Das blinde Licht

In 1909, the German chemist Fritz Haber found a way to extract nitrogen from the air, helping to avert global famine. The same process also enabled the industrial production of explosives, likely prolonging the First World War. In 1916, while serving on the Russian front, the astrophysicist Karl Schwarzschild produced the first exact solution to Albert Einstein’s field equations of general relativity. His work revealed the possibility of a region of space from which nothing could escape: what would later become known as a black hole. In 1967, after visiting war-torn Vietnam, the mathematician Alexander Grothendieck turned away from the field he had helped transform, abandoning his pursuit of a grand unified theory of mathematics »for the good of humanity«.

Benjamin Labatut’s novel »Das blinde Licht«, published in English as »When We Cease to Understand the World«, tells the stories of scientists almost broken by the scale of their own findings. The scientific discoveries of the early 20th century shattered established ideas of matter, time, space and reality itself. But they cannot be understood simply as part of a story of civilisation progressing towards the light. They are also bound to the wars, totalitarian regimes and human disasters that shaped modern Europe.

Labatut’s novel speaks directly to the present: digital media, artificial intelligence and the global crises we face are inextricably linked to the revolutions begun by Einstein, Haber, Schwarzschild and their contemporaries. What unforeseen catastrophes are being sown by today’s scientific and technological innovations? Following »Ungeduld des Herzens (Beware of Pity)« and »Michael Kohlhaas«, this is the third production by Simon McBurney at the Schaubühne, and is a co-production with the company Complicité.