More information: www.humboldt-foundation.de/en/explore/newsroom/pre… “Beethoven`s ‘Empire of the Mind’: Artistic ‘Effigies of the Ideal’ and the Cultural Politics of Resistance” In a letter from the time of the Congress of Vienna, that grand party of the Restoration, Beethoven wrote in 1814 about an “empire of the spirit or the mind” as an alternative to the reality of politics as usual, of “Monarchen” and “Monarchien” as he put it. His lifelong interest in Friedrich Schiller encouraged him to incorporate into his artworks “effigies of the ideal” or affirmative symbols, such as the “Ode to Joy” theme in the Ninth Symphony that serves as the official anthem of the European Union. This conference reassesses the cultural legacy of an artist who lived through some of the most turbulent events in European history, from the French Revolution to the rise and fall of Napoleon and the ensuing Metternich regime of the 1820s. What accounts for the continuing impact of the works of this “deaf seer” in our current age of globalization and political instability, a quarter-millennium after Beethoven’s birth at Bonn in 1770? This question supplies one of the central issues of the conference.