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Theater 32.3 (2002) 31-53



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Theater in Berlin:
Last Stop. Amerika and the Volksbühne Experience, Plus New Voices and Ekkehard Schall

Gitta Honegger

[Figures]

January 2002

From my Berlin hotel room on Friedrichstrasse I look across a courtyard of GDR plattenbauten to the new skyline of Potsdamer Platz. To the left, three cranes in constant slow motion create the impression that the prefab concrete-slab façades, so characteristic of East German low-cost urban housing, are being welded to the brick Daimler/Chrysler Building and the translucent Sony complex next to it, an office high-rise in the shape of a rock crystal with an adjacent tent-shaped shopping mall.

If Daimler/Chrysler's old New World retro-chic mediates between the plattenbau's increasingly nostalgic aura and the techno-glitz of the new global economy, the cranes are a reminder that the merging of East and West and the digging through the layered rubble of history is a tough construction job. Not visible from my vantage point, but deeply embedded in the archaeology of Berlin, Wilhelmstrasse—named after one of the many König and Kaiser Wilhelms and infamous as the location of Hitler's chancellery—horizontally divides the former East Berlin's privileged neighborhood from the reconstructed Potsdamer Platz. Not so long ago Potsdamer Platz was a vast desolate expanse in the heart of the divided city—the overgrown wasteland vaulted over by Wim Wenders and Peter Handke's Himmel über Berlin, which will forever superimpose itself on my view of the emerging cityscape. (The American title Wings of Desire doesn't at all convey the ironies of the German Heaven above Berlin.) In Berlin, the question of what is "real" is not just a challenge for postmodern theorists. It is made up of clashing biographies in an ongoing reconstruction of memories projected onto every site and extracted from every new experience. Berliners are obsessively [End Page 31] preoccupied with the performative force of buildings and sites, which theater artists incorporate into their site-specific stagings. In Dialogues, avant-garde choreographer Sasha Waltz, now codirector of Berlin's Schaubühne, moved her dancers between the stage inside and the surrounding cityscape. Performers pop up in the back of trucks, in driveways, alleys, and treetops. They emerge on rooftops, their moving bodies corresponding to the gilded sculptures atop the old palaces and churches, which seem to glide in the sky against the backdrop of windblown clouds. Bodies is the title of Sasha Waltz's undisputed masterpiece in the Schaubühne's repertoire. Bodies are the current fashionable topic of Berlin's artists and cultural theorizers. Judith Butler, high priestess of performed bodies in constructed realities, has become a cult figure in Berlin. She shared the spotlight with Sasha Waltz in joint interviews and standing-room-only public conversations at the Schaubühne.

Post-Wall Berlin keeps postmodernists and hard hats busy with construction. Director Christoph Schlingensief, controversial ringmaster of actual and virtual realities, sends up both in a production of his play Rosebud at Berlin's Volksbühne am Rosa Luxemburg Platz. Inspired by Orson Welles's Citizen Kane—what else?—Rosebud sends up political constructs and media-constructed realities in Chancellor Schroeder's Germany in the wake of September 11. The opening tableau, lampooning Robert Wilson/Tom Waits [End Page 32] collaborations, features construction workers in bright yellow hats and gear gliding across the stage, like cutouts in profile, to the sound of techno-rock. Besides Welles's mysterious sled (its Freudian mystique debunked as a son's memory of "How I learned to ride a sled in my father's lap"), Schlingensief appropriates the film's critique of capitalism and the media—as expected—with an infantile tastelessness that belies his political savvy.

Schlingensief's ongoing preoccupation with the media's production of the real owes more to War of the Worlds than to Citizen Kane. Rosebud's central plot—the staging for television of the kidnapping and murder of Chancellor Schroeder's wife, a willing performer—is an...

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