Those who look on at catastrophes wrongly expect those involved to learn something. So long as the masses are the object of politics they cannot regard what happens to them as an experiment but only as a fate. They learn as little for catastrophe as a scientist’s rabbit learns from biology.
–Theodor W. Adorno,
Berthold Brecht’s “Mother Courage”was written just before the Second World War and is set in the midst of the Thirty Years War. In a postscript to the play, Brecht says that the legacy of that war was “cynicism and business as usual”.
My business is too difficult, you now why? Because it is my business to awaken human sympathy…..Because people have this terrible faculty of making themselves feel nothing at all, more or less when they like.
-Berthold Brecht: spoken by Peachum, head of the beggars union in his “Threepenny Opera”