Speaker
Description
In October 2025, Swiss author Sibylle Berg published the final part of her trilogy, which begins in a dystopian England in the near future (GRM. Brainfuck, 2019), escalates into a Europe-wide crisis and ends in revolution (RCE #RemoteCodeExecution, 2022). In La Bella Vita. PNR, she now describes the period two years after the revolution, which prevented the great collapse and forced a system reboot. Europe reinvents itself as an anarchist utopia. It requires robust strategies to recover socio-politically and economically beyond nation-state concepts. In 93 chapters, Berg formulates 93 proposals for a constitution of the so-called beautiful life (das schöne Leben), thus covering a wide range from dystopia to warning utopia to utopia. In my talk, I would like to examine how Sibylle Berg herself as a Member of the European Parliament as well as her trilogy as political literature stand in the tradition of Bertolt Brecht's ‘intervening thinking’ (eingreifendes Denken) and, more than a purely fictional thought experiment, points to real ways out of the crisis.
| Keywords | dystopia, utopia, Sibylle Berg, political literature, Bertold Brecht, intervening thinking (Eingreifendes Denken) |
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| susanne.lorenz@istanbul.edu.tr |