Centre for Contemporary Performing Arts

In Compassion. The History of the Machine Gun, Milo Rau and his team journey to the political hot spots of our time: the Mediterranean routes of refugees from the Middle East and the Congolese civil war zones. The semi-documentary double-monologue, based on interviews with NGO workers, clerics and war victims in Africa and Europe, deliberately ventures into contradictory terrain: how do we endure the misery of others and why do we watch it? Why does one dead person at the gates of Europe outweigh a thousand dead people in the Congolese civil war zones? Compassion. The History of the Machine Gun not only contemplates the limits of our compassion but also the limits of European humanism.