For a head-on attack on Catholicism, the Christmas season is a good choice: in spite of frosting and tinsel, the birth of Jesus also marks the beginning of a story of violence and oppression by the Church. At the Schauspiel Köln, director Oliver Frljić will tell these stories: “We want to find the kingdom of heaven ourselves” is the name of his feverish, nightmarish play development, which comes up with a surprising ending.
Frljić has an eye for a society’s pain points and he knows how to hit them. For example, there was this waterboarding scene in “Balkan Makes Free” at the Munich Residenztheater in 2015, in which an actor was tortured until the audience intervened. Or his provocative pieces about the Catholic Church in Poland and Croatia, for which the 45-year-old was threatened with death.
So what can be seen in Cologne seems almost mild at first. Frljić takes the centuries-long building history of Cologne Cathedral as an occasion for a Catholic crime revue, sometimes morbid, sometimes cheeky. Golden masked bishops dance between bones and skulls. Cathedral builder Gerhard makes a pact with the devil. Archbishop Rainald von Dassel steals the relics of the Three Kings from Milan to stimulate pilgrimage tourism to Cologne.
The text jumps from the cathedral building to the abuse scandals of the present
It got brutal when the plague reached the city, which was busy building a cathedral, in the 14th century. Incited by anti-Semitic lies and hatred fueled by the church, the Christian population murdered or expelled all Jewish neighbors. While the pogrom is reported off-screen, churchmen and women hang up small dolls and set them on fire. “Rats, rats, rats” they bark in the mild light of the church windows by set designer Igor Pauška.
Via the Napoleonic wars and the “Battle of Nations” near Leipzig, Frljić and his dramaturge Sarah Lorenz reached the world wars in leaps and bounds that were not always comprehensible. Suddenly individual actresses step forward and introduce themselves with weight class and age as the bells of the cathedral. They look like children, from off-screen they are interrupted by scornful laughter. What shoud that?
That becomes clear at the very end. After a wild war choreography to the howling of sirens, it is very quiet. The words of a church petition to Albert Speer still echo in my head, saying that the armaments minister should upgrade the Cologne bells to a higher protection class so that they would not be melted down for war purposes.
Then it gets light. A man from the audience enters the stage, Karl Haucke, born 1951, social worker, not an actor, survivor of years of severe sexual abuse by a father. The ensemble sits down on the floor, listens, the stage belongs to Haucke. He speaks calmly and analytically: About systematic rape in his former boarding school in Bonn. About the “spiritual abuse” when the perpetrator made the confession himself. About abuse of trust. About trauma and consequential damage. About structures that protect rapists – to this day, right up to Cardinal Woelki, who is currently on leave from Cologne, who covered the perpetrators and made an expert report on the abuse scandal in the diocese disappear.
Then Haucke comes back to the bells. Imagine if someone wrote such a letter in the 1960s. Someone would have asked that the boys, instead of making them available “to satisfy the lust” of the priests, be given a higher class of protection: “the class of people with dignity,” says Hauke quietly.