The radio play begins with a hissing noise, as if the frequency of your radio set had not been set correctly. Or, a second thought, as if steam was escaping somewhere under pressure. Then a second sound like that of an unevenly running machine. The impression that you might be on an industrial site, however, blurs as soon as Jens Harzer starts to speak: “I’ll guide you behind the world”, he promises with his always somewhat somnambulistic and always unmistakable Jens Harzer voice. What kind of fantastic place can it be to discover the world?
It may be the entrance to a realm of the dead. Anyway, you can hardly escape the fascination of this mysterious area behind the steam or the rustling of the ether. These first seconds are too stimulating to curiosity. But no matter how far you listen into this parallel universe in the further course, all impressions remain In the unbound – so also the excellent title of this radio play. The musician FM Einheit designed it. In this case, that means: He selected the lyrics, composed the music and also staged the piece.
Celan’s poetry is one of the most puzzling things there is in German-language literature
The texts are by Paul Celan, whose poetry is one of the most enigmatic that exists in German-language literature of the 20th century. To reduce it to the poet who has struggled hardest for a literary language with which to describe the Holocaust is not enough. The Holocaust is the extreme case of Celan’s writing, which, however, fundamentally revolves around the possibilities of language, moves into the border areas of the expressible.
FM unit, who is a member of the percussionists Palais Schaumburg and the Collapsing new buildings was, thinks his radio play in terms of music. It is more difficult to interpret per se than literary text. He succeeds – and this applies equally to Jens Harzer – not to fade Celan’s hermetic poems any further and to charge them with ever more secrets. Instead, they stalk the world of thought that Paul Celan designed in his work with great acoustic clarity. Without interpreting it in a simplistic way.
The compositions are predominantly dynamic, as a listener you are carried through the acoustic spaces that FM unit builds. Again and again he remains in it, exploring it. Sometimes it’s ringing sounds, sometimes hissing and wiping, sometimes melodic. But they never even come close to a spherical esotericism. And they are not under the voice of Harzer, but stand next to her. Music and text alternately come to the fore.
The picture of the beginning remains the same: You step into clouds of fog, lose your orientation, sometimes the ground beneath your feet. And don’t want to be anywhere else during this hour. At the end there is an inkling of a way out. But like everything in this hauntedly captivating piece, that might as well be a chimera.
In the unbound, HR 2, November 27, 2021, 11 p.m.