Potsdam-Hans-Otto Theater: Carl alone in the GDR

The writer looks modest, even shy. Lutz Seiler-Büchner award winner, Suhrkamp author and one of the very few who manage to write demanding novels and still end up on the bestseller lists-seems sympathetically out of place on the stage. For a long time he applauds the others during the applause before the ensemble pulls it towards the ramp, where he tentatively and awful in front of the Potsdam audience. The evening has already run at that moment and contains it in Nuce, contains his misunderstanding.

The literature and the theater remain strange here, they would like to come together, but the distance is too great. What a strangeness! A medium like the stage, with a centuries -long experience in getting written in body, in sound, in space, in motion, fails because of this task. Why is it this Friday, the premiere evening, since you publish the Hans-Otto-Theater Seilers with the Leipzig Book Prize for the novel “Stern 111”? First of all, courage. Although the version created by director Esther Hattenbach and dramaturge Bettina Jantzen only follows “motifs of the novel by Lutz Seiler”, but an emancipated sovereign theater work cannot be seen.

Muckefuck: in the morning, unfiltered, left

Nd.muckefuck is our newsletter for Berlin in the morning. We wake up through the city, are on site when it comes to decisions on urban politics – but always among the people who affect them. Muckefuck is a Berlin coffee length – unfiltered and left. Register now and always know what needs to be argued.

The musicians Johannes Bartmes and Michael Koschorreck, who are enthroned on a scaffold above the events, accompany the evening to keyboard, percussions and guitar and point out in an interesting direction: this could not be a fabric for a musical-acting overall work of art, maybe even even For a musical? However, the question is answered with a very clear “Hmm, does not know”. Instead of combining scenes, topics and moods, they only move a sound carpet here, on which the ensemble then slips around.

“Stern 111” tells of the turning time in two strands: Carl, a young bricklayer with a writer’s ambitions, gets the task of taking on their house in Gera shortly after the fall of the wall, while they themselves are looking for a new life in the West . There, collective accommodations, personal humiliations and the happier and often bad experiences with real capitalism are waiting for them. In his part, Carl does not last long in Thuringia and escapes to East Berlin, where he finds asylum in the household scene, works on his poems and is looking for love.

The audience alternately pursues these two groups through the turmoil of turning: The anarchic artists and late proletarians around Carl on the one hand, the one from the world revolution that occurs on the Spree, the end that it is the most important thing to stay here and stand Defending the house, even if the eviction commands come. And on the other hand, the sympathetically-naive-looking parents, who, which Karl Roßmann in Kafka’s fragment “America” ​​remembered, simply let themselves be shaken by nothing, just hope for a future-and then actually go to the United States.

The scenes with Franziska Melzer and Philipp Mauritz are among the best on this three -hour evening. It stems how the two break up with rain jackets and torn players, how Mauritz is amused by the conditions in the refugee home or Melzer bravely blends in when their Inge is mocked by villagers from the West. The events in Berlin, on the other hand, drop significantly. Carl, played by Paul Wilms, stays strange to you, together with the other home occupiers, he is more symptom than character, is very nervous, completely mania, completely depression in changing phases. He tigers over the stage, rushes back and forth restlessly, then breeds.

The epoch break drives his forehead to his forehead, and again and again he strokes through the greasy hair, whines, dances, drinks, falls on his mattress. This works purely on the outside. Unlike in the parenting of the parents, there is no sympathy, not even understanding for Carl and his people. And so it doesn’t matter a little when the son complains bitterly with the parents, never really paid attention to by the two. What would be to be accused of? There is not much to see, not a lot of meat, not much blood on this house -occupier. The feeling of youth and freedom increased into the global policy has a rapid effect, as if there had been no real role models as if it had never been felt, but only presented.

Next performances: February 9th, 16th and 28th

www.hansottotheater.de