In the end, art is the salvation. The modern composer Sepp Trautwein, who fled to Paris from the Nazis, packs all the pain, homesickness, anger and the little bit of hope into a symphony. That is of course a beautiful idea: the music itself becomes an exile and the last protection against a horrible reality.
Oliver Kraushaar plays this composer Trautwein in Luk Perceval’s production at the Berliner Ensemble as a Bavarian stubborn, quick-tempered and defiant and sometimes sentimental in a beer mood. One could say: The man keeps what his straightforward first name Sepp promises. The Bavarian dialect, with which Kraushaar skilfully equips him on the Berlin stage, is not an obtrusive folklore cliché performance, but the linguistic continuation of Sepp Trautwein’s loner anarchism, a composer like a peasant, an incorruptible defiant who only wants to make his music.
In Hitler’s Germany he was so disgusted that he gave up the professorship in Munich and fled to France with his wife (strong and clear and without a single wrong note: Pauline Knof) and son (Jonathan Kempf): “Music for common people is mean music”, good art needs good air. Now the little family lives in a tiny flophouse. In 1935, in the second year of her escape, exile is no longer heroic, but shabby everyday life. Worn down by the endless struggle for papers, for work, for a little money and some dignity, life for the emigrants is above all miserable.
Despite all the rumours, Feuchtwanger’s trilogy is epic broadband cinema
Trautwein’s symphony is called like Lion Feuchtwanger’s novel trilogy, the last part of which, “Exil”, tells of Sepp Trautwein’s life in Paris: “Wartesaal”. Sepp Trautwein’s return to art after excited attempts to do politics himself as editor of a Paris migrant newspaper has unmistakable parallels to Feuchtwanger’s own trials and tribulations: After he had written a naive and self-important propaganda book for Stalin’s safe Soviet Union for all time disgraced and robbed of his intellectual reputation, the best-selling author returned to his core business with his “Exil” novel.
Like the first novels in the “Wartesaal” trilogy, the Munich novel “Erfolg” and “Die Geschwister Oppermann”, this is epic wide-screen cinema despite its slightly colportage-like character design. Luk Perceval, one of the great storytellers of European theatre, staged this at the Berliner Ensemble very clearly, without slag and touchingly in its sobriety (text version: the director and the dramaturge Sibylle Baschung).
The stage designer Annette Kurz uses Feuchtwanger’s waiting room metaphor by filling the empty stage with countless simple wooden chairs. In the first part of the evening, they playfully pile up in an Eifel Tower silhouette. After that, they are the furniture for the permanent temporary arrangement of the uninhabited on the stage, which is often bathed in fog, grazing light and semi-darkness in order to darken the atmosphere.
How well intellectual vanity and dignified opportunism get along
Trautwein’s antagonists are responsible for plot tension, two Nazi follower phenotypes from the cliché picture book. Peter Moltzen, who enjoys making fun of an officer from the German embassy in Paris at the offensive crack batch cabaret, provides the rough version. Trautwein’s contrasting figure, the conservative career journalist and bon vivant Wiesener (nicely laid-back: Marc Oliver Schulze), is more multi-faceted and abysmal. The supple cynic feels splendid as a Nazi propaganda intellectual for the educated middle class.
Feuchtwanger draws here one of his contemporaries, the prominent journalist Friedrich Sieburg, in a barely encoded and easily recognizable way. As Goebbels’ press speaker in Paris, he gave the noble pen to the upper classes as elegantly as he did after the war as a star feature writer for the FAZ. On the BE stage, in his dressing gown, he demonstrates how nonchalantly lust for life, intellectual vanity and dignified opportunism go hand in hand.
Thankfully, the direction refrains from lecturing the audience and pointing finger updates. One thinks of the plight and desperation of today’s exiles from Russia, Ukraine, Iran or Syria while watching, even without cross-references. When Trautwein’s wife, devoured by the misery of exile and by the loneliness next to her selfish artist husband, decides to commit suicide in a very sober, unsentimental monologue as a logical and unavoidable consequence, the staging, in all its kitsch freedom and laconicism, develops an enormous Hardness. The end of the evening, Trautwein’s salvation in art, is given an evil background: suicide as a woman sacrifice at the altar of the male art genius.