Munich: season opening at the Residenztheater – Munich

Opposites collide hard. At least that’s what the documents collected by Regine Dura and Hans-Werner Kroesinger say. For example, there is an eyewitness report by an Israeli secret service agent who was present at the Fürstenfeldbruck airfield in 1972. It’s a clear protocol, says Dura, which soberly describes the devastatingly unsuccessful liberation of the Israeli athletes from the violence of the Palestinian terrorists. And then there are the documents from the German authorities, which do not find any mistakes. Everything done right, that’s the tenor. 50 years later, the German assessment is different. But that’s how long it took. It was only at the commemoration ceremony for the eleven victims on September 5 in Fürstenfeldbruck that Federal President Frank-Walter Steinmeier asked the relatives for forgiveness.

Regine Dura and Hans-Werner Kroesinger were there in Fürstenfeldbruck, they say. For the two theater makers, the commemoration is a kind of end point in their 1972 Olympic project that they have planned: the theater evening “The Games Must Continue – Munich 1972”, the first premiere of the new season at the Munich Residenztheater. If there can be such a thing as an end point at all, even after 50 years, new details about the events are constantly coming to light. But at some point there has to be a premiere. And that is this Saturday, September 24th, in the Marstall.

With five actors and in around 90 minutes, Dura and Kroesinger want to tell about the 1972 Olympic Games. That’s not easy. In the anniversary year of the games, the news situation was not exactly thin, there were a number of publications across the various media, plus current reporting. What else can you expect from a theater evening in autumn?

Kroesinger and Dura work through extensive historical material

Probably a lot. Kroesinger and Dura have been renewing the field of political documentary theater for years with their clever concepts. They conduct extensive research, which they then condense into very concentrated evenings, which are sometimes described as brittle. There is always a lot of material, never just the foreseeable one. Sometimes together, sometimes alone, they work on the renowned stages across the country, a lot in Berlin. Kroesinger had already dealt with a specific Munich topic in 2002, when he worked with “Gladius Dei” on the history of the Haus der Kunst. In Augsburg he dealt with the bombing in World War II and the armaments industry, in Nuremberg Dura and Kroesinger worked in 2021 at a historical point on the Nuremberg trials. The duo tightens their information together. But the theater manages to address the emotional level more than any text or news report, says Kroesinger. Just by meeting together in the room.

They started researching for Munich a year ago, says Dura. They researched archives, met contemporary witnesses in different places, and traveled to Israel. Speaking to the duo, the flood of information they have gathered is immediately apparent. Documents from the Israeli secret service are mentioned, as is the memory of a Bavarian police officer who was on duty in the Olympic Village. Stories from the Israeli community in Munich are just as much a part as are illustrated books on the Olympics from the GDR. Dura made the theater text from the material collected together, which Kroesinger was in charge of staging together with her.

The directing team Regine Dura and Hans-Werner Kroesinger.

(Photo: Birgit Hupfeld)

“How is politics reflected in the actually non-political games?” That was one of her basic questions, says Kroesinger. The 1972 games were originally intended to overwrite the 1936 games. It should be cheerful games – as they were in the beginning, before the catastrophe. Both occur in Kroesinger and Dura. Germany, which was divided into two at the time, also plays a role for the Munich theater evening: How did the FRG and GDR want to present themselves back then, what were their goals? “We walk a lot of tracks,” says Kroesinger. At the same time it is an investigation of different positions that are cut against each other. “We try to find out what attitude is behind the files,” says Dura. Taken together, it all sounds like a challenge in a positive sense, also for the audience.

Even before you can get involved in this condensed evening, a long-awaited takeover from Basel will be shown at the Residenztheater: Simon Stone’s 2015 production “Engel in Amerika” from 2015 arrives in Munich on September 23, Tony Kushner’s award-winning social play about the USA in the Eighties under Ronald Reagan and the furiously spreading HIV virus. It can be seen as a forerunner to the Residenztheater’s successful production “The Legacy” – only slightly shorter at five and a half hours. However, the Munich audience should be used to this kind of timely challenge by now.

Angels in America, Munich premiere: Friday, September 23, 5 p.m. Residence Theater; The games must go on – Munich 1972, premiere: Saturday, September 24, 8 p.m., Marstall

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