Hello, my name's David Rumserman, and this is past, present, future, the History of Ideas

podcast. Today, I'm talking to Lear Ippie about her remarkable new book, Indignity, A Life Reimagined.

It tells the story of her grandmother's extraordinary life.

It also uncovers a hidden history of Europe in the middle of the 20th century.

And it's about many of the philosophies of dignity that Lear and I have been discussing and how they can impact, make, break, destroy a human life.

We're going to try and pull all of that together.

There we've been talking about dignity and the history, the philosophy of the concept.

You have written a book called Indignity.

It's not a work of philosophy.

It is a work of memoir, of narrative history, the reimagining of a life, your grandmother's life.

And yet, it contains in it a lot of the themes that

we were talking about. And as we were talking, I found myself thinking, this is in the book, this is

in the book. It's not a work of philosophy, but there's real philosophy in that. And I'd like to get to

it. But I think to get to it, because almost everyone listening to this will not yet have read

the book, we probably need to say a bit more about the story, the narrative, so people can make the

connection. So let's start with that and then I'd really love to hear, not least because

it does begin with two lines, one from Kant and one from Schiller. So we have things to say

about them too, but I don't think we can start there. Let's start with the

photograph. So the spur for this book, not just for the writing of it, but for your desire to

uncover the story that's in it, is a photograph. Just tell us about the photograph and how the

photograph led to the book. Yeah, so it starts with a text message that I received from a friend saying that my

grandmother had become viral on Facebook. And sure enough, I went to check and I discovered that the

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