FUN AND RESPONSIBILITY: That’s not enough, there’s still something missing

I actually decided to never be annoyed by the development of the city. I assume that it’s me who is hurting the most. Trying not to get angry has also become incredibly tiring: I’m hanging in limbo.

In 2024, ANGER is in and ANGER is out, says my friend M.

ANGER is something divine – when you think of ANGER you tend to think of ANGER. Anger is a completely different political drive than anger; it is less about the individual who accuses the system of having “missed out” and more about something bigger.

M. says: The political attitude of “Now it’s my turn” is one of the most dangerous of all.

I think of reddened faces, suppressed anger that has turned inward for far too long and spreads from there, like a disease. Anger is something much more external, it’s about radicalization, it’s about movement, it’s about more.

That’s not enough, there’s still something missing.

Kreuzberg’s Oranienstrasse was actually supposed to become a motorway. A city highway.

Apartment blocks were built along the anticipated roadway. Oranienplatz was supposed to be the motorway junction. The rental agreements were rent-controlled for 30 years. It was assumed that the apartments were unattractive because they were located on the highway. The highway never came. The highway that never came protected the neighborhood in its absence for 30 years. And then again for 30 – the contracts were extended by the city. I don’t want to imagine what will happen when the next 30 years are over.

What they call “gentrification” doesn’t suit the city. But I like the good food that the expats brought with them. I like to indulge in sourdough pizza and creamy pistachio ice cream. Especially when I’m hungover.

Nevertheless, it doesn’t suit the city to no longer be cheap. Even the good, better food, the sourdough pizza and the creamy pistachio ice cream, don’t taste quite as good here. It doesn’t belong here.

In other cities, Paris for example, people are used to stealing. A friend of mine sewed huge pockets into the inside of his coat. Sometimes he gets caught, but no charges are ever filed. You should never hang your handbag on the hooks in the toilet cubicles, but keep it on your lap when you pee – I learn that there are probably gangs who fish handbags from toilet doors with hooks on broom handles.

My first job: Put the iconic stickers on the matchboxes in the Volksbühne on Rosa-Luxemburg-Platz. And remove other stickers first. LSD, BN’s graphics office, was somehow at odds with the current graphics department – now new, different stickers had to be put on the box, with other, identical-looking robber wheels on them.

I thought of the monks’ hourly prayers – praying without ceasing. Always in circles through the cloister, always in circles around the traffic island at Moritzplatz. I stretch my arms out at the roundabout, I’m always a little afraid of being run over.

My colleague at the Volksbühne comes from Bielefeld (which, as everyone knows, doesn’t exist – the Bielefeld conspiracy). She finds it more difficult to arrive at the warship-like house. My basic Marxist training helps me: All that is solid melts into air.

A friend asks me if I love my city and I say:

Yes, but it’s a cold love, not a hot one.

The dramatic, I learn, is based on the assumption that subjects can trigger something and change something with their actions. There is a conflict between several parties and in the end at least one of the parties is usually dead – caused by the action or inaction of one of the other parties.

Postdramatic is pure individuality. In Pollesch – hopeful impotence, vain, emotional devotion of the late capitalist subjects (in a major German city that was once divided into East and West). The idea of ​​the end of the story has come to an end.

I’m learning: Melancholy is the nostalgic longing for something that never existed.

I’m learning: The most romantic love is the unfulfilled one.

Maybe the “That’s not enough, there’s still something missing,” the endless, half-motivated running in circles has actually exhausted itself – the exhaustion has been transformed into an energy of change.

Always in circles, always in roundabouts, with a little bit of a death wish. And a lot of feeling.

In Chekhov, from whom I take my name, the post-dramatic is already introduced – but at the level of the dramatic characters. For example, one character is hard of hearing. This gives the other characters the opportunity to chat to themselves in a post-dramatic, undirected manner, to actually have self-reflective soliloquies instead of using language as an action.

“In the end, it’s always about economics,” says my friend P., who lives in New York. “It’s about whether you have running water at home and whether your garbage is disposed of.”

Nowadays you can almost become immortal. But only if you can afford it. Sometimes I feel like my love for Berlin is nothing but nostalgia. And now that René Pollesch is no longer there, the feeling is even stronger than before.

But: That’s not enough, there’s still something missing.

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