In conversation with … Elsa Romfeld

Abstract

Elsa Romfeld is a philosopher of medicine and philosophical anthropologist. Since 2008, she has been teaching and conducting research in the Department of History, Theory, and Ethics of Medicine at the University Medical Center Mannheim. Her central concern is the art of living and dying – a subject she has explored for over 30 years through numerous publications and projects that span multimedia and transdisciplinary approaches. A trained Germanist as well, she considers language both a vital medium and a research object that deserves greater attention. Among other things, she addresses the question of how illness and death can be expressed – for instance, within the working group “Language and Ethics” of the Academy for Ethics in Medicine, which she coordinates together with Katharina Fürholzer.
We spoke with Elsa Romfeld about Café SensenMAnn – Mannheim’s first and only Death Café, which she founded in 2018 – and about the challenges and possibilities of engaging (pro)actively with the “(un)speakability of death.”

The conversation was conducted by Katharina Fürholzer, Junior Professor of Interdisciplinarity Studies, and Marcella Fassio, Postdoctoral Researcher in Modern German Literature.