Historical Legacies

Abstract

Theatertreffen, Berliner Festspiele, Berlin, Germany, May 12–28, 2023.At the start of the 2023 Theatertreffen—the sixtieth annual roundup of the ten best German-language theatre productions of the past year—Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky visited Berlin and was received grandly by Germany’s president, Frank-Walter Steinmeier. Berlin is close to the Polish border, and on the other side of Poland lies Ukraine, a daylong drive from Berlin. One might expect that the imminent danger of Putin’s invasion of Ukraine would have been manifest in the Theatertreffen selections, as it was constantly discussed in the German news and cerebral television talk shows. The seven-member jury, expressly constituted with a quota of over fifty percent women, viewed 451 productions to make the selections, which were restaged in Berlin for the festival.If any theme emerged from the offerings that I saw (seven of the ten chosen productions), it was that German-language theatre continues to examine its cultural consciousness for the roots and recurrence of fascism, or National Socialism. And not without reason, as demonstrated by the arrest in December 2022 of twenty-five co-conspirators of the so-called Reichsbürger movement who were plotting to overthrow the government, including a descendant of the aristocratic Hohenzollern family and a member of the German parliament from the neofascist party Alternative für Deutschland (AfD). A kind of time warp was the other Leitfaden or throughline in Theatertreffen: historicizing storylines, a self-consciousness or embedded critique of the material in order to place it at a historical distance. In this category might fall Ein Sommernachtstraum [A Midsummer Night’s Dream], Ophelia’s Got Talent, Der Bus nach Dachau [The Bus to Dachau], Das Vermächtnis [The Inheritance], Die Eingeborenen von Maria Blut [The Natives of Maria Blut], and Ibsen’s Nora, better known outside of Germany as A Doll’s House. These were, in a sense, presentations of presentations, not entirely successful, but always ambitious.The layering of its ingenious costumes told the (unsubtle) story of the fascist takeover of a village in Die Eingeborenen von Maria Blut, based on a 1937 satirical novel by Maria Lazar, its stage version written by Lucia Bihler and Alexander Kerlin. Bihler directed the production that was initially staged at the Burgtheater, Vienna.1 The fanciful staging, with its bobblehead, child-like characters, gave a frighteningly convincing yet ridiculous account of how easily fascist nonsense becomes mainstream. Die Eingeborenen, in all its silliness, made a stronger political statement than the literal indictment of Nazism found in another Theatertreffen offering, Der Bus nach Dachau, whose reenactment of concentration camps took on a serious subject without evidencing any fresh thought.In German theatre, culture, politics, as well as contemporary history, the echoes of Nazism are always to be heard: as a warning, a parable, or touchstone. This recent past is an indelible legacy for Austrians, as well. Hitler was, after all, an Austrian, born near Salzburg. It has been said that the Austrians were, and some remain, even more fervent Nazis than the Germans. Since the 1980s, the Austrian right has been a coalition partner in various party alliances. In Germany, the neofascist AfD recently achieved shocking electoral breakthroughs in Thuringia.That all said, in Die Eingeborenen von Maria Blut, the easy slide into fascism takes place in a small village that’s fallen on hard times. The rise of Nazism gains its impetus from the closing of a local factory. The villagers need new jobs. Those with Jewish (or part-Jewish) backgrounds, despite their prior integration into this rural society, are soon well acquainted with the fear of persecution. The victims also include a man who is portrayed as partially disabled, who initially sees the rise of fascism as an opportunity for him to finally gain respect and power. He delivers a speech celebrating the Nazi takeover, until he finds himself among those being marched off, presumably to his death. Despite the gravity of the subject matter, the play’s production was wonderfully colorful, even campy. Center stage for much of the show was a gigantic statue of a red-robed Maria, flanked by enormous swaths of blue draped fabric at the end of which were representations of angels. The half-dozen players took on multiple roles, aided by a costuming twist that at first appeared comical but soon turned sinister. Oversized heads—like those on toy bobbleheads—were worn by the actors when they portrayed people who submitted to fascism’s lure. The comic effect was enhanced by the costuming: all pink clothing, which made them look much like children, including short pants. These dolls spoke, gestured, and giggled as their childlike voices were relayed through the sound system.The faces of the villagers who struggled against the fascist takeover remained uncovered. They wore what appeared to be transparent yellow latex clothes, designed to look like the German folk costumes favored by the Nazis—dirndls and lederhosen, however, with pink underclothing visible. This comical Volkstümlichkeit showed how the customs of the country provided a shared culture for the village until economic circumstances and personal rivalries drove people apart. The play was divided into several short scenes, each of which ended with a blast of blinding bright light from a frame of bulbs at the front of the stage. The pink underclothes and yellow latex, in addition to the giggly voices of the bobblehead figures, were at odds with the parable about the rise of fascism that ultimately ends in a death march. Further, the superjumbo Maria statue, which occasionally spoke between scenes via the sound system, was absurd. The visual display, in conjunction with the silly children’s voices, was consistently ridiculous, which was in the end to the show’s advantage. These comic features helped make this oft-told story feel fresh and were clearly designed to ridicule fascist ideology. Who could believe any pronouncement delivered by a person in short pants who looks and acts like a goofy little child?By contrast, Der Bus nach Dachau tackled its subject matter as plainly as its title. A “twenty-first century memorial play” created by De Warme Winkel (and company) and produced by De Warme Winkel with the Schauspielhaus Bochum, the performance began before the audience settled in and the lights had dimmed. First, a lecturer addressed the cast, seated in folding chairs stage left, in halting German, often calling out for help with his translation. He described asking his father in 1993 about the Nazi occupation and the Holocaust; the father replied by saying something along the lines that the Germans, ahem, the Nazis, should be shoveled out like any other unwanted shit, but do it with a pitchfork. Stage right, a big wall hid an enclosed performance box outfitted with bunkbeds, like those that had been found in concentration camps. Unlike the real camps, all genders of this fresh-faced, multiracial, and buoyantly youthful cast were housed together, with their KZ uniforms neatly pressed. The faces were later replaced by even smoother and unblemished digital avatars that looked like 3D animations. The inevitable video from the inside of the onstage box appeared to show inmates pretending to die. After this fleeting effort to evoke the camps, the show broke off again for a (fake) discussion between the actors about the ways in which the Holocaust has been portrayed over the years, with jokey references to Schindler’s List and other high-profile treatments. The cast chew on this topic for a bit, before a prerecorded video plays, showing the actors cavorting in a highway truck stop, traveling via the bus, one assumes, from the play’s title. The box then turns, and it’s lighted blue, empty. The End. This mercifully brief production felt like a very cheap exploitation of German history that never came to grips with antisemitism or the record of mass extermination in any meaningful or productive way.Das Vermächtnis, Matthew Lopez’s adaptation of E. M. Forster’s 1910 novel Howards End, thematized a different but related account in the historical oppression of homosexual men. Previously staged in London and on Broadway, the play was produced by the Residenztheater, Munich (Bayerisches Staatsschauspiel) in a German translation by Hannes Becker, with Philipp Stölzl serving as both its director and set designer. Although the text felt somewhat antiquated in its depiction of today’s gay scene, and dipped a little too much into melodrama, the play effectively evoked earlier eras when gays were regularly persecuted and imprisoned, as well as the years in which AIDS terrorized the gay community and mercilessly killed off a generation of men. The invocation of AIDS was neither exploitative nor gratuitous. Rather, the adaptation of Forster’s novel brought to life the anguish of that time and the lingering pain felt by those who survived. Das Vermächtnis was also a big coming out play for Forster: the author’s reasons for remaining closeted were explained for those with no sense of history. Forster clearly finds a counterpart in this update in the figure of Henry, a closeted homosexual with two sons from a marriage to a woman.While the New York production was performed on a near empty stage, the metatheatrical beginning and interstitial scenes in the German version were performed against a set designed to look like the back of an American theatre. Behind this sat a turntable with other, massive sets: the interiors of immense apartments, one with a gargantuan fireplace; the country house to which they repair with its columned Federal-style porch; and a flophouse. Some scenes, however, were staged as if the very idea of sets was now passé. The otherwise talented German actors weren’t nearly as buff as their American counterparts, so the complex stage decoration might have been an effort to compensate. Much of the play hints at the mystery regarding the origin of one of the central characters, who is unable to love or tell the truth. His literary success—ostensibly autobiographical, which garners raves on Broadway—turns out to be all a fiction. He then dumps his devoted boyfriend, takes up with a prostitute—who eventually rejects him, too—and ultimately kills himself in a fiery car crash. It’s not the cheeriest story, but was still a lot of love going around. The country house where some of the play’s action takes place was said to have hosted a couple hundred men who later died of AIDS, including the son of a neighbor, the only woman in the show.2An inherited house and ruminations on the effects of time on stories took a different form in Nora, first produced in Denmark in 1879 and the next year in Germany, where it had an alternate ending in which Nora stays instead of abandoning her children. In Felicitas Brucker’s Münchner Kammerspiele production, which begins with table work among the handful of actors in front of a projection of a dollhouse with snow falling all around, Nora shows just how feisty she is—out of control, yelling, and denouncing the dramatis personae, in which she is described flatly as “Helmut’s wife.” She was already subordinated before the first word of dialogue, as this Nora points out. The analysis of the character list goes on and is something of the key to this production, billed as a “thriller” co-written by Sivan Ben Yishai, Henrik Ibsen, Gerhild Steinbuch, and Ivna Žic, in a German translation by Tobias Herzberg and Hinrich Schmidt-Henkel. The maid complains that she’s listed simply as “a” servant with no name. The postman protests because he’s last in the list of characters, and nameless, too, despite his importance to the plot. He then makes an extended exit, gratuitously refusing, again and again, to disappear, lingering in the spotlight. The playscript addresses the shortcomings of Ibsen’s text in not allowing these other characters to speak much or drive the plot. The three children, usually portrayed as playful rug rats, have their own retrospective, post-plot scene in which they discuss Nora’s parenting decisions. Similarly, Nora’s childhood friend Christina, who struggles to make ends meet, breaks out more than once to denounce Ibsen’s play.The effect is something of a joke, but one with a serious streak that forces one to reconsider the play at its most basic level. When the characters speak out against their subordinations within the script, it palpably expands the scope of Ibsen’s critique. The play is no longer just an early stage gesture toward feminist liberation, it becomes a more global critique of social hierarchies and the damage that they inflict on individual lives. It’s a clever and weighty production; still recognizably Ibsen, but one reinvigorated for the present. The set, designed by Viva Schudt, who also designed the costumes, begins as an upside-down version of a house turned inside out. It is positioned at a forty-five-degree angle to the stage floor so that the players must clamber around, trying to find their footing. At various points, such as when a character’s efforts at fulfillment or self-definition are thwarted or threatened, that particular player slides down the set, literalizing his or her loss of status. The gray video projections of rain on the house continually rolled unnaturally upwards. Later, color projections vividly seized the set, its broken surface becoming an exciting projection screen.There were also two terrific moments of silence. The postman’s prolonged exit is one; the action and silence spoke for themselves since he had already delivered his critique. Another silence, toward the end of the narrative, occurs when Helmut (played by Edmund Telgenkämper) at long last began to understand what was going on with Nora, which allowed the adaptation of Ibsen’s play to find its considerable depth. All of Ibsen’s action, all the rewriting of of his words, and all the messaging and politics embedded in the set were dwelled upon in these profound, wordless minutes. It was live performance at its best, silencing the audience through the absence of the spoken word all the while captivating its attention.Perhaps answering that nagging question of why contemporary German musical theatre doesn’t travel so easily, the curators programmed Der Einzige und sein Eigentum, replete with spangly costumes, dance, and music by Sebastian Hartmann and PC Nackt, based on the nineteenth-century, post-Hegelian philosopher Max Stirner. The production was directed and designed by Sebastian Hartmann for Deutsches Theater Berlin, where the Theatertreffen revival was also staged. “German musical theatre” can sound like an oxymoron, at least until the lyrics register. From first to last, the songs considered depression, alienation, suicidal thoughts, and other forms of hopeless introspection. The orchestra played bravely along as the actors repeatedly asked (in song) whether it was worthwhile to continue to live. The question at hand, it seems, was the myth of the self. The set included a gray spiral structure that held an ascending footpath on the inside. It was well-suited to Max Reinhardt’s turntable, manipulated by a stage-hogging performer, which emitted wisps of smoke and left the humans with little room to maneuver.Taken on its surface, the text is filled with narcissistic clichés. The psychology of the depressed never moves beyond the expression of malaise or extreme egotism. The anonymous players repeat phrases such as “Ich bin mir zuwider” (I find myself repulsive), and “Wozu bin ich geboren?” (For what purpose was I born?). Another question, “Do you think the end of the world is coming?” sizzles with apocalypse, yet somehow feels like an optimistic note. As the title hints, one of the basic premises of the show involves probing the concept of individuality. Lines like “Das Ich ist alles” (the ego is everything), are so extreme they cannot help but induce laughter. The costuming and ceaseless movement suggested that the perspective of the show was meant to be ironic. The musical subsequently asks, “Sind wir alle gleich geboren?” (All we all born equal?) and “Hat die Gesellschaft einen Willen?” (Does society have a will?). These are, naturally, good, serious questions. Yet the production makes no effort to answer them or move beyond the surface. At one point the word vielleicht (perhaps) is repeated a hundred or so times. For much of the performance, the actors disappeared into the spiral set, and video projections of the actors onstage (alongside prerecorded material) took over. The images morphed during one sequence into a 3D projection, for which the audience had been given 3D glasses. Kind of cool, I guess, but not cool enough.The last two Theatertreffen productions I witnessed attempted to reconsider classic texts, although the end results were, much like Der Einzige und sein Eigentum, fairly one-dimensional. Ophelia’s Got Talent was a cringy, all-naked circus act—the name in the title being just about all that connects the show to Hamlet and the fair Ophelia, except for some later allusions to water and her aqueous end. It begins with a pirate hostess, pants-less, of course, who identified as Captain Hook, a character (obviously) not found in Hamlet. For a few minutes, the production resembled a TV talent contest. This format then dissolved away early into the three-hour, nonstop, Vegas-style, all-girl, and very naked revue masterminded by Florentina Holzinger and produced by Volksbühne am Rosa-Luxemburg-Platz, Berlin. One player inserted a hook through her face, which she then paraded before the audience. There was also a naked dwarf and a naked woman (the latter of whom appeared to have Downs Syndrome) swimming in the lap pool on the floor and in the fish tank at the rear of the stage. A sword swallower then pushed a camera down her throat while the live video of her guts screened on the monitors at either side of the stage. The dwarf did an erotic dance with a toilet plunger. The players then created a fountain onstage by positioning hoses around, in, or through their bodies—one hose went into the mouth of one of the players and out her nose. In the pool, one performer donned a swan’s head, in reference to the myth of Leda. A glossary that had been distributed to attendees listed and explained this and every other watery myth being invoked, including Undine and the Lorelei, among others. There were also passing references to Narcissus, Goethe, Schiller, and Heraclitus in the show, performed in a mixture of German and English. In the grand finale, a helicopter was lowered à la Miss Saigon from the fly space, driven by the dwarf. The other players grabbed on after it had been sufficiently lowered and then humped the helicopter once it was aloft again. It was a show in which anything could happen, as the pirate dutifully told the audience. But why? What was the point? To make society accustomed to the naked human body, to share unashamedly in voyeurism? The nudity alongside the “freak show” seasoning provided by the dwarf and the Downs Syndrome performer had the effect, I suppose, of normalizing all those things. When the dwarf went in for the toilet plunger act, it was only a slight step further. There was perhaps some truth in the display, the truth of the human body in all its variety.For an adult or for anyone who has ever succumbed to the charms of Shakespeare’s tale of lovers and gods and a magical forest, Ein Sommernachtstraum—in a version by Antú Romero Nunes (and company), directed by Antú Romero Nunes, originating from Theater Basel and performed at Hebel-am-Ufer—would be something of a trial. Shakespeare’s play is a frolic, with the improbable admixture of sorcery and divine intervention in five interwoven plotlines. The most visible frame here, refracting a subplot in Shakespeare, involved amateurs getting together to perform the play, among them a couple of unskilled hams. The cast was ethnically diverse, the casting gender-neutral and very fluid. Helen, for instance, had a prominent beard. The overriding motif concerned the awkwardness of the entire enterprise and their lack of acting polish. In this regard, the show succeeded on its own terms. It was hokey and slapdash. A lot of Shakespeare’s play was cut to leave room for the childish emotions of these immature adults. Two of them couldn’t stop touching each other. One of the actors was so full of himself that he volunteered to play nearly all of the roles: he longs for the attention, despite his modest abilities. A one-man band situated on stage accompanied these antics with piano and electronics, alongside the occasional cello. Ultimately, the tedious infighting and metatheatrical framing burdened the nearly three-hour show with a lot of annoying clutter while killing the midsummer magic of the play.The Theatertreffen offerings were all forceful, if not always successful efforts to reinterpret stories, myths, and dramatic literature for a contemporary audience, with an eye toward social criticism. Der Bus nach Dachau and Die Eingeboren von Maria Blut were really tackling the same story, although with contrasting approaches. Ophelia’s Got Talent spoke to the myths of the feminine with a gesture toward empowerment, just as Sommernachtstraum seemed to envision, focusing the audience on the weaknesses of all-too-human characters. Das Vermächtnis, conversely, engages the sexual repression and suppression that haunts E. M. Forster’s novels, a literary inheritance that the play sought to transform for the present day. The “myth of the self” cries for help in Der Einzige und sein Eigentum. Nora has always been a howl of protest for the liberation of women, but here its message is broadened to include other elements of society. However varied in quality and subject matter, these productions convincingly attested to the adventurousness and social conscience of German-language theatre today.