Theatre

In Stuttgart, the citizens have taken to the streets. They are protesting against the construction of a new train station and against the demolition of the old one. They are protesting against the mania for the huge and spectacular and the remoteness of political policy. The theatre director Volker Lösch foresaw the conflict, put it on stage and is now energetically putting his oar in.

Yes, Just Make A Plan

This has never happened before. The opponents of a major project lay bare their arguments and intentions. An eighty years-old public man, known for his sharp tongue, but in the meantime mellowed by age and wise in years, plays the mediator: CDU politician Heiner Geissler. The whole thing, eight hours of quarrelling and reproaches, broadcast in full by the television channel Phoenix, an inextricable tangle of facts, figures, regulations, estimates, errors and oversights. Political theatre? Citizens’ theatre? At any rate, no media circus. German Rail, the state government of Baden-Württemberg and the city of Stuttgart are for Stuttgart 21. The Alliance 90/Greens and the allied citizens’ initiatives such as Living in Stuttgart, Railhead Station 21 and Park Protectors are against it. The project Stuttgart 21 has been around since 1994.
Planned is a new, underground through station, new and faster routes to Ulm and to the airport. And a new city district for the area now covered by the tracks of the railhead station. The costs have so far risen to about ten billion euros.

You can’t have both

There is no middle course: Either the station is built underground, or not. Either the Stuttgart subsoil, with its difficult soil conditions and precious mineral springs, is torn up and an outrageously expensive express route tunnel to Ulm is bored through the Swabian Mountains, or not. One could say: Either progress or not. One could also say: Progress, yes, but not at any price. And so the opponents of the underground station call for the alternative: Keep the railhead station (Kopfbahnhof) above ground and improve it – K21 instead of S21.

Heiner Geissler calls for “Stuttgart 21 Plus”: Stuttgart 21 should be improved and put to a stress test. The rail track terrain should not be given over to real estate speculation, and the citizens should have their say in the developments. Undeterred, the opponents of Stuttgart 21 continue their protests, now under the name of “Resistance Plus”. The state elections in Baden-Württemberg in late March 2011 will show which politicians, which parties, the voters trust to deal responsibly with this situation.

What has it all to do with theatre? A lot. The citizen protests led politicians and German Rail to agree to arbitration. And it was artists that founded, propelled and inspired the citizen protest movements. With his action alliance “Living in Stuttgart”, the painter Gangolf Stocker coordinates demonstrations and communication with the police and the authorities. The actor Walter Sittler is a prominent spokesman for the protests. Likewise the director Volker Lösch: in 2006 he already put all the problems on stage in his ominous production Faust 21 at the Stuttgart Theatre. The chorus of Stuttgart citizens went berserk with greed and avarice, wallowed in delusions of grandeur, danced and talked themselves high for Stuttgart 21 with citations from the project, their own and Goethe’s verses, and satirized Faust’s quest for omnipotence and immortality. Faust 21 ends not with divine redemption, but rather with capitalism as religion: the modern economy as the continuation of the Creation.

From the theatre to the streets

Similarly, Lösch also demonstrated the Stuttgart forms of protest beforehand in the theatre, in the production Notes from Nowhere (Manifeste des Widerstands) from 2007. Lösch and dramaturge Beate Seidel sought and found creative varieties of resistance. Going on 80 chorus members, children and actors showed how much fun imaginative protest can be. Three years later it all became real. Lösch called for a citizens’ chorus. Hundreds, experienced and inexperienced, came to the rehearsals. Hard work awaited them: division into caesurae. Practicing stress, rhythm, tempo, volume. The text: a collage of Peter Weiss Marat/Sade and citizens’ slogans against Stuttgart 21. The first performance, at the Monday demonstration in August 2010 in front of the north wing of the main station threatened with demolition, was a success: “Fellow citizens! If you fight / you can loose. / If you don’t fight / you have already / lost”. How liberating a chorus of voices can be! Hundreds of thousands experienced that in the summer and autumn of 2010 in the streets of Stuttgart. Rhythm, in unison: “Stay up here!”

And it went on. In September a small group ventured bravely without Lösch into the public gallery of the town council meeting in the Stuttgart City Hall: “We demand / an immediate building halt!” In October a much bigger group arrayed itself at the Potsdamer Platz in Berlin, this time directed by Lösch, and shouted at the smooth high-rise façades: “Greetings from Stuttgart! The city of resistance! Stronghold of imagination! Political / epicentre! / Stuttgart / the biggest open air theatre in Germany!”
One thing is crystal clear: at the moment of performance there is often little left of choral art. But a chorus is a chorus, and always works.

There is a film about the protests: Oba blaiba! There is a DVD: Stuttgart steht auf (i.e., Stuttgart, Rises Up). There are books, caricatures, pictures, posters, collages. There is an anti-21 beat and a new version of Beethoven’s Ode to Joy. There are buttons, T-shirts, scarves, umbrellas, cloth bags, flags – all in the now world-famous Stuttgart protest green. Something has been set off: the desire to express oneself, the desire to put one’s oar in, the joy of resistance. Every evening at 7 pm the tomfoolery breaks out: a minute of din and racket in the streets and squares, using everything that is loud, including one’s own voice. Invented by Volker Lösch and Walter Sittler. Stuttgart street theatre. Starring: the citizens. It will go on.