Anne Applebaum: Keynote Speaker at the 2025 Salzburg Festival

In 2025, the Salzburg Festival will not only reflect on various centres of power that have shaped – and scarred – history, but also engage with pressing contemporary issues. Eighty years after Austria’s liberation from the Nazis and thirty years after it joined the European Union, the world is undergoing a profound crisis and heading toward a radically different geopolitical order.

The keynote address at the opening ceremony of the 2025 Salzburg Festival will be given by the Polish-American historian and journalist Anne Applebaum, who covered the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and has since established herself as a prominent public intellectual. Her address, titled ‘Democracy and the Music Festival’, will respond to sweeping ideological realignment, apparent democratic decline, and the rise of authoritarian alliances by defending civil society and artistic freedom as the core values of human civilization.

‘Anne Applebaum is one of the most incisive commentators on the rise of autocratic governance in the East and West, as well as a powerful and compelling voice against the erosion of Western democratic norms,’ says artistic director Markus Hinterhäuser. ‘Her brilliant writing tackles the critical questions surrounding this complex and troubling global trend, providing sharp insight into what is at stake for the world today.’

Anne Applebaum was born into a Jewish family in Washington, D.C. in 1964. After studying Russian history and literature at Yale and international relations at the London School of Economics, she began her journalistic career in 1988 as a foreign correspondent for The Economist in Poland. She was present as the Iron Curtain came down a year later and reported on the fall of the Berlin Wall.

Anne Applebaum, recipient of the Pulitzer Prize (2004) and the Peace Prize of the German Book Trade (2024), is widely known as an influential and trenchant critic of authoritarian regimes. In numerous books, she has explored the brutal legacy of the Soviet Union (Gulag: A History), the alarming popularity of anti-democratic political rule, and the rightward shift of political culture (Twilight of Democracy). In her most recent publication Autocracy, Inc., she analyzes the inner workings of authoritarian alliances that seek to undermine democratic forces. This book aligns with themes addressed in Iron Curtain: The Crushing of Eastern Europe (2013), in which she examined how countries in central and eastern Europe fell behind the Iron Curtain after the end of the Second World War and shed light on the early years of Stalinism up to the suppression of the Hungarian Uprising in 1956 – a defining historical period for Austria as well, and its journey as a democratic nation. ‘Before a nation can be rebuilt, its citizens need to understand how it was destroyed in the first place: how its institutions were undermined, how its language was twisted, how its people were manipulated,’ she wrote in Iron Curtain.

Anne Applebaum is married to Radosław Sikorski, who served as the Polish foreign minister from 2007 to 2014 and again since 2023.

The opening ceremony takes place at 11 a.m. on 26 July 2025 at the Felsenreitschule.