Obituary: Alexander Lang died: Between distance and absurdity

With Alexander Lang’s appearance as director, the theater changed completely. One can speak of a revolution. And of all places, at the Olympus of the GDR theater, the Deutsches Theater in Berlin, where Lang had been a member as an actor since 1969.

Perhaps for Lang, who was born in Erfurt in 1941, it was the role of the rebellious Paul Bauch in Volker Braun’s “The Kippers” that made him a pamphleteer at his own theater? In it he called for actors to have more say in the theater – and immediately switched to directing. These were the paradoxes from which his theater drew its energy. Lang’s furious directing debut came in 1977. The director of Heiner Müller’s “Philoctet” had just thrown it in. It is unclear whether it is because of the three stubborn actors or because of the extremely demanding text.

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“Then I’ll do it myself!” cried Lang, Philoctetes in Müller’s adaptation of Sophocles’ original version, which caused consternation with a cardinal shift in emphasis: “The dead hero does it too!” The original cell of Lang’s theater was created, along with it Christian Grashof and Roman Kaminski. They had some friends and many enemies at the house. The ensemble’s approach seemed too new, too unconditional, too bright, too formally exaggerated, the majority of which acted according to the motto “The main thing is that we can speak well.” That meant: Play until the absurdity of all noble ideas becomes apparent! Volker Pfüller was a set designer who knew that actors are animated puppets who are desperately trying to free themselves from the strings to which they are hanging.

Büchner’s revolutionary play “Danton’s Death”, which premiered in 1981, was a test of this highly formally pointed reading, which Lang called “fantastic realism”. ) are. With Lang, however, Adorno’s “negative dialectic” was played in the Pfüller proscenium stage, which was not allowed to be discussed in that way in the GDR. Revolutions destroy an old order. And now? A blank space opens up that remains a question mark. Barbarism or justice? At Büchner they enter into a bloody wedding in the form of Danton and Robespierre. In Lang’s “working theses” on “Danton’s Death” you can read: “‘Danton’s Death’ is not a historical drama, but a Büchnerian contemporary piece… Danton and Robespierre’s struggle ‘What the new man should be like’ turns out to be unreal. The “Epicurean man” and the “ascetic man of virtue” are both mental models that are planned without changing the social situation.

How do you solve this approach scenically? Through a playful trick that can be called ingenious: Christian Grashof embodied both characters, Danton and Robespierre. With a turn to the right he was Danton in dandy white, with a turn to the left Robespierre as the dark high priest of Jacobinism. The heated exchanges between them became the crazy soliloquy of a revolution that had defied all reason.

What a furious dramatic flight of heights from Grashof and Co., but also a profound reading of revolution that came close to Volker Braun’s “Lenin’s Death”. It was the theaters of the GDR that created new readings of history in the 1980s and offered mental models to get out of the paralyzing status quo after Biermann’s expatriation in 1976. Lang’s furious production of Christoph Hein’s “The True Story of Ah Q” at the DT Kammerspiele in 1983 seemed like a ludicrous footnote to Beckett. Theater in the no man’s land of history. In 1986, under the motto of a “trilogy of passion,” Lang combined three pieces: Euripides’ “Medea,” Goethe’s “Stella” and Strindberg’s “Dance of Death.” This time a dance in black and white: destruction of passion by dispassionate forces.

But my favorite production by Lang remains Grabbe’s “Duke Theodor von Gothland” from 1984: the screaming madness that bursts forth in a strangely pleasurable way, in the form of the sword-wielding Gothland (Grashof again). Lang’s comment about Gothland being ready to “blow up the world.”

Then the conservative faction won at the DT and probably also in SED cultural policy. Lang received a work visa for the West in 1986 and was head director at the Schiller Theater in West Berlin at the time of reunification. There you could also see important productions, such as “Grimm’s Fairy Tales” with the ancient Bernhard Minetti, or his bitter, evil commentary on German unity with Schiller’s “The Robbers” from autumn 1990.

Lang was one of the few German directors who was invited to direct at the Comédie-Française in Paris (in 1994 with Kleist’s “Prince of Homburg”) and returned to the Gorki Theater as a director and actor in 2003, where he had once been after drama school debuted there, presented a provocatively cold “Nachasyl” and in 2006 an equally radical “Broken Krug”. But the opinion-forming media had decided to only treat Alexander Lang condescendingly, which this great director endured calmly.

Fortunately, his productions of Heinrich Mann’s “The Sad Story of Frederick the Great” (DT, 1982) and Brecht’s “The Roundheads and the Pointed Heads” (DT, 1983) are available on DVD. And you should have seen his legendary saxophone-playing philosopher in Konrad Wolf’s ultimate Berlin film “Solo Sunny” from 1980 alongside Renate Krößner anyway.

The last years of his life became a difficult test for the great distance player, who always remained a friendly, approachable and generous conversation partner, when both of his legs had to be amputated. Anyone who saw him accepting the Konrad Wolf Prize at the Academy of Arts in 2020, as always ironic and sharp-tongued, with overwhelming intelligence, completely forgot the wheelchair to which he was tied. The important director and actor Alexander Lang died in Berlin on May 31st.