The Goethe-Institut Washington, together with Scena Theatre, presents "Spotlight: Berlin," a series of Berlin play workshops featuring selections of the latest and most sensational plays to appear on the Berlin stage. These staged readings will take place on June 3, July 1, and August 26. All play readings will be in English.
The second play featured is Michel Houellebecq’s
Submission (Unterwerfung).
Translated by Norma Cassau and Bernd Wilczek, in a version of Karin Beier and Rita Thiele
Paris, 2022: Street battles between extremists are bringing the political climate to a boiling point. The Front National is enormously popular and is set to become the strongest party. To prevent it from nominating the next president, the liberal parties at the center are coalescing with a moderate Islamic party. The plan works. France’s first Muslim president moves into the Elysée Palace. What makes this perfectly plausible vision of the future so scandalous is what follows after: Within months and without the slightest resistance, civil society changes completely. The Muslim Brotherhood, who take on France as if it were a bankrupt company, do not create a totalitarian regime à la Huxley or Orwell. Their assumption of power and France’s transformation happen in an entirely unspectacular, democratic and legal way. Schools and universities are Islamized, women disappear from public occupations, clothing requirements and polygamy are introduced. And the public accept Islamic obligations and prohibitions in the same way that they previously accepted quota systems, tax increases, the rules of recycling, and the privatization of public services.
RSVP
Michel Houellebecq (born Michel Thomas February 26, 1958 or 1956 on the French island of Réunion) is a controversial and award-winning French author, filmmaker, and poet. To admirers, he is a writer in the tradition of literary provocation that reaches back to the Marquis de Sade and Baudelaire; to detractors he is a peddler of sleaze and shock. Having written poetry and a biography of the horror writer H. P. Lovecraft, he brought out his first novel
Extension du domaine de la lutte in 1994.
Les particules élémentaires followed in 1998 and
Plateforme, in 2001. After a publicity tour for this book, which led to his being taken to court for inciting racial hatred, he went to Ireland to write. He lived in Ireland for many years, and now lives in Spain.
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