EUSTORY Past Forward Festival
Do you believe that dealing with the past can change our future for the better? Then join us at the EUSTORY Past Forward Festival in Hamburg! From 7 to 11 September 2026 we invite professionals, practitioners and young activists to share, experience and discuss strategies and possible solutions to challenges of history and civic education in Europe and beyond.
You will leave the festival with new perspectives, practical tools, and a strong European network to support your work, when pressure on democracy is growing.
What to expect?
To mark EUSTORY’s 25th anniversary, Körber-Stiftung’s multi-day festival aims to inspire hope in difficult times. We invite people from a variety of professions, backgrounds, and age groups to share and discuss ways how to engage with our past in a responsible, courageous, and forward-looking manner.
Our Topics
- Making Peace with History: reflections and best practise how to tackle history when it is contested and emotionally burdened.
- Who Owns the Past: reflections and best practice on coping with struggles over memory and painful gaps in public commemoration, as well as on the potential of history to promote social cohesion.
- Memory Meets Machine: orientation on future trends and strategies concerning the challenges and opportunities that history and commemoration face by AI, ChatGPT and social media.
Our sessions
- Hands-On Workshops to experience and discuss meaningful approaches to transformative educational experiences and tools for current challenges
- Deep Dives by keynote speakers and panelists as food for thought
- Dialogue Across Borders to share and discuss potential solutions to urgent challenges and to enlarge your professional network
- Meet Hamburg when local organisations open their doors to offer a glimpse behind the scenes of innovation in civic education
- Young perspectives on histories that matter at the “Roots and Reels” Award Ceremony
- For this year’s EUSTORY history competition prize winners aged 16-20, we offer a Youth Workshop how to apply Constructive Journalism to historical storytelling as part of the festival
