Werner Fritsch, an attentive contemporary who knows the historical background
Photo: Wikipedia.org
You are one of the very few authors in the Federal Republic who did basic military service in the Bundeswehr at the beginning of the 80s – similar to the soldiers in the NVA with the experience that a conventional army would only play a role for two or three days at most in a nuclear war . Does this really matter for the political discussion?
Yes, dear Doctor Irmer, we would have shot each other in an emergency in the early 80s! Be careful: I was the best machine gunner in my company! Quiet blood! I grew up with songs like “Masters of War” by Bob Dylan or sentences by Frank Kappa – “Politics is just the entertainment department of the defense industry”. Back then, everyone in my generation was a pacifist. The sentence by the American poet Carl Sandburg was written on every wall: “Imagine it’s war – and nobody goes there!”
What was your experience back then?
After graduating from high school in 1980, I joined the military to write about it. Ostmark(!) barracks in Weiden. What a contrast! A few weeks before, people were talking about democracy in the advanced German course… And suddenly you, as a democrat, find yourself in a dictatorship that trains you to extinguish life, radiate landscapes for thousands of years, etc.
Interview
Werner Fritschborn in Waldsassen/Upper Palatinate in 1960, has written a total of 44 plays since the 1990s, as well as radio plays and prose. Four of the eight parts of his 24-hour film “Faust Sonnengesang” have been completed. The work, as well as other pieces mentioned in the conversation, have been published by Suhrkamp as DVDs and books.
The theater director Stephan Suschke pointed out in a much-discussed article in the “Berliner Zeitung” that the current government comes primarily from a once pacifist generation in West Germany that had no contact with the military and is now rather negligently moving towards war options.
“The greatest danger today are people who do not want to accept that the age that is now emerging is fundamentally different from the past.” Max Planck 1947! To Hiroshima. Apparently, thinking tank parrots without military service experience pose the greatest danger in the history of humanity. Ex negativo, of course.
In 1992 you published the piece “Fleischwolf”, which even has the subtitle “Battle” and describes the dehumanization by the military in a red light bar near a military training area. Later, in “Quarry,” you described the inner world of a soldier on duty. For both pieces, the statement remains that the military machine always produces brutalization and violence – instead of the officially invoked “citizens in uniform”. What do these pieces represent?
The order is as follows: After the military period – back in 1980, this was 456 days in the Federal Republic – I performed my action theater piece “Steinbruch” in the Weiden Old Town Gallery in 1981. It was only in 2000 that »Steinbruch«, realized by Patrick Schimanski at the National Theater Mannheim, was invited to Mülheim. It is a soldier’s monologue on maneuvers. But in the age of the atomic bomb this is absurd theater. The multi-figured piece “Meat Grinder” was created with the notebook always in the side pocket of his uniform trousers. The language material comes from the military – you can’t invent something like that – as original audio. According to Wolfgang Koeppen, it is “the most outrageous text in Edition Suhrkamp.”
And what was the public reaction to the piece?
“Fleischwolf” premiered at the Schauspiel Bonn in September 1992. Around 30 theaters then wanted to show the piece. Because it was the year of Hoyerswerda. However, there was a theatrical scandal: no one in West Germany wanted to admit that right-wing radicalism also existed in West Germany. The 30 theaters dropped out. It was only years later that right-wing radical cases in the Bundeswehr became known, and “Der Spiegel” asked me to describe my experiences in an essay. I write about anti-Semitism and uncommented Nazi propaganda films in “Political Education.” The “Spiegel” text can be found online at “Invincible at dawn”.
It didn’t stop there.
The monologue “Sense,” which I premiered at the Schauspiel Bonn, describes the war in Ukraine 80 years ago from the perspective of an old farmer, still erotically obsessed with Ukrainian women, but at the same time traumatized by the great murder. In light of the Iraq War, I wrote “Hydra War.” The piece revolves around Medea, Jason and the Argonaut voyage as a raid that provokes an Islamist act of terrorism across time. “Hydra Krieg” premiered in Linz with Käthe Reichel, Bertolt Brecht’s muse.
The theater, which is otherwise quick to pick up on any topical issue, seems to be having a hard time dealing with the war issue today. What would you suggest in a situation where pacifism of any kind is almost impossible to maintain and at the same time the war and threatening rhetoric seems frightening?
Theater! The voice of man since Aeschylus. Since the media is less and less the voice of people and more and more that of power, art is now the new “fourth estate”.
In your monumental film poem “Faust Sonnengesang” you trace various mythologies on all continents that tell the first and last things of people. Has this utopian project of a world-travelling Faust changed due to the current situation?
On the contrary! It’s more important than ever! In “Faust Sonnengesang” I try to celebrate what connects people on five continents in the face of the fury of hatred flaring up around the world, not what divides them like politics – divide et impera – does. Because the images sent around the globe of a war that not only destroys people but also the environment are killing the future. You see: I expect everything – and hope for the best!
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