Collateral Damage on the German Mind, or, How Young German Directors Became More Involved with the Issue of War

During the Gulf War the old means of protest were still effective on the German stage. "No blood for oil" implied--for some theaters--keeping the curtain down. To stage Lessing or Botho Strauss seemed inappropriate at that moment. And only a few months later those artistic directors who thought they had made a clever political statement regretted their attitude. Theater can have an impact only when it lifts its curtain and involves its audience. Back then, today's young directors--the generation born around 1970, of which Thomas Ostermeier is certainly the most prominent figure--had just entered theater schools. No one knew that the end of the decade would raise questions that were completely new: a war to which Germany would not only contribute with money and official lip service, but in which it would also fight.

It is now obvious that German theater was hardly prepared to deal with the wars of 1999, that is, the different types of wars that were overlapping in former Yugoslavia. It would be unjust to say that nobody cared about the collapse of a country that once stood for the "third way" in the Cold War constellation. But since this is so difficult to understand and even more difficult to present in theater, there was only the more or less metaphorical refugee who would bring the bad news of present wars onto the German stage. Anna Langhoff's 1994 play Transit Heimat [Transit home] is a good example of this tendency in new plays. In fact, very few productions dealt directly with the issue of Yugoslavia before 1999. The most controversial among them was Frank Castorf's version of Dirty Hands (Volksbühne Berlin, 1998), an outstanding theatrical blending of Sartre's communist heretics with the "underground" world of Yugoslav filmmaker Emir Kusturica. Castorf's neosurrealist political theater uses a time tunnel of sorts in which the past and the present clash against each other. This production was nominated for Theatertreffen, the national theater festival in Berlin, an annual competition that features the top ten German-language plays of the past season. In May 1999, when Theatertreffen opened with a panel discussion on TV, the war was still hot, and an outraged Castorf stated that the bombing of Belgrade would define the eastern border of the new world order. Another panelist, Claus Peymann (artistic director of the Burgtheater in Vienna and now of the Berliner Ensemble), declared that theater artists had the right if not the need to be antigovernment (staatsfeindlich) in this situation. Looming behind all this was the more than disturbing fact that the generation of Vietnam protesters, such as the German secretary of state, Joschka Fischer, had engaged in this war. The suspicion of media manipulation ("They have concentration camps. No second Auschwitz!") additionally fueled criticism against the official discourse of a war for human rights: "Don't you see these refugees?" versus "Don't you see the crime we do?" These questions would also enter the theater of the younger generation as an ongoing debate. So far they had kept silent, although they clearly had something to say.

The point is that these young directors don't feel the need to be explicit about their political attitude, as, for example, Castorf and Peymann do. Therefore, the question of whether they have developed new forms of political theater may appear odd at first. German theater of the 1990s was a theater of micropolitics: little stories on a small scale, mostly family catastrophes and difficult love relationships full of unprecedented violence. It seemed unlikely that the "great discourse" would grow out of this atmosphere. Our bombing of Yugoslavia for a questionable and, yes, at the same time, noble cause has definitely triggered productions that have, at least, the impact of important political theater: they make people think and talk about...