There are endless ways to pronounce the name “Dietmar” appropriately. You can over-articulate him, whisper, casually drop him or scream desperately outside when this Dietmar, lawyer, is the last hope. “Make it really small,” says Nora Abdel-Maksoud, who quietly approaches actress Gro Swantje Kohlhof during the rehearsal. And so Dietmar just whimpers away in the next scene. Loud laughing. Tiny trick, very big effect.
The situation in the play “Jeeps” is this: Silke has just found out that she has lost her entire inheritance. Small apartment, medium-sized apartment, a boathouse in France – gone. In Germany it is being redistributed. After a reform of inheritance law, amounts of money, real estate, other goods and debts are simply drawn from among the population. And on the lot in the trembling hands of Silke, founder of “Laptops in Lederhosen”, there is now an amount with a big minus in front of it. So Dietmar will have a lot to regulate. Whether that is a cause for pity or malicious pleasure depends on the perspective.
The director and playwright Nora Abdel-Maksoud, 38, came up with this crazy social experiment and also stages “Jeeps” herself at the Munich Kammerspiele, where she is engaged in three productions. She is not only one of the smartest theater makers at the moment, but also by far the funniest. She worked at the Gorki-Theater and the Ballhaus Naunynstrasse in Berlin and at the Munich Volkstheater. Her plays and productions are lightning-fast screwball comedies, social satires and mockumentarys. The degree of her neat madness is somewhat reminiscent of René Pollesch when he was still original, only less meta and less self-referential.
There is always an injustice at the core of their pieces. In “They called him Tico” a black-haired baby experiences anti-Muslim racism, in “The Making-of” she satirized sexism and grotesque images of masculinity in the film industry. She then dealt with the subject of classicism in “Café Populaire”, premiered in Zurich in 2018, for the first time. In it, a vicious alter ego splits off from a woken wannabe artist, who hates poor people and also expresses it. Abdel-Maksoud’s staff is a hodgepodge of mediocrity: failing clowns, power-obsessed overperformers, submissive henchmen and always the philistine bourgeoisie in all his diet.
She noticed how privileged she is in Rio de Janeiro: the same bourgeois child bubble
And now “Jeeps” https://www.sueddeutsche.de/kultur/. “Exactly like the very big car,” says Nora Abdel-Maksoud a few days before the rehearsal in a plush Munich café. She considers the class question to be one of the most pressing in society and one of the most prominently ignored. “Why are we sitting in this café and not in another?” ask her. “That says a lot about us. Academic children.” She first noticed her own privilege when she traveled to Rio de Janeiro for a theater festival: “They were all like us! I had simply wandered from one citizen child bubble to the other citizen child bubble.”
Gabor (Vincent Redetzki, center) is a clerk in the job center, likes to drive and has to deal with the newly disinherited Silke (Gro Swantje Kohlhof, right).
(Photo: Armin Smailovic)
Nowadays, social precariousness is nicely transported to private television, where it remains consumable and abstract. The theater is also an educated middle class bubble, even for those who work there: “Who can afford the unpaid internships? Your parents have to be able to afford it. That is the first payment barrier.” Hardly anyone admitted, however, that they are “wealthy” or even “rich”; they consider themselves to be middle class. In addition, everyone thinks that they have largely achieved their own prosperity or their position in society. “But that’s not true. The role of a person’s socio-economic background, or rather: the legacy, in my opinion, can often be equated, it cannot be emphasized enough.” Nowadays, hard work alone is not enough to build up wealth or buy a property. In her plays she emphasizes exactly that and, along with the theater audience, also catches those who tend to live on the sunny side of the system.
In “Jeeps”, Nora Abdel-Maksoud takes a look at the heirs. According to a study by the German Institute for Economic Research, a gigantic 400 billion euros are inherited in Germany every year. Ascending trend. Silke, the disinherited heiress, “always spoke with peculiar pride about her part-time jobs. She felt mature and self-sufficient, she worked to finance backpacking trips to Cambodia and Laos,” writes Abdel-Maksoud while the job center clerk in Gabor spent his summers in Gabor Spends an outdoor swimming pool and buys an “Ed von Schleck” at his parents’ kiosk. “In all of their decisions, big and small, Silke and Gabor differ over and over again on exactly the same point: the ease with which they make them.”
Can the injustice of inheritance be compensated for with a state lottery?
A blatant injustice, believes Abdel-Maksoud and calls for a redistribution. She is not alone in this: The Austrian student and future heiress Marlene Engelhorn, for example, wants to tax herself more heavily with the “Tax me now” initiative. The Berlin SPD politician Yannick Haan, also heir, suggests introducing a so-called “social legacy”: At the age of 21, everyone would receive 20,000 euros from the state, which they can invest wisely. The money for this could be drawn from an increased inheritance tax for very large inheritances.
Nora Abdel-Maksoud makes it more radical. The inheritance lottery, which it organizes in “Jeeps”, is just as mercilessly unfair in its randomness as the birth lottery, which catapults some into wealthy families, others into families with debts. It’s just stupid that the job center was chosen to carry out the reform. So in the waiting hall Hartz IV recipients encounter angry disinherited people and all together at the mills of German bureaucracy. Abdel-Maksoud caricatures them with relish, has information sheets read out and approval stamps stamped, and clerks “bend, punch, file”. She demonstrates the accessories of a supposed social order, the helpless attempt to manage social inequality away.
Out of this love for and the desperation of the rules, a crazy comedy develops even during the rehearsal at the Kammerspiele. “That’s my talent,” says Nora Abdel-Maksoud, “I couldn’t write a social drama at all.” No matter how hard she tries, she always ends up with “do it three times” slapstick. The third time it’s funny “. But she can not only do the “man runs through revolving door” (which will be available in “Jeeps”), but also the great sense of humor in the smallest detail that can be found in a single “Dietmar”. Comedy is wholesome, not educational, comedy can decode monstrosity. She notices whether a gag works when the actors read the text, they are the perfect “bullshit detectors”. What does not ignite is thrown out. In the future, Abdel-Maksoud would like to just write and leave the direction to others. But let’s be honest: who but you should bring your lyrics to the stage better?