The first thought: It’s surprising that Falk Richter is now staging Thomas Bernhard’s “Heldenplatz” at the Münchner Kammerspiele (the premiere is this Saturday in the Schauspielhaus). Surprising because Falk Richter himself writes pieces and stages them and many others and always attaches great importance to the fact that the performances that come out of it are precisely in the discourse of the moment. How does Bernhard’s play, with which the premiere director Claus Peymann hit the Austrians at the Vienna Burgtheater in 1988, in what kind of rotten, anti-Semitic, revanchist, small-minded, narrow-minded, stubborn, corrupt and generally disgusting state they lived?
At the end of the hour-long conversation with the wonderfully friendly Falk Richter, you know why he’s doing it. First of all, there is the language that fascinates him, the seemingly endless monologues, this digging into a topic, the clear stance and the radical confrontation with political reality. It looked like this in Austria in 1988: Kurt Waldheim was elected Federal President in 1986, even though the World Jewish Congress had submitted documents before the election that proved Waldheim’s profound Nazi past. Well, the Austrians probably chose him out of spite, and as a result had an internationally isolated president. According to Richter, parts of the material against Waldheim will also play a role in the performance. As well as recordings from 1938.
Here in 1938 the Austrians cheered Hitler en masse
The Heldenplatz is located next to the Hofburg in the center of Vienna and is famous because on March 15, 1938, the Austrians cheered Hitler en masse here and celebrated the “annexation” of their country to Nazi Germany. In the play, 50 years later, Professor Josef Schuster jumps out of the window of his apartment on Heldenplatz, his widow can still hear the cheers from 1938, but has never been able to stand it in the apartment. The Schusters, a Jewish family, had fled Hitler to Oxford, now they are returning because the Mayor of Vienna wanted to reinstate Josef Schuster in his old chair.
In addition to the widow, there is also the brother of the deceased, Robert, also a professor and, with Bernhard, the voice of the most elaborate Suaden against Austrian conditions. There are two daughters Anna and Olga, one of whom has developed a more soothing attitude, even though she is spat upon as a Jew on the streets of Vienna. There is also a son, colleagues from the university department, a housemaid and Ms. Zittel, who not only masters the first act with everyday gala and a psychogram of the family, but also as the housekeeper of the deceased was probably closer to the deceased during his lifetime than her own wife . The first and third act take place in the apartment, the second takes place in the Volksgarten.
Although, in view of the more recent events, a young ex-chancellor and his entourage would be an option, Falk Richter is guaranteed not to want to make a play about Austria – “Heldenplatz” has no notable performance history in Germany. The decision for the piece was also much longer back than the discovery of Mr. Kurz’s antics. Even before the artistic director Barbara Mundel took over the Kammerspiele in 2020, it was clear that she wanted to see “Heldenplatz” on the program; Falk Richter was happy to agree to the production. Richter is part of the artistic direction, or, as he calls it, part of the “Corona administration”; he did not have the feeling that he was running a theater, when precisely this fixed connection with a house was something like home for him.
But there has to be theater, and “Heldenplatz” even more so. For Falk Richter, the trigger was the question of how members of an endangered social minority deal with the situation turning over and being at risk again. Or, to put it briefly: as a Jew, do you stay in Halle after a neo-Nazi murdered there and wanted to cause a massacre in the synagogue? After the premiere, Bernhard was accused of using himself to negotiate his issues as a non-Jew from a Jewish family, which he also paints with colors that come from the palette of anti-Semitic clichés – intellectual, arrogant, wealthy.
Do you stay if the situation changes? One of the questions that Falk Richter asks about the Bernhard piece.
(Photo: Tobias Kruse)
Temporal shifts: 1938, 1988, 2021
Falk Richter understands the accusation, but it is much more important that all characters are people who are directly affected by politics if they are not protected. Or when a climate arises in which revanchism and anti-Semitism become socially acceptable again among the bourgeoisie, police officers pass on addresses of people at risk and history is purged of remembrance of atrocities, like Waldheim’s biography on an experimental basis. “We are discussing the piece on the basis of what is happening in Germany right now.” There are temporal shifts, 1938, 1988, 2021, and for the present, Richter added a file, pushed it, in consultation with the Suhrkamp-Verlag, between Bernhard’s files two and three, overwriting Bernhard’s themes, especially those here now strongly rejuvenated university colleagues in the German present. One thing we can look forward to: Thomas Bernhard also tears up a large part of the Austrian press in his piece, the German one is now in focus. Apparently this newspaper you are reading too.
To invent such an act himself is nothing unusual for Falk Richter, he is both an author and a director. On the one hand, he feels comfortable writing, alone with himself, on the other hand, he loves talking, discussing, engaging in theater, in rehearsals, when the actors begin to grow the texts. It can also happen that actors defend their own Richter’s texts against the director Richter, in places that he already wanted to delete. When staging his own texts, he does not think that he is currently working on a literary masterpiece by this author Falk Richter.
When the premiere ended after five hours in 1988, the audience in the stalls cheered Claus Peymann and the ensemble, while shouts like “Peymann out!” and “Austria live!”, a national flag was hung over the parapet. C. Bernd Sucher reported in this newspaper at the time, and Peymann himself laughed cockily. “The provocation was successful, the coup was successful.”
Heldenplatz, based on Thomas Bernhard – in a version with new texts by Falk Richter, Kammerspiele, Saturday, Dec. 4, 7 p.m., cards below www.muenchner-kammerspiele.de.