Theater: Sartre at the Berliner Ensemble: The ugly dialectic of action

At the beginning the effects explode in the Berlin ensemble. After all, two old masters of their field are involved in the production of Jean-Paul Sartre’s “The Dirty Hands” alongside the Slovenian director Mateja Koležnik: set designer Olaf Altmann and musician Bert Wrede. But neither of them apparently trusts the quiet, urgent tones of the essentially philosophical text, but instead resorts to the tools for the rough. So there is immediately a noisy carpet of sound over a huge circling wooden shack, then the fog billows.

The actors initially have to be tuned up via microport despite screaming so that they can be understood. Between the slats of the wooden shack, a bright strobe light (light: Rainer Casper) flashes painfully into the spectators’ eyes. Existentialism means learning to suffer?

More theatrical mobilization is not possible; the dream of a bright future cannot be destroyed any faster. No one can more thoroughly confuse intensity with noise. Despite the crazy hustle and bustle scene at the beginning, something like calm returns surprisingly quickly. This is thanks to Koležnik, who fortunately is not interested in mere effects, but in Sartre’s text. She very precisely traces the antagonism that runs through this chamber play about spirit and power, ideas and ideology, loyalty and betrayal.

Sartre, a pioneer of existentialism and a lifelong love-hate relationship with the Communist Party, also negotiates his problem as an intellectual of bourgeois origins with the party in “Dirty Hands,” which premiered in 1948. Before the final shots ring out, the piece ends with: “Not usable.” No, he didn’t want to be usable. His concept of political commitment was different from blind allegiance.

Many of his experiences with the Resistance and, always, with Stalinism flow into “The Dirty Hands.” So he could be sure that his pieces would receive strong reactions from both left and right. In the early GDR, Sartre was a hate figure for the SED ideologists. They felt attacked by his theater of distance, this mixture of Brecht and Heidegger. They called his philosophical existentialism, which opposed dialectical and historical materialism with its fetish for the laws of history, revisionist. But in the 1980s, Vincent von Wroblewski published Sartre’s plays at Reclam Leipzig with a clever commentary that did not suppress criticism of Stalinism.

Sartre was not a follower, but a self-thinker. That’s why he lets two main characters meet here: Hugo, who is introduced (or rather: presented) as an intellectual who is under the burden of proof, and the high-ranking party official Hoederer, who, however, has large parts of the party against him. Some people wanted to recognize Trotsky in him, but Sartre always denied this. He is primarily concerned with collaboration in France during the German occupation. He provoked people by saying that the Resistance fought more against the Vichy regime than against the occupiers. After his arrest by the Gestapo, Sartre was soon released and was suspected by his comrades of being an informer. Hugo is dominated by the fear of being liquidated as an enemy of the party.

Then political coordinates shift. The Red Army begins its triumphal march. Is France now occupied by the Soviets and what does that mean for the French communists? Lots of strategic simulation games in which there are no innocent people. Only Hugo, the incapacitated intellectual who tries to keep his convictions “pure,” lets rival party official Louis (Gerrit Jansen) send him as an assassin to the suspected traitor Hoederer, who sees through him: “You’re all the same. An intellectual is not a real revolutionary, he is at best a murderer.

Marc Oliver Schulze is a Hoederer with political vision who lets the dogmas be dogmas and tries to remain capable of political action. Here he seems much more capable of judgment than the intended intellectual Hugo, whom Paul Zichner plays as a stubborn persuasionist. He actually shoots Hoederer; but out of pure jealousy. Because Comrade Hugo sees his wife Jessica (Lily Epply) kissing Comrade Hoederer. Jessica, in her feminine guise, seems to be smarter than the men who trump each other in their mania for importance. This is how the weak Hugo actually becomes a murderer. Out of passion or injured pride of ownership? There is also Olga (with the constant seriousness of the official: Pauline Knof), in which feeling and party loyalty wage an unequal battle.

When Hugo leaves prison after a few years, the party line has changed: now the dead Hoederer is no longer a traitor, but the nestor of a new, far-sighted policy. Hugo should disappear from the scene, after all he not only killed the hope, he also knows too much.

We see Hugo and Hoederer as two sides of one character: that of the party intellectual struggling with the temptation to betray. This strong inner tension gives the evening its dramatic intensity. Like Brecht – and even more so Heiner Müller – Sartre treats the characters like alien objects, coolly and almost uninvolved as a chronicler of the trials and tribulations of the 20th century. »I want the audience to see our century as an outside witness as if it were a foreign thing. And that it empathizes at the same time, since it is what makes this century.«, said Sartre in 1959. This rift that runs through the century also threatens to tear the committed intellectuals apart internally – into one like Hugo and another like Hoederer.

With his book “The Betrayal of the Intellectuals,” Julien Benda asked the question why thinkers so often do more harm than good to their time. They don’t do what is expected of them. But who are they betraying? The party spirits on the one hand and zeitgeist surfers on the other, caught up in the strategy of political struggle here and pure relativism there? This is inevitable if they just don’t betray themselves.

Some people missed what was refreshing about the production that evening: Chancellor Scholz suddenly spoke of a “turning point,” a nice word for an ugly thing: new enemy images, militarization of thinking. Nothing seems to matter to the Greens more than protecting nature. Absurd world in which everyone gets their hands dirty in their own way.

But should we therefore superficially update the still strong Sartre text? It seems to me an advantage that Koležnik deliberately does not do this in her production. As a viewer, you can shudder to accept the fact that lies and betrayal have always been part of politics – and intellectuals would do well to keep their distance from them if they do not want to invalidate their words.

Next performances: February 17th, February 18th, March 12th, March 13th