Zufall, Erlösung und Politik

Abstract

Master and Margarita is a masterpiece of literary modernity. Mikhail Bulgakov wrote the novel in the 1930s in Moscow under the life-threatening conditions of personal persecution. The novel shows how all rationalist claims to power fail because of the invincible power of chance. The utopian state of peace and freedom that the novel creates lies in a sphere beyond all real conflicts and tensions. The present Corona crisis puts the planning reason, which characterizes the history of Western rationality, in many ways questioned. It testifies to the enduring power of chance and thus to the principal limits of human domination of nature. This experience should sensitize our political thinking for the fundamental vulnerability of human beings and the existence of the unpredictable in a new way.