Theater and Industry: The Eastern Woman as a Dinosaur

Right at the beginning there was an alleged scandal: According to the AfD member of the Bundestag Kay-Uwe Ziegler East Festival violate the gun law. It is enough for him that an installation was shown on the opening weekend that consisted of water bottles with scraps of fabric and instructions for building Molotov cocktails. A second work of art is currently being examined by the public prosecutor’s office, in this case because of the use of unconstitutional symbols. In fact, it contains swastikas – although the artist is merely referring to a swastika carved into a wall near the exhibition site, which had apparently not bothered anyone before.

Even if one can certainly ask whether the Molotov cocktail dummies were successful art or simply agitation – a Ukrainian art student wanted to use them to draw attention to the situation in her homeland after the Russian invasion – the reaction to them appears to be clear but quite exaggerated. The incidents are an indication that the festival currently being held in Bitterfeld-Wolfen is apparently a huge thorn in the side of right-wing populists. Even without weapons, people probably fear a certain explosive power. At first glance, the series of events, which are taking place for the second time this year and this time on three weekends instead of just one, does not seem all that political. Above all, it wants to be a place of “mutual interest”. Like last year, the aim is to explore the social, economic and ecological reality of East Germany using various artistic means.

Curator and dramaturg Aljoscha Begrich grew up in rural areas of the GDR and later worked on theater projects in New York and Tehran. He had already returned ambitiously last year to direct the Osten Festival; This year he is responsible for the program together with cultural manager Susanne Beyer. Your curatorial team has invited theater people and artists from all over the world. Many people, as we learn from conversations here, have their center of life in Berlin.

Perhaps the basic question that the festival raises is: Can the urban, transnational art world and the academic discourse surrounding it be united with the reality of life of the (former) workers from Bitterfeld-Wolfen, whose proximity one is looking for here, supported by institutions like the Federal Cultural Foundation and the Goethe Institute? Or is there an insurmountable gap here?

Bitterfeld-Wolfen has been a location for the chemical industry for over a century; In GDR times, the Wolfen film factory, formerly the second largest film factory in the world, and the Bitterfeld chemical plant were located here. After the fall of the Wall, parts of the industry were privatized, parts were shut down and demolished. Thousands lost their jobs. Groundwater and soil are partly contaminated by chemical waste; A so-called “bubble” of toxic substances located in the ground beneath the city must be constantly monitored. Today, at seven percent, the unemployment rate is no longer as high as it used to be (in 1991 it was 20 percent), but the results of the European elections show that people here are anything but satisfied with the status quo: 43.2 percent of the vote from Bitterfeld-Wolfen went to the AfD. This means that the right is significantly more popular here than in the Anhalt-Bitterfeld district (37 percent) and Saxony-Anhalt as a whole (30.5 percent).

On the very Sunday on which the election was so drastic, I went to the Osten Festival, first to the Jugendclub 84 in Wolfen-Nord. The area seems deserted, and that’s not just on Sunday mornings, but also because there were once five times as many people living in this part of the city as there are today. Flowers of all colors grow on the abandoned wasteland between monumental apartment blocks from the socialist era. Stickers from Halleschen FC fans are stuck to the lampposts, almost all of them play with right-wing radical symbolism. “Give your life to the club!” you are asked here.

What films could fit this better than those by Thomas Heise, who created unique documents about youth shortly after reunification? The filmmaker had planned to attend the Osten Festival himself, but died at the end of May after a short, serious illness. His film “Imbiss Spezial” can also be seen at Jugendclub 84 this morning, which captures everyday work in a snack stand at Berlin’s Lichtenberg train station in the fall of 1989. Despite propaganda on the radio, everyone here knows that the GDR is coming to an end.

Most of the other festival events do not take place in Wolfen-Nord, but around the Old Fire Station in Wolfen. Here you can go on a short tour with the hannsjana collective, which takes you across the site of the former film factory. Through several performances, the artists link the topics of paleontology and the East German women’s movement. They believe that today there is a false image of both the Tyrannosaurus Rex – which actually chirped instead of roaring – and the East German woman. However, a cowboy dance rehearsed by women from Bitterfeld-Wolfen shows that there is a significant difference between the two phenomena: The Eastern woman is – lucky! – lively.

The performance “Handarbeit,” which will be performed shortly afterwards in the Städtisches Kulturhaus, was also developed by Bitterfeld-Wolfen residents. On stage, they make the complexity of the hand as a body part and a signifier tangible.

In the evening, as on every day, the festival invited discussion; This time – in keeping with the day’s program items – it’s about the role of women in the GDR, especially in Bitterfeld-Wolfen and the film factory.

It’s an informal and harmonious conversation between women of different origins and generations – but when Lynn T Musiol, an artist from Berlin, talks about her installation exhibited at the festival, resentment briefly flares up. Musiol speculates that it is “probable” that there were sexual orgies among the film factory’s employees; after all, it was pretty hot in the darkrooms. In the video work “Kiss Kiss Wolf,” Musiol imagines the film factory as a place of lesbian-queer eroticism. A few older listeners are irritated. Where are the former employees of the film factory now, they ask? Surely they could report better about the conditions there than the young artists and scientists from Berlin. Perhaps the situation is an example of how an experiment like the Osten Festival cannot proceed entirely without friction – but nobody asked for that here.

The day ends with a performance by the Bandentheater collective, performed solely on stage by Anja Gessenhardt. Using the means of documentary theater and artistic interludes on a pole dance pole, Gessenhardt tells a moving story about her childhood and youth in the GDR as well as how she experienced the collapse of her birth country as a teenager.

On the way back, my accidental companion – a well-known dramaturg from Berlin – tells me about a lecture performance in the Bitterfeld town hall that I missed. The collective les dramaturx traced the effects of the so-called Green Revolution in agriculture in relation to the climate crisis and species extinction. My companion enthuses: What is currently happening in Bitterfeld-Wolfen is more interesting than anything in the capital.

After that day in the Anhalt province, I too have the impression that something extraordinary is happening there: namely, not only collecting and producing really stimulating art, but also creating a concrete connection to this place and the people who live here with each individual work. Back to the local without giving up the universalist claim: This is how the avant-garde works today.

This weekend (Friday to Sunday) this year’s Osten Festival enters its final round. The entire program can be found at www.osten-festival.de.