Lorenz Just: “Day XYZ”: Theater occupation and self-discovery

Occupying a theater doesn’t seem that difficult, but doing something meaningfully new with it seems very difficult – at least in Lorenz Just’s book “Day XYZ”. The cover shows a broom without a handle; the symbol of the unheroic question that every collective that wants to do something with spaces faces at some point: Who will sweep away the dust so that we can happily sit on the floor again tomorrow when the plenary session comes around?

Lorenz Just, studied Islamic studies, born in Halle an der Saale and grew up in East Berlin, has so far written a novel, a volume of stories and several plays. In his second book-length prose text, we follow the thoughts and actions of an unintentionally unreliable narrator: It’s not a meta-level checker playing with the knowledge and ignorance of the readership, but a young man – he’s too inquisitive to be a fool, too quickly overwhelmed to be a rogue and insecure – ends up, out of chance and boredom, in the world of political activism, which is foreign to him and initially alienating. The setting is an occupied city theater.

He dutifully volunteers to take the protocol – and immediately fails. He is involved in various working groups, puts up posters and tries to join in the discussions here and there. He moves from station to station, from function to function. But the organization doesn’t give him a permanent place, let alone a stable worldview. He is a yes-man: Over the course of the action he introduces himself under different names, all of which (there is a sound exception due to foreign language pronunciation) begin with “Yes”. But at first he only wants to make commitments in general, to just join in or play along, because the purpose of the whole occupation project should become clear in the process, or not at all.

All sorts of quirky people are involved in the theater cast, which is introduced at the beginning of the novel through a kind of foreplay on the forecourt that resembles an opinion poll. There are know-it-all students, veteran activists who cook and do crafts, and social workers who go astray. A few people actually seem to be involved in performing arts, but they are a minority. You invite a lecturer who could also coach executives with her Powerpoint presentations. The narrator, we quickly learn this much, has no biography that he could present well. He also lives in a puny one-room apartment.

“Day XYZ” takes place in a city theater, but where exactly that is is not explicitly stated. The generality of the conflicts is transferred into concrete scenes instead of adding local color to the narrated world. Tourists always show up who find this kind of activity really great. There is no indication that we are dealing with a Berlin story. The Volksbühne in the capital was last occupied in September 2017. The “Dust to Glitter” collective was responsible for this. A few months ago, some of those involved published a paper called “Organizing Cultural Commons.” Theory follows practice.

A question that critical and perhaps grumpy observers were already asking at the time was whether a group of people were doing politics (i.e. occupying) here in order to be able to be artistically active in a place that would otherwise impose different rules on them. Or whether there is only a particularly urgent need for political performance in order to ultimately find a place in an art institution of rank and reputation in order to then get involved in business as usual.

Just’s book offers streams of consciousness as well as numerous dialogues in which all kinds of opinions and claims to power that have to do with this question come into play. The narrator doesn’t like to judge anyway. Of course, the occupiers quickly become dissatisfied and become “not a hydra, but just a bunch of snakes.” The occupation, someone commented, was nothing more than “tolerated temporary use.” Someone else’s fantasies of destruction – “I want to tear the wood veneers off the walls, slash the velvet upholstery, smash the marble” – are not given any further approval. At times the book seems like the libretto of a possible cast.

People have all sorts of names that either sound like abbreviations, corruptions or pet names. You recognize yourself through attitudes, types of behavior in the cast drama; biographical backgrounds are touched upon as much as possible. To put it somewhat pathetically, you try to break the crack in time through action, not jump through the specific times of your own life.

In the novel, however, it also goes outside the door. The ominous outside is a cruise, sponsored by a rich, lonely aunt, which the narrator goes on, only to meet people on land who remind him of home, presumably Arab men who are enthusiastic about German philosophy, etc than was ever possible for him. And then he doesn’t even have an opinion about the death of God.

The narrator also ends up at an NGO activist wedding in the village, where he stoically listens to all sorts of prejudices about Germans and where, among other things, the particularly beautiful question comes up: “Is it true that Germans don’t dream anymore since World War II?” « (“Is it true that the Germans have stopped dreaming since the Second World War?”) Later, the narrator, who calls himself “Jake” abroad, sets off on an odyssey by bus to find all sorts of unknown letters of unknown content from his now deceased aunt To give to people at home and abroad, and sometimes experience – hospitality. The activists in the theater have a hard time with this. How much foreign world and inner world can a tightly organized cast allow on the boards that mean the world?

Friendly heterogeneity and grim administrative power, sloppily contested fantasies of self-discovery and yet not being able to really get involved with others and other things, without pre-formed demands – that’s what “Day XYZ” is thematically about. Shortly before the end, the narrator admits: “Now I wanted to hear my voice in the large hall, I needed that: to hear my own voice clearly somewhere. That’s exactly what our theater was there for, exactly what it was built for one day, or had I misunderstood something completely wrong again?”

Anyone who goes after votes in politics often suffers a loss of language. The narrator doesn’t want that. That somehow makes him likeable without being pleasing, neutral without being null. In Just’s text, apart from the naming policy already mentioned, there are some linguistic peculiarities: For example, different ways of gendering; absurd passages in rather clumsy English; Sentences begin with small letters if there is no noun. This undermines any sterile standard language, just like all the long sentences that don’t get lost in boxes. The narrator naturally drifts away without illuminating himself complacently for too long.

There is heart and humor, seriousness and absurdity. There is room for a lot of interpersonal and psychological things in or on “Day XYZ”. Maybe that’s what we would like for the big world theater too. In any case, Just succeeds in creating a clever, complex, but never know-it-all concept novel that is both easy to read and fun.

Lorenz Just: Tag XYZ. Spector Books/Volte Books, 272 S., br., 14 €.