Nora Sternfeld

Billy Wilder is credited with saying: “The pessimists are in Hollywood, and the optimists are in Auschwitz.” Antonio Gramsci, on the other hand, wrote about the pessimism of the intellect and the optimism of the will while imprisoned in a fascist jail. This lecture outlines artistic, theoretical, and activist examples of sober hope as inconsolability, as wisdom for survival, and as everyday practice. For, as Heiner Müller said, “we can do nothing but our work, which has little impact, and none for the dead.”