Arendt/Brecht : " Stop and Think "

Songs in French or with surtitles support her argument, highlighting the biting irony of both authors. How does a poet navigate dark times, asks the philosopher Hannah Arendt? How to remain a poet in a world in ruins?

She examines Brecht's political failings, but also what redeems him from them. The author of The Origins of Totalitarianism wonders how it was possible for such a great poet to compose odes to Stalin of such mediocrity, both ethically and aesthetically.

She is convinced that beauty and truth are inseparable.

She argues that our responsibility towards the world is all the greater the more we have to offer it, and that a poet or any true artist always risks losing their gift, of being “punished by the gods of poetry,” if they do not want, or cannot, speak the truth.

On stage, Maria Machado, who left her German homeland in 1961, will be Hannah Arendt, while Ariane Dubillard will speak for Brecht, interpreting his songs, sometimes advocating for his ideas and choices, even political ones.

At this moment in our present, where democracies are undermined by an increasingly mystifying use of language, the two actresses in turn discuss what is right, what was right, - what will be right, perhaps? - in all dark times. Songs in French or with surtitles.