Sometimes the right books are celebrated by strange people for the wrong reasons. This is what happened in George Orwell’s dystopian novel “1984” during the Corona years, the draft of a bleak surveillance state complete with constant wars, permanent propaganda brainwashing and an all-powerful party. When Corona deniers demonstrated with images of the Health Minister as Orwell’s “Big Brother” and viewed the hygiene measures as an attempt at totalitarian control over the population, they demonstrated the enduring fascination of Orwell’s novel as well as their need to ennoble their own aggressive paranoia in literary terms.
Orwell’s “1984” at the Berliner Ensemble – Culture
