Frank Castorf: A knife called betrayal

It’s been a few years. A little theater eternity. Frank Castorf was doing well. Vienna, Athens, Belgrade, Hamburg. Most recently, one of his legendary, extra-long theater works premiered in Berlin in the summer of 2021. Erich Kästner’s novel “Fabian”, which tells of the declining political construct of the Weimar Republic.

Now Castorf is back. Again at the Berliner Ensemble. Another novel. Again, the crisis-ridden late Weimar years are the starting point. Hans Fallada’s novel “Little Man – What Now?” (1932) in its censorship-free original version served as the scenic basis for this large, five and a half hour production. It’s not always the case with this director, but here you can honestly say: Wherever Fallada is on the theater menu, you’ll also get Fallada on stage.

His successful novel was adapted astonishingly true to the original – with some side threads of the plot and the chronology, which is not always conducive to gaining knowledge and enjoying art, being removed. The entire story about the soon-to-be unemployed employee Johannes Pinneberg and his wife from a social democratic working-class household, Emma, ​​called Lammchen, and their Murkel, the child they are expecting, is unfolded for us: the unplanned pregnancy and the hasty wedding, the accountancy work in the Pomeranian province and the way to Berlin, the insight into the demimonde and the attempt to stay at a distance from it, unemployment and exclusion from society.

Yes, the entire novel finds its way onto the stage. But of course much more is created. When the curtain rises for the first time, quite a few spectators look ahead in amazement. The set designer Aleksandar Denić, Castorf’s artistic partner for years, is known for his opulent, association-rich installations, which, when placed on the revolving stage, promote constant changes of scenery and which contain several interior spaces, which are often only revealed to the audience through live cameras. This time only emptiness awaits. No colorful images distract from the social upheavals of the declining state.

Only a red fabric initially extends across the entire width and height of the stage. After just a few minutes he is dragged down by the force of the ensemble. This will happen more than once this evening. It is no less easy to tear down a red flag than to raise it. Society is falling apart, the fascists are on the rise, but the promise of the communists, just now unmistakably loud, fades away like a shout among many on its way from the theater stage to the auditorium. The red flag, as this evening literally shows, can also become the red cloth that invites you to a bullfight.

Solidarity and community are invoked time after time in the novel. Castorf counters Fallada’s words, who, for all his insight, tend to be socially romantic, with reality. He takes “Little Man – What Now?” as a social panorama: he stages the conflict between workers and stand-up collar proletarians, the white-collar workers, such as the protagonist Pinneberg. Communication no longer seems possible where the milieus meet, not even where left and right and supposedly apolitical people meet.

Castorf enriches “Little Man – What Now?” with passages from Fallada’s early autobiographical novella “The Cow, the Shoe, Then You.” Written in psychiatry, it reflects the author’s experiences, who spent his life seeking a little happiness in morphine and cocaine. Fallada, who comes from a good middle-class family, is a drop in his class. Before he had his literary breakthrough, he worked as an employee. Nevertheless, his view of life remains a counter-proposal to Johannes Pinneberg, who perishes because of the circumstances, but also because of his doomed desire for gentleness and honesty.

The worker, the employee, the artist – these are three types, isolated in their social activity, with whom no revolution can be made. Hans Fallada’s novel doesn’t yet know anything about what follows the economic crisis and mass unemployment. Castorf makes use of passages from Heiner Müller’s sequence of scenes “The Battle”, which wants to dramatically get to the bottom of German fascism. We are experiencing a “Night of the Long Knives”: two brothers, two workers, meet on the night of the Reichstag fire; One remained an anti-fascist, the other defected to the Nazis under torture. “There is a knife between us, that means betrayal,” booms eloquently from the stage. With a knife one will kill the other. The community that Pinneberg is looking for is an illusion. He is left with private happiness, if at all. The “Volksgemeinschaft” propagated by the Nazis also turns out to be a bad joke, but without any punchline.

Frank Castorf allows all of this to flow through in his scene arrangement with some speed and dazzling costumes (Adriana Braga Peretzki). Before that, the ensemble practices quick role changes. Above all, Andreas Döhler rumbles out the great monologues in a brash, Berlin-like tone. And time and time again, the ensemble saves us from the coldness of reality with music: “Never again cocaine” is Faber’s collective self-deception, intoned with verve.

“But later and always and everywhere, / when workers sit together, / the song of the Jarama battle will ring out, / hearts will be set on fire to fight,” it sounds shortly afterwards. Castorf doesn’t shy away from the sentimentality of the old fight songs – why should he? – they still seem broken: by the knowledge of what soon followed.

The players soon find themselves under the stage. Captured with cameras, they crouch under the turntable for which Helene Weigel herself had pulled out tank wheels from Soviet soldiers. “Blood catches flies,” it is said, once again with Heiner Müller, from the depths of the Berliner Ensemble. Castorf offers no reconciliation, no false beauty that would endure, but shows the abysses towards which society is moving. Great love, which in Fallada remains the starting point and end point, in Castorf it takes a back seat as a private problem behind the enormous political questions that arise. First and foremost: What now?

Next performances: September 21st, 22nd and October 29th

www.berliner-ensemble.de