Background

A review of the most important new German plays and premiers of the 2010/2011 season.

Since 1976, a jury consisting of five theater critics has determined which seven to eight plays in the German-language theater season will be invited to the Mülheim Festival. At least in the eyes of the jury, they are the most striking, most innovative, and, well, best of the year. Over a space of two weeks in May / June they are shown and discussed at Mülheim, and time and again one has been tempted to infer from this selection trends in new German drama.

This year’s selection criteria

The undertaking can easily lead astray. First, because with up to 150 premiers on German-language stages per year, seven invitations highlight a selection of just five per cent. And certain genres, which also like to go under the name of premiers, are excluded: in the view of the Mülheim jury, novel and film adaptations fall so little within their competence as do the numerous documentary formats that are increasingly pressing onto German stages. (The 2007 invitation of the Rimini Protokoll experts theater with their Marx evening on Capital remains a controversial exception.)

The second reason is that the jury can refuse to recognize trends. As they did this season, in which suddenly there was a conspicuous spate of plays in the living-room battle format that Edward Albee invented in 1962 with Who’s Afraid of Virgina Woolf?: two couples (preferably an older and a younger one) get together, drink and quarrel over political, moral and erotic issues. In a quite adroit manner, Roland Schimmelpfennig (Peggy Pickit sieht das Gesicht Gottes / Peggy Pickit Sees the Face of God), Rebekka Kricheldorf (Robert Redfords Hände selig / Robert Redford’s Blessed Hands), Theresia Walser and Karl-Heinz Ott (Die ganze Welt / The Whole World) and others all helped themselves to this setting in the 2011/2011 season so as to tell of a middle class depraved by affluence and for whom, for lack of deeper interests, nothing remains but alcohol-soaked self-laceration. As contrast, plays have also occasionally touched on the problems of the world outside the living room, preferably the African misery, to which they turn at least verbally as theoretical do-gooders.

The Third World and social upheaval

Despite all their rhetorical elegance, none of these plays were to be seen at Mülheim. But there were enough plays that targeted these conditions more sharply and directly. For example, Kassandra oder Die Welt als Ende der Vorstellung (Cassandra, or the World as the End of the Performance), which premiered at the Vienna Schauspielhaus. The play also revolves round the question of Africa, but instead of addressing how we turn a blind eye to this, its author, Kevin Rittberger (born 1977), actually made the effort to have a hard look at the problem: he spoke with boat people in Spain and wrote down their stories so as to address, in the second part of his work, the impossibility of grasping what is really happening there.

Rittberger has ventured far out of his own milieu. Armin Petras, alias Fritz Kater, has gone deep into it. Based on the sociological-theater research project “On Life in Transition”, his we are blood is a dense sequence of scenes about the liquidated life in the new German states that traces the despondent loss of the “We”.

The German working world

Petras’s empathic seriousness is countered by the angry farcicality with which the other invited plays take precarious working conditions into their sights – perhaps a late consequence of the financial crisis, otherwise almost completely neglected by German drama. Felicia Zeller’s virtuoso language score, Gespräche mit Astronauten (Conversations with Astronauts), premiered in Mannheim, travels into the interior of the fatherless German family, where double-burdened mothers hope for help from au pairs from eastern European countries with names like Sloppyland and Retchistan. Very funny and very politically correct, the German host / mother tacks between left-liberal platitudes about tolerance, overwork and a painstakingly concealed readiness to exploit her guests. For their part, the Eastern European helpers also do nothing else but look out for number one. In Lutz Hübner’s business farce Die Firma dankt (The Company Thanks), premiered in Dresden, the new reality hits the executive Adam Krusenstern: the company that he has served for 20 years is now being turned completely upside down, and the new boss turns out to be a hip university graduate who describes the brave new (work) world in terms of Andy Warhol’s Factory, which has no use for Old School types such as Krusenstern. And Oliver Kluck’s Warteraum Zukunft (Waiting Room Future) takes on the problem of careers from the point of view of the now going on 30 “internship generation”, which has adapted to an uncertain, completely flexible professional life. Kluck has little sympathy for their spoiled self-pity, their fierce ambition and their bleakly pent-up aggression, but all the more a precise gaze and a highly flexible language that can turn a sentence inside out, from submission into the naked hate of dog-eat-dog.

The “precariate” and immigration

Neo-liberal globalization has left many behind. Die Ausgeschlossenen (The Excluded), Heinz Bude’s “end of the dream of a just society”, could serve as the motto of many new plays this season, ranging from Dirk Laucke’s Start und Landebahn (Takeoff and Landing Strip), Philipp Löhle’s Die Überflüssigen (The Superfluous) and supernova, to Ewald Palmetshofer’s tier. man wird doch bitte unterschicht (beast. one may, pretty please, say lower class). That they know how to avoid “concern” kitsch through wit and quick change of perspective is a mark of this generation of dramatists. This also applies to Verrücktes Blut (Crazy Blood). Nurkan Erpulat’s und Jens Hillje’s surprise hit of the season in the Berlin Naunynstraße shows young Turkish post-immigrants of the second or third generation on whom their teacher works off her educational mandate with a gun in her hand and Schiller’s Enlightenment ideal in her brain until all the clichés stand on their heads.

But the Mülheim Dramatist Prize was won, for the fourth time, by Elfriede Jelinek and her category-defying art: her highly personal Winterreise (Winter Journey) bores deep and painfully into her own family history, a linguistic avalanche that spares no one, including the author herself, and tells of an exclusion beyond all sociology.