Lothar Trolle: Promised Land from the Desert

It was always considered an insider tip. The fact that someone is called this means that the authorities take great care to ensure that the person concerned stays there for far longer than they would like. Lothar Trolle, a prime example. Drives linear thinkers into the parade, but has always accepted the social consequences of his lack of compromise with a high degree of external calm. Heiner Müller put it in the following sentence: “Otherwise he only resembles himself, states and sunsets don’t scratch his identity.” He didn’t have any real luck with the theater. But he hasn’t been able to sacrifice his bulkiness because of that, ever.

His collected texts are called “After the Flood”. A compact world of evil tricks, of terrifying parables, of dark reports of true progress, in other words: of cheerfully cynical prophecies of the good progress of the standstill. Is there hope after the flood? Absolutely! In the current desert – there is enough sand there for the transmission. Our true wealth. In such a satire of the utopian, in which only the catastrophic varies and increases, the joke of the indifferent troll is fulfilled. Perhaps similar to BK Tragelehn, he haunts a scene that is thinning out like the last straggler. Their demons were called Müller and Brasch and Schleef (Trolle was in his parallel class in Sangerhausen).

One notices in the dramatic texts and the stories that violent, shock-hard breath of contradiction that knows a lot about the bottom, about the spheres of poorly paid survival work in the big cities of the East, of upheavals and collapses, and this in the middle of the supposed upheavals. Trolle is a proletarian poet, he combines images of desolation with mythical traditions in a provocatively unsentimental manner; the clouds of the Olympics can hardly be distinguished from the cement dust of unfinished construction sites.

It is no coincidence that “Hermes in the City,” staged by Frank Castorf at the Deutsches Theater Berlin, became the most exciting Trolls performance in 1992. Shorthand about everyday, terrible criminal cases become the promenades of a cruel god who goes through the city murdering and raping, always with classical verses in his head. Such horror poles love trolls: poetry and killer instinct. Interpretation material that collects traces from all times and recharges its batteries through puzzles. This literature is concise, downright sporty in its take on banal reality – and poetry is always kept away from all the constraints of a message of class tension and other phrases. Work against theory-minded vigilance of virtue in the name of improving the world, in which “the corridors of what can be said are so narrow and the spaces of what is thinkable are so low” (dramaturg Bernd Stegemann).

Recently seen at the Theater unterm Dach, where “Torsten” had its Berlin premiere, a production by the AGGREGATE theater, directed by Silvio Beck. Story of an East German conman. The GDR: a children’s home. Escape and the Foreign Legion. Drugs and brazen role-playing games. Always higher, always higher. A rise is a fall. In the end, T. is a manager who ends up in the garbage can.

A production: cold and bold and crude. Astrid Kohlhoff, Stefan Ebeling, David Jeker: babbling radiance, outrageous clowning, arobatic intoxication. Fluttering, hissy, happy play with identities: the human being completely in his essence, when he doesn’t have to or isn’t allowed to commit himself – the slippery slope is also a way up. Or a way at all if you are born only to come up short in it. A world where there is little comfort, but much defiant need for it.

The writer as a trapper. The cold creeps up on you. What are you doing with her, what are you doing with yourself? The hero has been lost to such drama, the pros and cons that have been carefully composed no longer work; The individual, which is just a beautiful lie, dissolves into monologues, into protocol-like descriptions of often unbelievable events, the threats of which do not lead to our world, but arise from it. In “End of the World Berlin” there are the animals of the zoo who, in a child’s imagination, roam the Neubauviertel killing them. There are “34 sentences about a woman”, a cleaning lady in a GDR workers’ dormitory – the news that she received a bonus becomes a sad report in Trolle about the value and dignity of a drudgery that is supposed to be called life.

Trolle, born in 1944, came to the GDR with his parents from the West. In the second grade, a classmate stated that Lothar was quite an idiot because only idiots would come up with the idea of ​​coming to the East. That’s how it started, and it didn’t stop: Throughout his life in the GDR, Trolle remained a semi-legal, someone who was looked at askance, someone who was left outside, a colorful dog, a strange subject. A fat snitch’s meal.

He studied Marxism-Leninism. A mistake: he thought this was philosophy. The topic for the state examination: the SED’s achievements in shaping cultural policy since the 11th plenum. “I never went there again and they never got in touch again.” Birth of a freelance author. After a reading, an official in the Writers’ Association confirmed: “I am incredibly sad. The troll can’t even be helped with socialism.« The Russian poets Daniil Kharms and Andrei Platonov can confidently be called soulmates of this twisted poet, who is moved by what drives people crazy between the rolling wheels of history. With the independent group “Medea” he performed Müller’s “Hamlet Machine” for the first time in the Zion Church in Berlin. Until the pressure wore him down. In 1988 he went to the West and staged in Munich, where it was the acting powerhouse Josef Bierbichler who prevented the Trolls work from being canceled before the premiere. From 1993 to 1995 he was engaged at the Kleist Theater in Frankfurt an der Oder, home for a short period of time.

Premiere years ago at the Berliner Ensemble: “Die Baugrube” after Andrej Platonow (director: Armin Petras). It says that the proletariat is not entitled to the truth, but to the movement. Conclusion after a century in which communists initially had nothing to lose and in the end nothing more to ask for. An evil, owl-mirroring joke prevails, it punctures ideological issues, and the old emptiness and the usual violence become visible.

Trolls smiles. Trolls writes. Lives in opposite worlds where the poet’s inner weather stays on course – and withstands the weather outside. Today Lothar Trolle turns 80 years old.