Hello Leipzig: Here’s how Thursday 27 August 2026 gets off to a start

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A tribute to a Leipzig-based democracy activist, an award for an American historian, and two exciting film premieres tackling deeply moving issues of our time. There is also the last evening market of the year in the city centre. And Leipzig’s public transport authority is today publishing new findings on driverless transport.

Only flying is better

The dream of driverless passenger transport – Leipzig Transport Authority (LVB) is moving closer to realising it step by step, or rather, wheel rotation by wheel rotation. At midday today, they will present the results of the ABSOLUT II project, in which, together with regional partners from business, academia and public administration, further conditions have been created for driverless shuttle services in local public transport.

The focus is on the transition from automated to driverless operation: ABSOLUT II was specifically designed to establish the technical, organisational and legal conditions necessary for the future deployment of autonomous vehicles without a safety driver on board. Instead, the plan is to monitor the vehicles via a ‘technical supervision’ system from a control centre. This is regarded as an essential prerequisite for operating autonomous shuttle services economically and on a larger scale.

“Autonomous driving offers great opportunities for local public transport. Particularly in suburban areas and less densely populated regions, flexible on-demand services can help to make mobility even more tailored to demand and cost-effective in future. With ABSOLUT II, we have laid the groundwork for this,” said Sandy Brachmann, Head of Marketing at Leipziger Verkehrsbetriebe
, in a public statement.

The findings from ABSOLUT II are set to be directly incorporated into the further development of autonomous mobility services. The plan is to integrate the technology with Leipzig’s on-demand service, FLEXA. Autonomous shuttle services are intended to complement existing regular public transport services and, in particular, improve connections to the city’s outskirts.

LVB is already working alongside numerous Saxon partners on the follow-up project ‘Saxon Initiative for Automated Shuttles in Public Transport – SIAS-ÖV’ to gradually prepare Level 4 autonomous vehicles for future deployment in regular service. The partners involved aim to integrate autonomous shuttle services into local public transport by 2030.

ABSOLUT II was funded by the Federal Ministry of Research, Technology and Space. A budget of 12 million euros is available for the entire research project. Further information on the ABSOLUT project and the participating project partners is available at absolut-projekt.de
.

Final round late in the evening

Today, the Leipzig Evening Market is taking place for the last time this year in front of the Old Town Hall. From 4 pm to 9 pm, there will be shopping, food and drink, culinary delights and entertainment. Visitors can use the evening to do some shopping, meet up with friends and family, or round off the day with food and drink.

The family programme includes the play van and the mobile library. The Fire Service will also be present again with information stands and activities for children. Singer-songwriter Max Schrut will provide the musical entertainment. Also taking part is the ‘Zukunftsmarkt’ initiative, which, under the slogan ‘Gute Wahl Regional’ (Good Choice: Regional), showcases the local agricultural and food industries. The initiative has helped recruit traders and is itself offering several activities centred on regional food: a big vegetable quiz, a wheel of fortune and the chance to make your own butter using traditional methods – all of which require both wit and skill.

The city has given a positive assessment of the late-evening markets. Dr Walter Ebert, head of the Market Office, has therefore already announced that the initiative will continue: “Sales figures are good, and quite a few stallholders had sold out before the end of the day. Next year, we will be running five events again from April to August, each on the fourth Thursday of the month.” This means the Leipzig Evening Market is set to take place five times in 2027 as well. Today’s event has no impact on the regular Friday weekly market. This will open as usual from 9 am to 5 pm in the market square in front of the Old Town Hall.

Film premieres with special screenings

Two new German films are celebrating their cinema release today with special screenings in Leipzig. At 5.30 pm, the Prager Frühling cinema bar (House of Democracy) will be showing Susanne Kim’s documentary ‘Becoming Kim’. At 7 pm, the curtain rises at the Passage Kinos (Hainstraße 19a) for the ‘Special Screening’ of Faraz Shariat’s ‘Staatsschutz’.

The German-South Korean production “Becoming Kim” (2026) draws on Kim’s own family to explore different cultural influences and expectations for a shared future. The director lives in Leipzig with her daughter; her Korean husband, Jeong Rae, has been commuting between Germany and South Korea for years and is opening a chicken grill there with his mother. Following the film, there will be a discussion with Susanne Kim and Sandra Schnabel-Perales, a systemic counsellor and therapist specialising in intercultural relationships.

‘Staatsschutz’, a German drama-thriller from 2026, tells the story of the young public prosecutor Seyo Kim (Chen Emilie Yan), who survives a racist arson attack and, whilst conducting her own investigations within the judicial system, encounters resistance and institutional barriers that hinder the truth from coming to light. Alongside Yan, the film stars Julia Jentsch and Alev Irmak.

The 114-minute film, rated 12+, was made following several years of research and is based on a screenplay by Claudia Schaefer, Sun-Ju Choi and Jee-Un Kim; it is being released today by Plaion Pictures. Following the screening at the Passage Kinos, director Faraz Shariat, activist Newroz Duman and criminal defence lawyer Dr Kati Lang will take part in a discussion. Alexander Schwarz, a lawyer at the European Centre for Constitutional and Human Rights (ECCHR), will deliver a welcome address.

Reserved tickets must be collected at least half an hour before the screening begins.

Honour for historian from Missouri

The Zeev Sternhell Prize, worth 2,000 euros, is being awarded for the first time today in Leipzig. The award goes to historian Micah Alpaugh for his book *Friends of Freedom: The Rise of Social Movements in the Age of Atlantic Revolutions*, published by Cambridge University Press in 2021. The award ceremony is to take place as part of the anniversary congress of the International Committee of Historical Sciences (CISH).

Created to mark the 100th anniversary of the CISH, the prize will in future be awarded every five years to a work that brings a particularly innovative approach to the international, transnational or global study of the revolutions of the late 18th and early 19th centuries. For the inaugural award, a 16-member international jury initially reviewed 17 books and selected ten finalists from among them. Alpaugh’s work was ultimately chosen as the best book of the past five years in this field of research.

Sujit Sivasundaram received an ‘Accessit’, a commendation for second place, for ‘Waves Across the South’. Cambridge University Press now also lists Alpaugh’s book as the winner of the ‘2026 Zeev Sternhell Prize, International Committee of Historical Sciences’. The CISH Centennial Congress is taking place mainly at the Educational Science Centre of the University of Leipzig on the Jahnallee campus.

Commemorating a Leipzig democracy activist

Frauenkultur e. V. is today paying tribute to the Leipzig-based writer and philosopher Dr Eva Lehmann-Lilienthal, who passed away in May 2026. The event, entitled ‘Remembering our female companions’, begins at 5 pm at Windscheidstraße 51. The commemoration is being organised in cooperation with GEDOK Mitteldeutschland (formerly the ‘Association of German and Austrian Women’s Art Associations of All Art Forms’) and Frauenkultur Leipzig.

Contributors include Christine Rietzke, Brigitte Blattmann, Sibylle Kuhne and Jelena Radosavljevic. The evening is dedicated to a woman from Leipzig whose life story intertwines Jewish city history, experiences in the GDR, and social activism during the Peaceful Revolution and in the post-reunification era.

Lehmann-Lilienthal was born in Leipzig in 1931 to a Jewish mother and was one of the few Jewish Holocaust survivors in Leipzig. From 1950 to 1955, she studied philosophy, psychology and political economy, taking philosophy classes from Ernst Bloch, amongst others. She later lectured at the universities of Jena and Leipzig. She obtained her doctorate in 1983 and subsequently worked in the fields of cultural sociology and cultural organisation.

Following her early retirement in 1990, Lehmann-Lilienthal became involved in efforts to draft a new, democratic constitution for a unified Germany. As part of a first-hand witness project organised by Frauenkultur Leipzig, she spoke about her involvement in the human rights working group within the constitutional movement co-led by Wolfgang Ullmann.

In 1992, Lehmann-Lilienthal was one of the co-founders of the Ephraim Carlebach Foundation in Leipzig. Alongside her social and cultural-political work, she was also active as an author. On 28 August 2018, she was awarded the 11th Isolde Hamm Prize. Eva Lehmann-Lilienthal would have turned 95 this month.