One minute of humanity

Venue: DT Stage - How can humans manage to live in the awareness that we are not alone, that we share the earth? Stanisław Lem's 1983 text A Minute of Humanity raises this question with the help of a fictitious book review: The text is a book about a book that tries to record what happens in the world in one minute, i.e. what humanity experiences, does to and destroys each other in sixty seconds. Statistics on death, reproduction, overpopulation and scarcity of resources are discussed, but also the amount of art produced per minute, church tax paid or animals eaten by humans.

The result of this ridiculous attempt to draw up an “extreme summary of humanity” and in doing so to uncover the human condition itself is rather disastrous. The thought experiment is complicated by the nature of time itself, because at the moment of her portrait, time continues to run, and the statistics that have just been collected lose their relevance. But what are the limits of the statistical method? Which areas of human life, feelings and actions escape the law of large numbers? And how can you actually endure all of this?

Stanisław Lem is considered one of the most important science fiction authors of the 20th century. In his extensive and creatively exuberant work, he has predicted numerous technological developments of the future — from robotics to the Internet to space travel. Novels such as Solaris or The Futurological Congress became classics of fantastic literature. Anita Vulesica, who is well known as a specialist in absurd and tragicomic theatre at the Deutsches Theater for her productions The Favourite, The Salary Increase and The Bald Singer, is now discovering a previously less illuminated text by Lem for the first time for the stage.