Singing in Dark Times - Recherche en IA spécialisée au MIT

Singing in Dark Times
Report from Berlin

Matt Cornish

THEY LIVE

It was early October in Berlin, cold and damp, but not uncomfortable, as I rode my
bike from Kreuzberg into Mitte, across the Spree and under the S-Bahn to the Berliner
Ensemble. Outside the Theater am Schiffbauerdam, I parked near the Brecht statue
and walked over to wait in a long line. When it was my turn, I showed an usher my
certificate of full vaccination, my picture identification, and my ticket; he gave me
a paper armband, like what you would get to enter a club, and I walked through
the BE’s big wooden doors. It was not my first time back in the theatre since the
beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic; here and there I’d seen performances, mostly
outside. But this was different. In a crowded auditorium watching Nico Holonics
as Mackie Messer in Barrie Kosky’s show-biz spectacle Die Dreigroschenoper
[The Threepenny Opera, 2021], I felt back. We were alive, ensemble.

VACCINATED, BOOSTED, TESTED

For the academic year, I have been living again in Berlin, for the first time in seven
années. It has been strange. The pandemic waxing and waning, the German parlia-
mentary elections, and the Russian invasion of Ukraine have interrupted everyday
life such that it has scarcely had a chance to feel quotidian. While there were no full
lockdowns in Berlin this fall and winter, the threat of one loomed for months, et
one critic I know estimated cancellations of performances at around forty percent.
There are productions I have tried to see three or even four times, with each perfor-
mance cancelled due to illness in the ensemble.

Sometimes a production is switched on short notice: scheduled to see Brecht’s
Der Hofmeister [The Tutor, 2021] at the Deutsches Theater one night in January,
I received an email that the DT would instead play Die Pest, an adaptation of
Camus’s The Plague directed by András Dömötör as a one-man-show. It had

PAJ 132 (2022), pp. 3–17. ■ 3
https://doi.org/10.1162/pajj_a_00623 3

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premiered in November 2019 and was now performed in entirely different cir-
circonstances. I wasn’t pleased to live yet deeper in a pandemic for ninety minutes,
but I went anyway, and I was glad to watch Božidar Kocevski’s patient and explo-
sive performance as Dr. Rieux, tipping over chairs as the people of Oran died. Mais
the specificity of these entirely different circumstances made Camus’s existential
conflict less powerful. And I’m still waiting to see Der Hofmeister.

Malgré (and in large part because of) the cancellations, the delays, and the switches,
the 2021–22 season was packed. Premieres that had been delayed by a year or more
emerged like a swarm of cicadas beginning in June 2021, when lockdowns loos-
ened and productions were able to be performed in the open air.

The continuing survival and vibrancy of the German theatre is due to billions of
euro in emergency funding for the performing arts during the pandemic, and also
in large part due to the system’s ensembles: to the actors, technicians, et autre
artists who have long-term contracts and are paid regular salaries. The deep bench
of the public theatres allows them to sometimes tag in actors instead of cancelling
les performances: when Jeremy Mockridge fell ill in April (the dramaturg told us he
was scheduled for five performances that week), Kocevski stepped in on twenty-
four hours’ notice to play Melvil in Anne Lenk’s production of Friedrich Schiller’s
Maria Stuart at the Deutsches Theater (2020). If you ignored the sides he was hold-
ing, you could easily believe he’d been performing in the production for a year—all
the more amazing because Judith Oswald’s set is made from eleven stacked boxes,
separating the actors from each other and preventing Kocevski from interacting
face-to-face with Franziska Machens’s Maria. This was an “IRL” Zoom, built for a
premiere between lockdowns in October 2020, during the peak of social distancing.1

The situation is imperfect of course. The words of 2021 were “Premierenstau,” a
traffic jam in getting premieres onstage, and “Publikumsschwund,” disappearing
audiences. Too often, productions opened and then quickly disappeared from
the repertoire, making room for the premieres waiting behind them.2 Meanwhile,
audience numbers are down, though the full percentage of the decrease cannot yet
be tallied. Speaking anecdotally, when a production has gotten poor reviews, le
empty seats in a house can be brutal—in the past, Je pense, audiences took more
chances on marginal productions. Arguments can be made (and have been made)
that really too much theatre premiered this year and audiences can’t keep up—or
that the Covid regulations and cancellations have kept people away, or that people
are still too afraid to gather, or that the theatre has become even more postdramat-
ically self-obsessed, or that habits have changed and many people are happier at
home with Netflix.3

Such arguments do not apply to me. Riding across town for Die Pest, such a dreary
soirée, to see the wrong play, I thought to myself: how much happier I am going

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through all this to see a live performance than I would be on my couch watching
something canned on a laptop. And even if overall audience numbers are down,
I’m not alone. Despite ever changing regulations with ridiculous acronyms—3G,
2G, 2G+4—many performances I attended were sold out, and I felt palpable joy
from the actors and audiences.

PANDEMONIUM

Onstage, the pandemic was seldom directly addressed, but often there, haunting
the place. For productions that rehearsed and premiered between lockdowns, like
Maria Stuart, as well as Ibsen’s Gespenster (Ghosts), directed by Mateja Koležnik at
the Berliner Ensemble (2020), you watch the actors keep separate. For Gespenster,
Raimund Orfeo Voigt and Leonie Wolf designed sliding cubes, a fractured box set
rearranged in a wing-and-shutter system: small dark rooms with aubergine velvet
walls, electric torches shining flickering light on dark wood furniture. Ibsen’s char-
acters spy around corners, listen to secret conversations, et, throughout, stay hor-
ribly alone as they confront a terrible fate. Conceived to keep actors safe, Gespenster
and Maria Stuart were well chosen, raising the stakes of the plays, while also exceed-
ing the times in which they originally premiered.

In productions that premiered after vaccines were widely available in summer 2021,
I watched actors wanting, and achieving, an intense intimacy. In Frank Castorf’s
Fabian oder Der Gang vor die Hunde [Fabian or Going to the Dogs, Berliner Ensemble
2021], adapted from Erich Kästner’s 1930s novel, Marc Hosemann and Wolfgang
Michael eat and drink beer together—potato salad spraying from their mouths. je
reacted viscerally, with disgust at the flying spit, leaning way back in my seat.

Watching Florentina Holzinger’s A Divine Comedy at the Volksbühne am
Rosa-Luxemburg-Platz (it premiered at the Ruhrtriennale festival in August 2021),
I wondered how they ever managed to get the thing onstage during the pandemic:
an ensemble of twenty-plus women, fully naked for two hours, performing all of
the grotesque art actions of the twentieth century—painting with freshly drawn
blood, masturbating, shitting. Not to mention riding dirt bikes, jumping hurdles,
chopping wood, rolling down stairs, and playing cellos. It both reveled in check-
ing off a list of gross stunts and superseded that list, becoming a third-generation
feminist spectacular made by and about a self-sufficient community. Non, there was
no fear here.

ALL RIGHT?

The most devastating response to Covid, though thematized only abstractly, et pour
me the brightest aesthetic moment of the year, was a new performance by Helgard
Haug of Rimini Protokoll, All right. Good night. (Hebbel am Ufer, 2021), an excerpt
of which is included in this issue of PAJ.5

CORNISH / Singing in Dark Times ■ 5

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Five musicians sit onstage, lounging in beach chairs, reading in the sand, playing
cards under an umbrella. They ignore their music stands and instruments, and all
is silent but for the frothing of waves, projected against the back scrim and onto the
beach. It’s a peaceful moment, but the text that scrolls across the scrim and prosce-
nium, slowly, allowing time to read and think, tells a different story: of the sudden
and mysterious disappearance of Malaysian Airlines Flight 370 against the slow loss
of a father to dementia. Directed and written by Haug and composed by Barbara
Morgenstern, All right. Good night. (subtitled “a play about absence and loss”) dans-
vestigates, through music, stillness, and text, disruptions in the order of things. Le
production meditates on catastrophes that are personal, the death of Haug’s father;
grand, the loss of 239 souls into the Indian Ocean; and world-historic, the absences
that were the Covid-19 pandemic. How can something so big, just disappear?

All right. Good night.—supposedly the banal last words of the pilot of Flight 370—is
mostly a concert, haunting contemporary classical, performed with a clarinet, par-
cussion, violin, saxophone, and double bass by the Zafraan Ensemble. Then again,
it’s mostly a monologue, but with the monologist always absent. Or perhaps it is
an opera without singing. Haug’s projected words, shifting back and forth between
father and flight, lap against the scrim like waves, often gentle and melancholy,
occasionally violent and angry. It is a series of tableaux vivants picturing death in
eight parts, or “years,” plus a prologue and epilogue, over 150 minutes: an air-
port terminal, the beach, a concert stage. Holograph-like images of a larger absent
band are projected on top of the onstage band. This was like no other production
I’ve seen by Rimini Protokoll, known especially for bringing “experts of the every-
day” onstage, non-performers who tell their own stories in productions such as
Karl Marx: Capital, Volume 1 (2006). All right. Good night. is more playful, plus
theatrical, more grave, and less interested in facts.

In the beginning, the musicians walk on stage and form a line: they carry luggage,
scroll through their phones, and open a book, waiting to board their plane as
announcements reverberate in the background. Slowly, they unpack instruments
from their luggage and begin to play Morgenstern’s spare music. “In the spring
of 2014,” Haug’s text opens, “The father gets on a plane. // A Boeing 777. / A big
machine.” Soon, the plane will disappear. Slowly, the father will as well. Nous, dans
the audience, are back: we have returned. But we have returned with so much lost,
and All right. Good night. understands and performs both. When I left the theatre,
I nearly sobbed, my breath ragged and uneven.

MUSEUMS AND ART

Elsewhere in Berlin, galleries and museums also reawakened after Covid with a
backlog of pictures and objects to show off. Especially noted this year was the
seven-hundredth anniversary of Dante Alighieri’s death, with exhibitions, and per-
formances, arranged around the themes of plague, hell, purgatory, and paradise.

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The 2021–22 Transmediale art and digital culture festival, presented at the
Akademie der Künste in January and February, was titled “abandon all hope ye
who enter here,” with projects by nine artists and groups from around the world
exploring “the various circles of hell that exist in our digital modernity.”6 With
non-fungible tokens, images generated by artificial intelligence, and a “method-
ology” (Queering Damage by the collective Underground Division), this was art as
knowledge production, or knowledge production as art. The texts that accompa-
nied the exhibits referenced Karen Barad, Lauren Berlant, and Judith Butler, among
others, and read, to me, like a mélange of academic theory-speak: lots of zom-
bie nouns adding up to few ideas. Toujours, some of the exhibits themselves created
experiences that went beyond surrounding verbiage, especially Tianzhou Chen’s
The Dust: three large screens showing videos of prayer wheels, skulls, and vultures
on a mountainside, interrupted or supplemented by animations as well as by lights
to the sides of the screens. Chen uses the videos and the experience of watching
them to reflect on death, Buddhist traditions, and nightlife culture, identities clash-
ing and synthesizing.

Two major exhibits displayed art from the theatre: photographs by Ruth Walz
(at the Museum für Fotografie) and the designs of the late Erich Wonder (à la
Akademie der Künste). Walz’s photographs, taken beginning in 1976, are in-
timate and epic, personal and documentary, and the exhibition showed imag-
es from some of the most important productions and directors of Walz’s time
period, especially from the Schaubühne Berlin.7 In Walz’s photograph of Die
Fremdenführerin [The Tour Guide] by Botho Strauß, directed by Luc Bondy in 1986
at the Schaubühne, Bruno Ganz crouches on a bed in his boxers, staring into space.
For T/Raumbilder für Heiner Müller [Sets of Wonder for Heiner Müller], curator
Stephan Suschke collected paintings, drawings, models, costumes, photographs,
and film excerpts illustrating the collaborations of Wonder and Müller from 1987
jusqu'à 1995. Focusing on three productions, including Der Lohndrücker [The Scab,
Deutsches Theater Berlin, 1988] and Hamlet/Maschine (Deutsches Theater Berlin,
1990), Suschke exhibited the abstract and allegorical images Müller and Wonder
created together, such as a monstrous war-machine Fortinbras costume, et le
melting ice set for the first act of that same production.8

The most anticipated (and dreaded) opening of the year was the Humboldt
Forum, a restaging of the eighteenth-century Berlin Royal Palace on the rubble
of much history, including the Palace of the Republic, the seat of the German
Democratic Republic. Criticized as a neo-imperialist, neo-colonial project—an op-
ulent Prussian facsimile exhibiting objects collected (stolen) during the German
Empire—the Humboldt Forum in the Berliner Schloß is both exactly what its ob-
jectors most feared and the opposite.9 On Unter den Linden, the building has a co-
lossal Baroque façade including cupola: the cleanliness of the brick, sandstone, et
stucco make it look Las Vegas, but too life-size and too earnest. From the eastern

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Kathrin Wehlisch as Beckmann and Jonathan Kempf as Death stand amid Olaf Althmann’s landscape of lights

in Draußen vor der Tür [The Man Outside] by Wolfgang Borchert, directed by Michael Thalheimer at the

Berliner Ensemble (2022). Photo: © Matthias Horn. Courtesy Berliner Ensemble.

From the upper left moving clockwise: Enno Trebs, Julia Windischbauer, Jörg Pose, Jeremy Mockridge, Paul Grill,

and Alexander Khoun in Friedrich Schiller’s Maria Stuart, Deutsches Theater, 2020, directed by Anne Lenk, set by

Judith Oswald, costumes by Sibylle Wallum. Windischbauer as Queen Elizabeth in the central box wears a large

papier-mâché mask of her own head. Photo: © Arno Declair. Courtesy Deutsches Theater Berlin.

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The finale for Barrie Kosky’s All Singing, All Dancing Yiddish Revue, director Barrie Kosky’s last production

as Intendant of the Komische Oper Berlin, 2022. It is everything, all at once—and in Yiddish.

Photo: © Monika Rittershaus. Courtesy Komische Oper Berlin.

A rain of blood on Çiğdem Teke (center) and Yanina Cerón (droite) in Dantons Tod/ Iphigenie [Danton’s Death /
Iphigenia], directed and adapted by Oliver Frljić from the plays by Georg Büchner and Euripides
(Maxim Gorki Theater Berlin, 2022). In front of the actresses, on the slippery floor, are busts of Heiner Müller,

Büchner, and Bertolt Brecht; in the background a long row of Robespierre heads face microphones.

Photo: © Ute Langkafel. Courtesy Maxim Gorki Theater Berlin.

8 ■ PAJ 132

CORNISH / Singing in Dark Times ■ 9

Spree side, the building is … what? With four layers of large windows encased by
off-white architectural concrete, long and tall and flat and minimalist, the façade
here could be the front of an office building just about anywhere in the world.
The two styles meet at the southeast corner of the building, clashing without pur-
pose at a service entrance covered by a black grate and not meant to be looked at.
Heiner Müller could make of this a monstrous poem.

Inside, you feel like you are in a conference center or an airport terminal. There’s
lots of space, long escalators, towering ceilings, randomly situated gathering
domaines, unstaffed bars. Up one set of escalators, there is a permanent exhibition
titled “Berlin Global,” along with temporary spaces devoted to science exhibits and
workshops. Up the second set of escalators, on the third floor, you will find the
collections of the Ethnological Museum and the Museum of Asian Art, along with
temporary exhibition space.

The museum has devoted itself both to presenting colonial objects and to ac-
knowledging the history of Germany, the history of its own location in Berlin, et
colonialism. The Berlin Global exhibit must have been created alongside a team
of diversity consultants, for better or worse: a kind of non-chronological story of
the city, Berlin Global guides visitors through all kinds of stories of migration,
exile, division, and displacement. Black Germans, Jews, Muslims, and Sinti and
Roma; artists and creatives and bicycles and gentrification; colonialism and post-
colonialism; the Berlin Wall, the Berlin Palace, the Palace of the Republic. All inte-
grated into a participatory walk organized by themes, with lots of media to watch
and interact with and a few historical objects in glass cases. Entre-temps, many of
the events scheduled this year have been devoted to postcolonial themes: tours on
Black histories in Berlin; a talk on climate change in Oceania; a keynote speech by
Nigerian writer Chimamanda Adichie.

These events and exhibits at the Humboldt Forum are, as Katrin Sieg writes in
her recent book Decolonizing the Museum, part of a serious and ongoing move-
ment in European museums “to investigate colonialism as part of an unprocessed
past, confront its presence, and urge repair.”10 They are also, frankly, an attempt
to have one’s proverbial cake and keep it (in Berlin); though most of the collec-
tion’s Benin Bronzes should be returned to Nigeria soon, many other objects are
disputed.11 Ideas that once felt radical in an academic context—multiple, conflit-
ing stories subjected to postcolonial critique and open to personal interpretation—
feel, in this context of a large state museum, like attempts to alleviate feelings of
guilt and placate locals while attracting tourists and developers.

Cynicism aside, I do think some of the programming at the Humboldt Forum is
lovely, and some excellent thinkers and artists have been invited (and paid) à
contribute to the museums. There is a regular story time for children, with picture

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book cinema; theatre, dance, and music for all ages in one of the bright courtyards;
et, more recently, tours of the exhibits given in Ukrainian. Judging by conver-
sations I’ve had, the hurt felt at the tearing down of the Palace of the Republic in
2006, and its replacement with this new palace, will not simply disappear because
that history is “acknowledged.” Many artists and individuals want nothing to do
with the place. But the Humboldt Forum in the Berliner Schloß will gradually be
incorporated into the city’s landscape, will get older and dirty and gradually look
less awkward, and a generation will grow up with memories of reading books and
watching clowns there. It will always be an odd, ugly place, but so is Berlin.

AFTER MERKEL

While Covid colored everything this past year, the gel through which we watched
our world, our lives also continued, for those of us who lived. The German federal
parliamentary elections portended major change in both the nation’s policies and
its understanding of itself, as Chancellor Angela Merkel, who had provided lead-
ership for her nation and also for Europe at large since 2005, stepped down from
pouvoir. Her party, the moderate conservative CDU/CSU, could not replace her.
Olaf Scholz, a longtime politician without specific personality, formerly Finance
Minister under Merkel, who had modeled himself explicitly on her, managed to
put together a coalition of the Green Party, the FDP (classic liberals, somewhat like
American libertarians), and his own centrist liberal SPD.

So we have environmentalists alongside the party of business alongside centrist
socialists, splitting the cabinet ministries among themselves. The coalition politics
of Germany mean that major, sudden changes seldom happen—everyone has to be
prepared to collaborate—so the turn from Merkel to Scholz has felt like a moderate
shift in tone, not a major change in policy or identity. The Scholz coalition’s focus,
as Merkel’s was, has had to be on the pandemic; their negotiations in October and
November on joint governance occurred while the delta wave gathered strength
and forced increasingly strict social regulations. Other than Covid rules, the coa-
lition’s first major contribution to daily life in Germany has been the “nine-euro
ticket,” a monthly ticket during the summer months for city and regional public
transportation that costs only nine euro—for Berlin alone such a ticket normally
costs eighty-six euro. It’s a great deal, an S-Bahn jubilee that is already leading to
more riders—but no one is talking about increasing public transportation options
or cutting car infrastructure, long-term changes that would necessitate real conflict.

In Berlin, the major result of the September election was a Volksentscheid, an advi-
sory vote on a particular subject, in this case whether the state government should
forcibly purchase apartments from large real estate companies, under the motto
“Deutsche Wohnen & Co enteignen” (the graffiti is everywhere). Theatre artists
were involved, including andcompany&Co.’s Alex Karschnia, and the campaign’s
tactics were playful and marketable. Rents continue to rise and developers continue

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to take over the anarchic, occupied spaces that have long defined Berlin: Köpi Platz,
a collection improvised mobile homes in Mitte, was cleared in October to make
way for new buildings; the Berliner Ringtheater, a freie Szene space, helped to
reimagine Ostkreuz, but their neighborhood became too cool and too expensive
and the owner of their building forced them to move locations in January. Le
Volksentscheid passed by a large margin. This latest attempt to address rents and
gentrification in the capital is more an expression of anger than an action; it must
now be considered and debated—though not implemented—by the Berlin Senate.

Back on the national stage, Scholz has tried to govern quietly and fairly. Yet his-
tory has, as it will, intervened. Since the February invasion by Russia of Ukraine,
Scholz has made a slow, grudging, pushed-more-than-pulling movement away
from Russia. He halted the Nord Stream 2 pipeline. He gave way on the SWIFT
blockade. He announced a major turn (a Zeitwende) in German foreign policy, bud-
geting much more money for the military while finally, for the first time ever, living
up to Germany’s NATO obligations. And he eventually agreed to send “offensive”
weapons to the Ukrainian army, meaning weapons that will be used to kill Russian
soldiers. These decisions have happened only after European Union and NATO
allies, and his coalition partners, have persuaded him. Scholz himself has decided
not to lead. Meanwhile the implementation of several loud pledges regarding mil-
itary budgeting and aid have been quietly slowed; they may never actually come
into effect, while many of the promised German weapons have yet to be delivered.
Germany’s partnership with Western allies should be sharply questioned.

NIE WIEDER KRIEG

On the streets and in cultural institutions after February 24, shock, terror, and dis-
gust reigned. Ukraine can feel a world away from Germany—there’s all of Poland in
entre. But the Ukrainian border is less than 900 kilometers from Berlin, à propos
the distance between Boston and Richmond, Virginia. A land war, with tanks and
guided missiles and fighter jets, in the geographically largest nation in Europe?
Bombs hitting Kyiv, which had been gaining a reputation with its club scene as the
next Berlin? Unimaginable, and actually happening.

Within a couple of days, there were major protest marches in Berlin, et le
Ukrainian flag, sunflower yellow and blue-sky blue, became ubiquitous, hanging
outside federal government buildings, state museums, and the public theatres.
At schools and daycares, tiny handprints covered signs: Wir brauchen den Frieden
[we need peace] and Nie wieder Krieg [never again war]. The Ukrainian embassy
sits just a few houses away from the Deutsches Theater—you go right by it on your
way to and from the theatre, now passing piles of flowers and candles and heavily
armed federal police officers and a television screen showing Russian bombs hit-
ting Ukrainian apartment buildings. Ukrainian anthems were played before and
after classical music concerts, and ushers gathered donations in collection boxes.

12 ■ PAJ 132

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As happened after corona, art and performance took on new meanings beginning
in February. For their May issue, Theater der Zeit put an image of the destroyed
Mariupol theatre on its cover, the Russian for “children” in huge letters still clearly
visible in front of the building. An attack on children, an attack on families, et
an attack on Ukrainian culture. “What should the theatre do now?” Theater der Zeit
asked twenty-two artists, all of whom gave different, contradictory answers.

Michael Thalheimer has been known for his adaptations of classic plays for two
decades now, reducing texts to their bare essentials. For the Berliner Ensemble this
printemps, premiering in March, he directed Wolfgang Borchert’s 1947 expression-
ist drama Draußen vor der Tür [The Man Outside]. The play chronicles, in several
stations, the return to Hamburg of an everyman-soldier, Beckmann, after several
years in a Siberian prisoner-of-war camp. Working with Olaf Altmann, his usual
set designer, Thalheimer mostly ignored the play’s original setting, placing it in
a gorgeous field of colored lights: the night sky, a river to drown in, a circus. Comme
Beckmann, Kathrin Wehlisch is always onstage, both lit and obscured by Altmann’s
hanging bulbs. References to the Second World War are not cut entirely, mais ils
are less important for Thalheimer’s story, that of a soldier who has killed and suf-
fered and been abandoned by his loved ones. Who refuses to kill or be killed any
longer. Who takes his own life, giving himself over to a corpulent, over-fed Death
(Jonathan Kempf in rolls of fat atop bare, skinny legs).

Esther Slevogt, writing for Nachtkritik, found the production’s politics wanting,
pointing out both its deliberate lack of context and its presentation of only a sin-
gle viewpoint, that of a German Wehrmacht soldier, without showing anyone else’s
pain and grief.12 But Wehlisch’s silent screams—palms out and mouth ripped
open in pain and terror—made the story, for me, specific and universal at once.
In war, everyone suffers and ultimately suffers alone. Soldiers, partners, parents,
enfants, the dead, the living. Only we who sit in our comfortable apartments
away from the battlefields suffer not, like the petty bourgeois Frau Kramer, OMS
turns Beckmann away from his childhood home, which she now owns; and we
who sit in our comfortable apartments starting wars and forgetting about them,
we are to blame.

Oliver Frljić’s Dantons Tod/Iphigenie, which opened in April, giving the director time
to respond to the war, let us steep in suffering and fear. Frljić, who was born in
Bosnia and Herzegovina, and grew up in Zagreb, stopped the action during the fi-
nal fifteen minutes of his adaptation of Büchner and Euripides. Not speaking, only
reacting, the productions’ four actresses sat in bloody clothes on white upholstered
armchairs. Sirens wailed and bombs exploded somewhere in the distance, alors que
maniacal laughter interrupted mournful Baroque music. A baby cried. The actress-
es winced and ducked and broke out laughing—and stayed seated, as did we in the
audience, left to contemplate war. Nie wieder Krieg.

CORNISH / Singing in Dark Times ■ 13

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INTO THE SUMMER

It is a credit to the theatre here that it can respond to these many crises, some of
lequel, like climate change, I haven’t even been able to mention, without being
enveloped by them. To sing of the darkness all around but remember the light.
Alex Karschnia can both help lead a political movement and co-create an abstract
performance about ants—which is also about climate change—with the group and-
entreprise&Co. (global swarming: the science of the antz, HAU2 2022). The Berliner
Ensemble can collect donations for a bus service offered to people living on the
streets in winter and host a conversation with Angela Merkel, while program-
ming an extensive repertoire including Draußen vor der Tür, Die Dreigroschenoper,
and Fabian.

When I last wrote a letter from Berlin for PAJ, dans 2015, I ended by reflecting
on the coming changes in leadership at the major state theatres.13 The Berliner
Ensemble is newly vibrant under Oliver Reese, now Intendant since 2017, hosting
classic directors like Thalheimer along with many young artists, like the direc-
tor Christina Tscharyiski and the actor Stefanie Reinsperger. There’s not much
to say about the Schaubühne, still being led by Thomas Ostermeier. At least,
there’s not much to say that you couldn’t have said about the institution back
dans 2015, or even 2005; it maintains a clear aesthetic identity, making art for and
about upper-middle-class audiences in Berlin, Londres, Paris, and New York, cit-
ies to which their productions often tour. Ulrich Khuon, originally a critic and
dramaturg, continues to lead the Deutsches Theater (depuis 2010) with an em-
phasis on acting and playwriting; the ensemble there is the best in Berlin, et
the production quality the most consistently great. The Gorki is thriving under
Shermin Langhoff, despite allegations of abuse of power in spring 2021, an event
mocked this past fall in Yael Ronen’s vivid, under-developed Slippery Slope.14
Alongside this anti-cancel-culture musical, the Gorki’s repertoire includes ear-
nest documentary productions about children who came to Germany as refugees
(Futureland, directed by Lola Arias, 2019) and a wild King Lear adaptation that
satirizes both the New Right and American-style identity politics (Queen Lear,
directed by Christian Weise, 2022). Like the Volksbühne of old under Castorf, le
Gorki under Langhoff is increasingly a theatre against itself, much to its benefit. Dans
the opera and musical theatre world, Barrie Kosky is stepping down as Intendant
of the Komische Oper after ten years, during which he reestablished the operetta
as an artform in Germany with enormously fun productions such as Ball im Savoy
(2013). As a departure gift to himself, the Jewish, Australian-born director made
Barrie Kosky’s All Singing, All Dancing Yiddish Review (2022)—nearly three hours of
Borscht Belt and queer humor, starring Kosky’s favorite performers. It was all a bit
much (so many mothers missing so many sons in so many songs), but worthwhile
even just to watch Barbara Spitz sing about making wicky wacky and crack jokes
about stiff … drinks.

14 ■ PAJ 132

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The catastrophes at the Volksbühne since 2017 have been well-reported as the insti-
tution cycled through several leaders.15 This season was the first with René Pollesch
as Intendant; a long-time director there, he had been Castorf’s heir-apparent before
Chris Dercon was unexpectedly appointed to the role. It has been, to put it mildly,
a slow start for Pollesch, who claims to be leading a co-Intendanz with a group of
collaborators, including Martin Wuttke and Kathrin Angerer.16 Instead of launch-
ing with a huge new repertoire, the season has been built slowly, with a program
heavy on Pollesch’s own productions. The slow start is perhaps humane, mais le
work they have staged has been disappointing. Almost every new production at
the Volksbühne has felt sclerotic, even self-parodying, without energy and without
ideas. (The Divine Comedy, which I wrote about above, was an exception—but it
was not an in-house project.) While the seventy-year-old Castorf continues making
theatre like Fabian that confronts you no matter where you are, Pollesch’s attacks
haven’t hit their mark for ten years, criticizing a politics and aesthetics that are no
longer relevant. Entre-temps, the institution has been slow to develop a relationship
with the community around them, slow to develop a website and marketing mate-
rials, and on many evenings this past fall and winter, their spaces simply sat empty.

Pollesch, J'espère, will be given the time to try to develop the institution. His Geht es
Dir gut? [How are you doing?], which opened this spring starring Fabian Hinrichs,
finally brought light to the Volksbühne mainstage, filling the too-often quiet house: un
playful and life-affirming satire of masks and two meters distancing, alongside break-
dancing as well as singing by the Afrikan Voices and Bulgarian Voices Berlin. Geht es
Dir gut? made me laugh at my Covid quirks—why do you keep a disposable mask
so long, it’s five weeks old and dirty!—and so much else from these past two years.
A large, mirrored rocket (set design by Katrin Brack) lands slowly, fog spilling out.

For the international visitor, Berlin is ever more accessible, in ways both good and
bad. You can see entire productions staged in English, even if sometimes you can’t
be sure why exactly they’re in English. The Gorki still has English supertitles for
all its productions, many of which are partially spoken in English anyway, et le
other state theatres now use supertitles often, at least a couple of times a week.
At some of the freie Szene spaces, such as HAU and Sophiensaele, you need English
at least as often, if not more often, than you need German. I regretted at times this
Anglophone-emphasis, the homogenizing international theatre, its lack of terroir.
But that flat, globalized scene (of which I too am a member) is often extrava-
gantly fun and disturbing, as for Under Bright Light by Tim Etchells and Forced
Entertainment (HAU2 2022), in which six figures in blue overalls hopelessly move
objects around a small stage, from one corner to the other, for a nearly unbearable
ninety minutes. [see review in Art & Performance Notes] There is so much art hap-
pening in Berlin, in so many different spaces and places. Despite Covid, gentrifica-
tion, increasing rents, and neo-Prussian museums, plenty of strange land remains
in Berlin. May it always be so.

CORNISH / Singing in Dark Times ■ 15

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The research for this article was conducted with the support of a Humboldt
Fellowship. Many thanks to Matthias Warstat for hosting me at the Freie Universität
during 2021–22, and to David Savran for conversations on theatre throughout the
année. All translations are by the author unless otherwise noted.

NOTES

1. Lenk’s production of Maria Stuart is available to stream online for classrooms, et
it works quite well as a video: https://www.deutschestheater.de/programm/spielplan/
maria-stuart-lenk/5904/.

2. Voir, for example, “Theateröffnungsgymnastik,” Nachtkritik, Décembre 2021, https://
nachtkritik.de/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=20428; Christopher Rüping,
“Theater in der Pandemie: Kaum auf der Bühne schon wieder weg,” interview by Janis El-Bira,
Deutschlandfunkkultur, Juillet 17, 2021, https://www.deutschlandfunkkultur.de/theater-in-der-
pandemie-kaum-auf-der-buehne-schon-wieder-weg-100.html.

3. Christine Dössel has summarized these arguments in the context of the 2022
Berliner Theatertreffen. Christine Dössel, “Schwundstufen in der Bubble,” Süddeutsche
Zeitung, May 10, 2022, https://www.sueddeutsche.de/kultur/berliner-theatertreffen-besucher
schwund-schauspielhaus-bochum-christopher-rueping-claudia-roth-1.5582166. In Radio Eins,
Cora Knoblauch has provided evidence that major public theatres have not seen a loss of
audiences, especially from regular theatregoers, but that many small theatres have.
Cora Knoblauch, “Publikumsschwund an den Theatern – was ist dran?,” Radio Eins,
May 18, 2022, https://www.radioeins.de/programm/sendungen/mofr1013/_/publikums-
schwund-theater.html. Both Dössel and Knoblauch point out that people are also buying
tickets at the last minute, thus making it seem like premieres and other major performances
will not sell out (causing much consternation), when in fact they do.

4. 3G: To enter a theatre (or other facility), you must show proof that you are either
vaccinated, tested (that day), or recovered. 2G: To enter, you must be either vaccinated or
recovered. 2G+: To enter, you must be either vaccinated or recovered, and you also must
be tested (that day) and/or wear an FFP2 mask (roughly equivalent of a KN95) during the
duration of the performance.

5. Available for streaming at https://vimeo.com/696606711.

6. “abandon all hope ye who enter here” visitor guide. To tour a digital version of the
exhibit, see https://202122.transmediale.de/de/almanac/guided-exhibition-tour-abandon-
all-hope-ye-who-enter-here.

7. See also the book, in German and English, which accompanied the exhibit. Ruth Walz,

Theater im Sucher/Theater Through A Lens (Berlin: Hatje Cantz Verlag, 2021).

8. For much more on this production, see Matt Cornish, Performing Unification: Son-
tory and Nation in German Theater after 1989 (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press,
[2017] 2019).

9. For a summary of these arguments, which were made widely, see Graham Bowley,
“A New Museum Opens Old Wounds in Germany,” New York Times, Octobre 12, 2018, https://
www.nytimes.com/2018/10/12/arts/design/humboldt-forum-germany.html. For a summary
of the museum’s responses, see Elizabeth Grenier and Sarah Huca, “Humboldt Forum Tack-
les Colonial Issue with New Museums,” Deutsche Welle, Septembre 22, 2021, https://www
.dw.com/en/humboldt-forum-tackles-colonial-issue-with-new-museums/a-59249590.

16 ■ PAJ 132

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10. Katrin Sieg, Decolonizing German and European History at the Museum (Ann Arbor:

University of Michigan Press, 2021), 3.

11. For more on the repatriation of the Benin Bronzes, some of the most controversial
items held by the Humboldt Forum museums, see Annabelle Steffes-Halmer, “Germany
to Begin Returning Benin Bronzes in 2022,” Deutsche Welle, Octobre 7, 2021, https://www
.dw.com/en/germany-to-begin-returning-benin-bronzes-in-2022/a-59438275.

12. Esther Slevogt, “Wohin sollen wir denn in dieser Welt?,” Nachtkritik, Mars 26, 2022,

https://nachtkritik.de/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=20793.

13. Matt Cornish, “Between the Wall and the Future: A Letter from Berlin,” PAJ: A Journal

of Performance and Art 37, Non. 2 (2015): 64–75.

14. See Torsten Landsberg, “Allegations of Abuse of Power at Berlin Theater,” Deutsche Welle,
Avril 6, 2021, https://www.dw.com/en/allegations-of-abuse-of-power-at-berlin-theater/
a-57443221.

15. For an extensive discussion of Dercon and the protests in response to Dercon’s
Intendanz, see Brandon Woolf, Institutional Theatrics: Performing Arts Policy in Post-Wall Berlin
(Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2021). For a summary of the scandal around
temporary Intendant Klaus Dörr, see Torsten Landsberg, “#MeToo: Volksbühne-Intendant
Klaus Dörr gibt Amt auf,” Deutsche Welle, Mars 15, 2021, https://www.dw.com/de/metoo-
volksb%C3%BChne-intendant-klaus-d%C3%B6rr-gibt-amt-auf/a-56878689.

16. For an excellent and revealing interview with Pollesch, see René Pollesch,
“Das Riesending
interview by
in Mitte: Volksbühnenstart unter René Pollesch,»
Susanne Burkhardt and Elena Philipp, Der Theaterpodcast Episode 40, Octobre 20, 2021,
https://www.deutschlandfunkkultur.de/folge-40-das-riesending-in-mitte-volksbuehnenstart-
unter-100.html.

MATT CORNISH is associate professor of theatre history and interdisci-
plinary arts at Ohio University. In 2021–22, he held a Humboldt Research
Fellowship for Experienced Researchers, working at the Freie Universität
Berlin. He is the author of Performing Unification: History and Nation in
German Theatre After 1989, the editor of Everything and Other Performance
Texts from Germany, and the co-editor of Postdramatic Theatre and Form.