There are many outraged faces on this theater evening in the Münchner Kammerspiele. Disgusted, anger-eaten, stunned faces, mouths torn open in scream or indignantly pressed together, many fists clenched, a finger here and there. Some heads are turned away from the stage. As if looking for allies in the ranks behind them. Are you making a dark plan? You don’t know and, thank God, you don’t hear them, because they are plaster busts. Classic white casts of angry male profiles, spread over the whole floor and also at the top of the rank. Anyone who thinks that this has something to do with the Corona requirements, which currently only allow a 25 percent cast, is mistaken. The cast comrades were not placed in the rows to make the theater look a little fuller, they are part of the staging concept.
“Heldenplatz” is played by Thomas Bernhard, the piece about National Socialism and anti-Semitism in Austria that caused a huge scandal during – and even before – its premiere in Vienna in 1988 by Claus Peymann. The performance took place under police protection. There were protests, shouting, disruptions. One of the ringleaders in the fight against the play was the then still young Heinz-Christian Strache, who was in right-wing extremist circles and later became Vice Chancellor of the FPÖ, who was overthrown by the Ibiza affair. It is people like him who symbolize the plaster heads in the ranks of the Kammerspiele. You are among us.
The scandal surrounding the play in the back of your head, the plastered screamers next to you and in front of you on the stage a mega-structure in an extremely high, blood-red glowing room lined with wall curtains like lacquer – everything is so monstrous that it looks very much looks a lot, but soon runs the risk of swallowing the piece. The shiny red on Wolfgang Menardi’s stage is the red of the swastika flag, the huge whip lanterns remind one of parade grounds, and this showroom could also be a stylized concentration camp. The mobile black frame, which becomes a table in the last scene, is somehow also a hangman’s place, and who would not associate the Holocaust with the many pairs of shoes placed on the floor and the black coal grave?
The director Falk Richter opens up a very, very large frame here, which in the following hours – almost three, after all – has to be filled accordingly large. This happens with hammering, impressive sound and image language, via videos, projections and film marches by old and new Nazis (videos: Lion Bischof, music & sound design: Matthias Grübel). But the piece itself, Bernhard’s “Heldenplatz”, is conversation-heavy and familiar and actually much too quiet, black-humored and private for this screaming, monumental space of meaning.
Falk Richter is interested in the anti-Semitism of an allegedly purified society
“Heldenplatz” is an explicitly Austrian piece with an explicit abuse of Austria. Bernhard’s pleasurable abuse of national “wickedness”, his bashing in Vienna and Graz, his allusions to local customs, business and institutions is not very humorous and conflict-laden for outsiders and not necessarily exciting. The play therefore has no tradition of staging. What interests Falk Richter in this is its original core: the anti-Semitism of a society that is oh so democratic, purified and enlightened, and yet again – or still – allows Jews and people of different faiths to be attacked.
When “Heldenplatz” premiered in 1988, Kurt Waldheim was the Austrian Federal President. The affair named after him sparked a fundamental debate in Austria about the role of the country in the Nazi era for the first time. The comfortable thesis that Austria was the “first victim” of Hitler during the “Anschluss” in 1938 was no longer tenable. Thomas Bernhard’s piece is named after the place where Hitler announced the “Anschluss” in 1938 – to the cheering of the Austrians. Archive recordings from that day haunt the production in abundance on monitors and screens, cut against with marches and protests of the new right. Bald heads with roaring grimaces, xenophobes, QAnon supporters, Brexiteers, political populists, lateral thinkers and Pegida demonstrators, CSU, NSU, AfD, everything mixed up and blurred into a large array of anti-democratic forces, deeds and statements. Everything is so relentlessly synchronized on one connection level – from Franz Josef Strauss to Beate Zschäpe – that it hurts in several ways.
Time has just passed Bernhard’s mania for insults
But the piece is also played. However, so true to the text and downright good that not much input comes from the playful side. First of all, in the form of Annette Paulmann, Ms. Zittel has her big talk and ironing appearance. She is the housekeeper in the house of the Jewish professor Schuster, who threw himself out of his apartment – down to Heldenplatz. From her we get the most important information about the dead scientist, this Austria hater and “accuracy fanatic”, and the circumstances of the piece. Because his wife is still listening to the cheers of 1938, they wanted to move away. Everything was already packed when Schuster took his own life. He couldn’t bear “that Hitler chased me out of my apartment for the second time”.
An oversized window with a stucco cornice initially symbolized the upper-class apartment on Heldenplatz. As “house maid” Herta, Katharina Bach looks out from behind the window as if paralyzed. Later she slips into one of the professor’s shirts or manically cleans the pairs of patent leather shoes. She knows how to make herself noticeable in her small role, while Paulmann has to iron out a whole mountain of text, which she does with shrill skill – and yet: the tirades and bad punchlines don’t ignite. Time has just passed by Bernhard’s monomania of abuse.
In the second scene, when the daughters and their uncle Robert have their say after the father’s funeral, all of whom are academics, Falk Richter has a strange conversation statuary, which is also a bit bland. As if they came from a funeral, Anna and Olga don’t exactly look in the yellow designer costumes by Amit Epstein. The bitterly realistic Anna (Wiebke Puls) tells of the fear that has haunted her again since she was spat upon as a Jew. The much quieter Olga looks like a trans woman with Thomas Hauser and thus nonchalantly represents – like Erwin Aljukic later with his vitreous bone disease in the role of son Lukas – other minorities threatened by discrimination and racism. The long-missing Wolfgang Pregler makes his comeback at the Kammerspiele in the role of the heart-sick Robert Schuster, who, as the brother of the deceased, drifts across Austria in hateful tirades. Leaning on two sticks and trimmed to be frail, he spits angry, desperate sentences. But none of this has the Bernhard explosive of yore.
Anette Paulmann (left) as “Frau Zittel” and Katharina Bach as the housemaid.
(Photo: Judith Buss)
In any case, the play serves more as a frame for the anger of the director Falk Richter at the New Right – and at a middle class, which pretends to have “mastered” the past while they are on all the attacks and harassment Permits streets and “the old man with the dog tie” from the AfD can say that National Socialism was only “a fly shit” in history. Which is why the focus of the production is on the scene that Richter himself added as the author, an angry reckoning with society’s “mendacious ‘never again’ theater”. An angry speech, in the style based on Bernhard, yelled by three actors with microphones in and on the floor, because we are all meant in our cheap, critical enlightenment. Hanau, Chemnitz, Halle – because of “never again!” The media are also getting their fill, especially the SZ, especially a certain article that appeared in this feature section about Igor Levit. It’s a big, sonorous wash-up. Agitprop, abuse and warning. An attack from the left. Violent, foaming, unjust and justified. In the end, above all: overwhelming.