shadow of Nazi crimes. A high school and university education in a Frankfurt where intellectual life is thriving amidst the ruins. And where a young Joerges discovers the beauty of theory thanks to Wiethölter. The experience in the United States where a pluralistic student movement is energised by the opposition to the Vietnam war. The construction of a law faculty in Bremen, with the almost impossible goal of transforming the teaching of law in Germany. The almost 20 years of Florentine experience, in the shadow of history and with the determination to imagine a Europe capable of being progressive. And without omitting reflections on the dark legacies of European law and on ordoliberalism, two phenomena that many European scholars have discovered thanks to Joerges.