RESISTANCE NOW. LETTER TO MY FRIENDS

Do you know that feeling? You've been invited, you've bought a gift, you've also written a little letter. A poetic letter, a human letter. But on the way to the invitation, you realise that something is wrong. That it doesn't workanymore, that it feels wrong. That's how I feel today, as hundreds of thousands of people take to the streets in Italy to end the genocide in Gaza. Today, as I prepare to premiere my new play in Italy: The Letter.

The Letter is about the relationships between children and their parents, between actors and their audience. It's about Chekhov, Joan of Arc and several other European icons. It is about love and grief. And above all, it is about our collective need for community and beauty. But you know what? Today, here, the play feels strangely wrong. At this time, when bombs are falling on Gaza every day and the fleet that was on its way to stop the genocide has itself been stopped, the beauty, the grief, the humor of my letter seem to me like a great silence, even a lie.

Perhaps you know this poem by Bertolt Brecht: 'What kind of times are these, when talking about trees is almost a crime because it implies silence about so many misdeeds.' Yes, that's how I feel: like someone who is verbosely silent. So I quickly wrote a second letter, which you can read here: a political, direct letter. Of course, nothing is more ridiculous than clenching your fist on stage, than proclaiming slogans and utopias in a theatre. Brecht already knew this: the only thing worse than socialist realism is social democratic realism. The stage is not a place of moral clarity, but a place of contradiction. The theatre I love is a dark, tragic, ridiculous, vulnerable, thoughtful place. But today, my dear friends, today we must be clear. We must say what we think. We must turn our attention to what is happening outside, in the world. And we must stop remaining silent about it.

What does it mean to not remain silent as an artist today? First of all: don't be confused by those who tell you that you have to choose a side. It may be a cliché, but humanity has only one side. Talking about Gaza means condemning the crimes of the Israeli military just as much as the crimes of Hamas. Not remaining silent means standing alongside all those who take to the streets to protest against the genocide in Gaza: whether they are Palestinian, Israeli or European citizens. Because a crime against humanity is not directed against this or that people – it is directed against all people, against humanity itself.

Then: to speak out and not remain silent means to call things by their name. Last week, you all heard the infamous statement by radical politician Eyal Mizrahi on Italian television when he was asked about the children murdered in Gaza: 'Define children.' Anyone who uses the term 'genocide', which the UN has unequivocally applied to Israel's warfare in Gaza, hears the same response: 'Define genocide'. As if we were in an academic seminar, as if people were not dying in Gaza every minute as you read this letter. From bombs, from hunger, from disease.

It's hard to admit, but we've wasted many months, even years, on linguistic games. It is enough to read just one of the countless reports by the United Nations and all kinds of research associations, it is enough to open just one newspaper. The crime is clear for all to see, and simply all the institutions that we invented after the Second World War to prevent exactly what is happening in Gaza have given it an unambiguous name: genocide.

Now, it is one thing to write down this word and say it clearly and distinctly. It is quite another to draw the consequences from it. Laws are not made to be recited like poetry. Laws are there to be put into practice. It is as Jesus says in the New Testament: We do not want to love with words and tongue, but in action and truth. Laws, words, institutions that are not applied but continue to exist nonetheless become ornaments of injustice and inhumanity. And ultimately, having become powerless, they are abolished – and with them democracy and freedom.

This letter is addressed to you who run theatres, who defend the institutions of freedom: be an example, be free. To speak and not to remain silent means not to be afraid. Do not be afraid of losing your position, do not be afraid to tell the truth with the words that are true. We must no longer remain silent for fear of being among the losers of history. For as Brecht says elsewhere, shortly before fascism triumphed in Germany and he was forced into exile: 'From now on, and for a long time to come, there will be no more victors, only the vanquished.'

For if we do not act now, if we continue to remain silent, we will not only become accomplices. We will notonly destroy our humanity, but also our freedom and, sooner or later, peace. If we remain silent today, we will have to fight tomorrow, just as our grandparents and great-grandparents fought. If we betray our values in times of peace, if we remain silent here and now without being threatened, how will we prove ourselves in the mire of reality?

And finally: we have no right to remain silent. Germany and Austria, where I live and work, Italy, where I will be performing my play The Letter next week: we are the three nations of classical fascism. Not long ago, we planned and carried out a genocide, the genocide of the European Jews, the most terrible genocide of all time.

Even then, we remained silent and simply carried on. We ducked away because we were afraid for our positions, because we didn't want to view things 'one-sidedly'. Because art has its own value and the situation was contradictory. Even then, everything was out in the open, and even then we hid theworst behind euphemisms.

On September 16, the UN Commission of Enquiry accused the Israeli government of 'direct evidence of genocidal intent'. The members of the commission quoted from speeches, orders and messages from Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his ministers and generals, including a televised address in which Netanyahu compared the Israeli military's invasion of Gaza to what the commission described as a “holy war of total annihilation” in the Hebrew Bible. What are we waiting for? How many hundreds of thousands of people must take to the streets before we, as artists, curators, directors and festival organisers, finally take responsibility? Before we transform our stages from places of eloquent silence to places of resistance?

There is a verse by the Jewish-American poet Delmore Schwartz that I love: 'Time is the school in which welearn, time is the fire in which we burn.' Let us burn and learn at the same time, be artists and activists at the same time. Let us stop being silent. Let us take a clear stand. Because only in this way can we save our art, the theatre: this vulnerable and thoughtful place where we search together for community and beauty.

Milo RauVienna, 4 October 2025