Berta is sitting next to Korl on the hard bench, Korl puts his arm around her and she says: “Now I have a backrest and I don’t know what it’s called.” A sentence like a novel. Because it says a lot more than one says in such a situation, because it expresses Berta’s entire longing for love and a life. And because it also says in it how you don’t give a damn what it’s leaning against, the main thing is that someone is there. The sentence tells the history of Berta and what is to come, not much that is good. The writer Marieluise Fleißer wrote many such wonderfully true sentences, not only, but also in her two very early dramas “Fegefeuer in Ingolstadt” and “Pioniere in Ingolstadt”. The dramaturg Koen Tachelet has now pushed them together, and Ivo van Hove has staged them under the title “Ingolstadt” at the Salzburg Festival.
Actually, “Ingolstadt” should have opened the drama program of the festival on the Pernerinsel in Hallein, but the rehearsals were shaken by corona diseases. The fact that it was released at all, even if it was postponed by a few days, shows a lot of the perseverance of everyone involved in this co-production with the Burgtheater in Vienna. However, it was not without injuries, for the premiere three roles had to be recast, Ernest Allan Hausmann, for example, courageously jumps in for Oliver Nagele in all four roles of the older men here. And the rhythm also bumps in the course of the two-and-a-half-hour evening, so things could get smoother and less redundant before the premiere at the Burgtheater in September. But that’s beside the point, are we glad “Ingolstadt” came out.
Brecht needed fodder for his theater scandal
“Purgatory” had its premiere in Berlin in 1926, when Fleißer was not yet 25 years old. She later wrote that the play arose from the collision of her Catholic convent education with her encounter with Lion Feuchtwanger and the works of Brecht. Bertolt Brecht threw himself on Marieluise Fleißer because she had a tone he could not write but longed for, an immediacy full of truth and radiance. He persuaded her to go to the “pioneers” because he needed fodder for a theater scandal that also broke out in 1929 because of deflowering on the open stage – in the case of van Hove it was more of a ruthless rape. Decades later, Marieluise Fleißer edited the piece, adding more flesh to the narrative framework. And thanked Brecht with the story “Avant-garde”: “Dealing with him was difficult to digest.”
In “Purgatory” Olga is pregnant with Peps, wants to abort the child in vain, Roelle knows that, puts her under pressure – and is mainly busy with herself. He wants to be a saint, a martyr, and yet only gets one in the face. He dreams of America with Olga, wants to be the star in the school pack. The students are not in Hove’s work, he replaces them with the pioneers from the second play. A pack stays a pack, those who don’t belong are in a bad way, the pioneers are even worse than the students. The pioneers are in town, building a bridge, Alma and Berta find that interesting; one tries to professionalize herself in sexual matters, the other is looking for love, her employer offers her his son Fabian, but she accepts the Korl, or rather he accepts her. He warned her. Nobody is doing well with him. The swimmers in town stole the wood for their jetty from the pioneers, the sergeant gets pressure from above, he passes it on below, Korl is standing below and he has to relieve the pressure.
Pioneers don’t like saints. Jan Bülow from Tilman Tuppy and Lukas Vogelsang gets to feel that here.
(Photo: Matthias Horn/Salzburg Festival)
Interlocked with remarkable naturalness Ivo van Hove, a master of exact nuances, the two pieces. They call from one to the other, the scenes sometimes run almost parallel, the stage is open. A water landscape by Jan Versweyveld with dangerous depths, the back wall is a mirror in which the audience sees itself. Sometimes there is also a screen, at the beginning everyone prays the Lord’s Prayer towards sunset.
pray at all. Bit much of it. Fleißer wanted to shake off her school days with the English girls in Regensburg, van Hove nudges her characters back into this world, with discreetly wispy choirs of angels, prayers. What is meant by this is the church system, as well as that of the military. Two systems, twice narrow. That’s why you don’t have to think long about what “Ingolstadt” is supposed to mean today – it’s a metaphor, still valid. It’s not about a situation that’s a hundred years old. The pioneers, outstanding among them the brutally triumphant Gunther Eckes or Maximilian Pulst as unsteady Korl, are argumentative colors like Olga’s family, like the rocker Peps (Tilman Tuppy) or Fabian (Max Gindorff), who quarrels ambivalently with his father. Decisive are those who want to get out. The man of pain Roelle (Jan Bülow), especially the women, Alma (Dagna Litzenberger Vinet), Berta (Lilith Häßle) and Olga (Marie-Luise Stockinger). Stockinger and Hässle blow everyone on the wall with their pain, their force, their defiance, their linguistic precision, their emotionality. And yet her two wives find no happiness. That is the truth of “Ingolstadt”.