Jan Philipp Reemtsma, the German literary scholar, social scientist, writer and patron, will hold the second ‘Speech about the Century’ at the 2021 Salzburg Festival. As a writer and thinker, he has focussed for many years on civilizational theory and the history of human destructiveness. Jan Philipp Reemtsma, who was the victim of a high-profile kidnapping in 1996, has founded both the Hamburg Foundation for the Promotion of Science and Culture and the Hamburg Institute for Social Research.