Speech on the (Dark) Times: Brecht’s Thought Then and Now, The International Amfiteater Symposium

In a brief yet extraordinarily lucid fragment from Buying Brass, entitled “Speech on Our Times” (Rede über die Zeit), Bertolt Brecht offers a precise analysis of the social conditions shaping his historical moment, not merely in Germany but globally. In the fragment, a character bearing the generic name Philosopher observes that “the monstrous oppression and exploitation of human beings by other human beings, the wartime slaughters and peacetime degradations of every sort taking place across the planet have almost come to seem natural to us”. Despite the historical distance, this observation still resonates as an uncannily accurate commentary on the conditions of our contemporary moment, marked by capitalist exploitation, violence against human and non-human life, war and the climate crisis. We live in a time in which numerous regressive, increasingly popular and even institutionalised forms of authoritarian (micro-)politics are gaining ground, recalling the dark forces of past eras. These politics are rooted in racism, chauvinism, nationalism, xenophobia, transphobia, homophobia, sexism, class discrimination, ruthless exploitation, (neo-)colonialism, religious fundamentalism, environmental degradation, militarism and more.

“If our present-day world no longer fits drama,” Brecht told his collaborator Elisabeth Hauptmann one hundred years ago, “then drama no longer fits the world.” Thus, from its very beginning, Brecht’s project of the epic (dialectical) theatre appears to have been conceived as an attempt to enable theatre to respond to – and even intervene in – its historical moment. The symposium will provide an opportunity to reflect on what an effective theatrical and/or Brechtian response to our time might look like today – a time marked by neoliberalism and the rise of authoritarian politics. At the symposium, we will thus explore the relationships between art (theatre, playwriting, literature, etc.) and the contemporary social and political context and seek potential theatrical and other tactics capable of following Brecht’s maxim in The Measures Taken (and Buying Brass): “Change the world, it needs it!” The symposium aims to reflect, through Brecht and the questions raised by “Speech on Our Times”, on the “dark times” of his era as well as our own.

Forty symposium participants will present their views on the subject; we also invite you to join the discussions following the lectures and presentations. The working language of the symposium is English.

The symposium will begin on Tuesday, 6 October 2026, at 6 p.m., with the opening of the exhibition Theatre Work: Brecht on Slovenian Stages at the Slovenian Theatre Institute; the exhibition is dedicated to productions of Brecht’s plays in Slovenian theatre.

More and the PROGRAMME of the symposium >>