When George Orwell Came to Stuttgart: Dr. Geoff Rodoreda (#54)

Few people know that George Orwell once walked across a small footbridge in Stuttgart and that the experience may have shaped one of the most influential dystopias ever written. In this episode of Made in Science host Wolfgang Holtkamp talks to Dr Geoff Rodoreda, literary scholar and former journalist, about Orwell’s little-known three months as a war correspondent in 1945 and his visit to Stuttgart just after its “liberation”. Rodoreda explains how archival work, field trips to Paris, London and the Neckar riverbank, and even a surviving footbridge helped him reconstruct Orwell’s time in Germany and why he sees echoes of these experiences in "1984". In the second half, the conversation turns to contemporary Australian and Indigenous literature, truth-telling about colonial violence, and what German students can learn from these stories about coming to terms with a difficult past.