Between the Wall and the Future: Report from Berlin

INCITING INCIDENTS

On Mondays in the streets of Dresden and Berlin, men and women chant “Wir sind das Volk!,” marching against a political system that they feel ignores their voices. The protests swell week by week — first a few hundred, now several thousand, then more than 17,000. This is not 1989, but twenty-five years later: beginning in March, after Russia invaded Ukraine, and gaining momentum through the final editing of this essay in December 2014. In Angela Merkel’s gemütlich Germany, marchers organized by PEGIDA (Patriotic Europeans against the Islamization of the West) seek to legitimize themselves through explicit connections to 1989. They demand less immigration to the Abendland, the land of the setting sun, and, in particular, fewer refugees.

At the Maxim Gorki Theater on November 15, 2013, the audience burst into applause before the premiere of a production of Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard. The unlikely new Intendantin or artistic director of the Gorki, Shermin Langhoff, born in Bursa, Turkey and raised in Germany, graciously received their ovation. Just a few months later, in March 2014 at the Berliner Ensemble, the unapologetically racist Thilo Sarrazin prepared to give a talk. Sarrazin, a former left-leaning politician (and author of the anti-Turkish screed Germany is Abolishing Itself, 2010), was promoting his latest book, The New Terrorism by Virtue: On the Boundaries of Freedom of Expression in Germany. As I understand it — I have not read the book, and do not intend to — Sarrazin argues that racists ought not to be made to feel bad about their racism. As one might expect, protesters showed up to defend Brecht’s house, and, in what must have been a publicity-stunt dream, managed to shut down the talk as it began. Berliner Ensemble leader Claus Peymann fell into an obvious trap, not only promoting Sarrazin but helping him prove his idiotic point. You may be surprised to hear that the man who produced Thomas Bernhard’s plays in Vienna — and earlier in his career raised money to pay for the dental bills of left-wing terrorists — would hand a megaphone to Sarrazin. But Peymann has grown increasingly conservative aesthetically, and productions at the Berliner Ensemble have looked the same for fifteen years. It is unfair to associate Peymann directly with Sarrazin, whose thoughts Peymann called “unsavory.” In the same interview, however, Peymann notes that Sarrazin “is enunciating the obvious fears of many people in Western Europe and especially Germany.” ¹

Berlin marked the twenty-fifth anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall this past November with glowing, environmentally-friendly helium-balloon sculptures marking much of the length of the East/West border in Berlin: a solemn celebration. But the division of Germany — the whys of that partition, the upset and dislocation of unification — no longer has political resonance. Memories of the collapse of the GDR have reified into history: the narrative is unambiguous. And the great artists of division and unification are aging or have died: Heiner Müller passed away in 1995, Einar Schleef followed him in 2001, and Christoph Schlingensief in 2010. Frank Castorf, who had only just become prominent in 1991, has led the Volksbühne for an unbelievable twenty-two years.

Now Dimiter Gotscheff, a Bulgarian director working in Germany who created inspired productions of Heiner Müller’s plays, has died as well, in October 2013. Gotscheff’s final work, Zement (Cement, 2013), Heiner Müller’s 1972 history of the troubled first months of the Soviet Union, was invited to the 2014 Theatertreffen. Unrelenting and violent on a dreary grey stage, the production did not memorialize communism or sensationalize its failures, but rather tenderly depicted figures on the far edge of revolution, implicitly asking what our late-capitalist tomorrow will be made of. Perhaps this Zement will have been the last great staging of the twentieth-century’s catastrophes made by someone who lived many of them.

In the pages of this journal in 1991, with the crash of the Berlin Wall’s fall still ringing in his ears, Carl Weber wrote about a unifying theatre...