Eric Arthur Blair, better known by his pen name George Orwell (1903–1950), criticised British imperialism and fought against Franco’s troops in the Spanish Civil War, where he was seriously wounded. At the same time, he witnessed the cruelty and cynicism of Stalinism. These experiences would form the basis for “Animal Farm” and “1984”. During the Second World War he worked for the BBC, for which he wrote a number of pieces. In the BBC radio address “Literature and Totalitarianism”, broadcast in the bleak year of 1941, he shows how totalitarianism makes freedom of writing and thinking impossible. The Austrian psychiatrist Viktor Frankl (1905–1997), for his part, experienced the horrors of the Nazi era at closest range in the concentration camps of Theresienstadt, Auschwitz and others. Despite everything, he displayed a remarkable resilience, which he demonstrated as early as 1946—less than a year after his liberation—in three lectures that form a preliminary stage of his famous work “…trotzdem Ja zum Leben sagen”. In them, he shows how human beings can draw hope and meaning even in the most difficult circumstances—thus, in his own way, and very much in the spirit of our festival motto, establishing happiness as an act of resistance.

Jens Ole Schmieder and Martin Schwanda, both well known to our audience, embody the English writer and the Viennese psychiatrist on this very special evening. The analysis and contextualisation of the speeches will be provided by star philosopher Konrad Paul Liessmann.