WILD FUTURE: The Helmut Schmidt Future Festival brings together ideas that would otherwise never meet
2026-06-02 Lüneburg, June 2, 2026. Combine the idea of the Year of Society with the concept of “Grunderbe”? Or link a European army with a continent-wide rewilding initiative?
Such unusual connections are at the heart of the Helmut Schmidt Future Festival. From June 15 to 17, 2026, 100 young people from Germany, Austria, and Switzerland will gather at Leuphana University Lüneburg to discuss concrete ideas for social change.
Under the title “WILDE ZUKUNFT” (WILD FUTURE), the festival explores the question of what kind of future we actually want and what potential emerges when familiar boundaries between ideas are crossed. “Many debates today revolve around the limits of what is possible. We are interested in the counter-question: What possibilities might we still be overlooking? The Future Festival creates a space where young people can think about exactly that together,” says Sven Prien-Ribcke, director of the Helmut Schmidt Future Festival.
For three days, festival participants will work on ideas for the future, discuss with guests from academia, the media, politics, and civil society, and develop new connections between proposals that would otherwise rarely be considered together.
Guests include, among others, physician and journalist Gilda Sahebi, social entrepreneur Lisa Jaspers, Greenpeace spokesperson Baro Gabbert, news influencer Fabian Grischkat, ZEIT author Yasmine M'Barek, entrepreneur Fried Graf von Bernstorff, physicist Marco Wehr, and illustrator Sarah Heuzeroth.
A highlight of the festival is the presentation of the Helmut Schmidt Future Prize at Hamburg’s Thalia Theater on June 17. This year’s recipient is futurist Florence Gaub. The head of the research department at the NATO Defense College in Rome will first engage with festival participants in a discussion about the social and geopolitical challenges of the coming decades.
What makes this special is that the participants will not only travel together to the award ceremony; their own ideas about the future will also be part of the program at the Thalia Theater.
The Helmut Schmidt Future Festival is organized by DIE ZEIT, the Federal Chancellor Helmut Schmidt Foundation, and Leuphana University Lüneburg. The festival is supported by ProjectTogether.
For more information: www.leuphana.de/zukunftsfestival