We can only recognize what we already know, but what we know must change in order to become recognizable. This insight from G. W. F. Hegel addresses the philosophical imperative to perceive reality truthfully instead of habitually. The familiar cannot be recognized because it is familiar and thus is perceived to be under the control of the subject—albeit that's a delusion. In the Phenomenology of Spirit Hegel asserts that subjective consciousness is guided by familiar views that manifest themselves in what he calls “festgewordene Bestimmungen,” hardened stipulations that produce false certainties which block doubt and lead one to ignore alternatives. At present, political cultures all over the globe seem to be affected by hardened stipulations and false certainties. The Brecht Symposium preceding the most recent one in Leipzig began in Oxford the day after the Brexit vote, and I vividly remember encountering students at St. Hugh's in a state of complete shock about the outcome. It took just a few months for the unexpected to arrive in the US with the election of Donald Trump as president. The unpredictability of these political shifts is rooted in what Matthew Goodwin and Eric Kaufmann call “immigration attitudes of individuals,” which have come to gradually dominate political decision making of growing parts of the electorate, but which are rarely communicated openly.

“Brecht Among Strangers” as the topic for the 2019 Leipzig Symposium sought to explore this problem in the context of Germany today as well as Brecht's situation between 1933 and 1945, when German National Socialism forced millions into exile. Brecht was one among those exiles, and living among strangers affected his theater work and philosophical outlook. Although Brecht had to abandon his experimental theater practice, such as the teaching plays, when leaving Germany, his encounter with the Chinese actor Mei Lanfang caused him to reflect in more complex ways on gesture as an essential element of his theater. Early on he established gestural acting as a key element for defamiliarization. However, Brecht used the term Verfremdung for the first time in 1936 in his essay “Verfremdung in der chinesischen Schauspielkunst” (“Verfremdung Effects in Chinese Acting”).