“To tell without mercy, without shame, what never was. Feel life. Because you can’t find it.” Around this thought expressed by one of her characters, Eva-Maria Alves has devised a complete, 75-minute radio play: 90th birthday. A company of those present and absent gathers around the celebrant. People talk to and about each other and, above all, to each other. The characters see old age as a grace because it gives them a goblin-like quality, a quirkiness and the freedom of fantasy.
But one should not underestimate them. By and large they have retained their savvy, and in doing so they make a few offspring who are present out of kinship duty look pretty – well: old. One of the younger ones always talks about Dubai and that he has to go back there immediately after the party. Bursting with importance, he still has to endure that the elderly spell out his wretchedness in minute detail.
They enjoy their fool’s freedom and have nothing left to lose. Laughing and coughing, that’s one of them and the cause of many teasing. In doing so, they cover up some gaps that they are painfully aware of – in their circle, in their memories, in their biographies. The author Eva-Maria Alves was not able to finish the piece herself, she died last autumn. So it was up to the director Christiane Ohaus and the composer Sabine Worthmann to finish what might never have been.
Childhood in Catholicism: How Werner Fritsch survived the Upper Palatinate
Werner Fritsch is not quite so mischievous in his radio play Mixing Memory & Desire. It is the first part of the poetic autobiography of the writer, director and filmmaker who was born in 1960 and who describes himself as a “forest peasant boy’s head”. So a stubbornness and also idiosyncrasy, which both had to develop first. In fact – Fritsch suggests an inevitability for someone who has something in his head that points beyond the mental narrowness of his homeland.
Fritsch grew up on a remote farm in the Upper Palatinate, the Hendlmühle in the district of Tirschenreuth. Or, thinking less in terms of administrative districts: “I come from Bavarian Siberia” – where the winters are longer, the summers are shorter and the thunderstorms are louder. Where, above all, Catholicism had everyone hooked and the boy spent his entire childhood knowing that God was always watching over him – of course, so that he could be punished at any time in the event of a misdemeanor. In fact, this task was fulfilled by Sister Consulata in the boarding school that Fritsch attended.
The fantasies of omnipotence that the adolescent develops are of grotesque, pathetic wit. Admittedly, Werner Fritsch did not become a superhero, but a person with powerful speech and thought power, who, despite the hardest efforts, was not able to break. Fritsch himself has Mixing Memory & Desire staged, with the help of a famous ensemble: Ilse Ritter and Angela Winkler play along, Sylvester Groth and Nuri Singer, the music was composed by Werner Cee.
A good reputation and a cherished life’s work, discredited in a matter of months
A third original radio play broadcast this week also takes stock of life: In How everything condenses into flowers the author Ruth Johanna Benrath and the musician and director Ulrike Haage use the means of fiction and yet strictly follow the facts to describe how the life of the painter Max Liebermann fatally deteriorated towards the end. Here, too, the ensemble of speakers is exquisite: Hanns Zischler, Martina Gedeck and Veronika Bachfischer.
Liebermann was one of the most respected German impressionists, leading figure of the Berlin Secession, honorary citizen of Berlin and from 1920 to 1932 president of the Berlin Academy of Arts, then honorary president – until the so-called “seizure of power” by the National Socialists. Art has nothing to do with politics or descent – but since his position was no longer shared, he left the Academy, said Liebermann on May 7, 1933. The Nazis did not see him as an artist, but as a Jew.
From then on, a house on Wannsee with a large garden was his limited sphere of activity, from then on he painted the flowers in it – “Flowers from the New World!”, as he defiantly asserted his cosmopolitan attitude. A necessary escapism, but if you look closely, you will notice criticism and attitude in the late paintings. In February 1935, Liebermann died at the age of 87. He was spared the fate of his wife – expropriation, humiliation and an agonizing suicide in view of the imminent deportation to Auschwitz. The Liebermanns’ wildly overgrown garden was too small to offer them any protection.
90th birthdayARD audio library
Mixing Memory & DesireARD audio library
How everything condenses into flowersRBB Kultur, July 8, 7 p.m.