2023-09-28 16:46:38
Like a new Barbie, Rainald Goetz walks in for the “welcome to the final show” lecture followed by an audience discussion about his new piece “Baracke” in a pink-colored stage from top to bottom in the upper foyer of the Deutsches Theater. Goetz seems determined, even if you can tell he wants to please. He’s wearing a bright red Adidas tracksuit, which surprisingly doesn’t look new at all, even though the author provides a very up-to-date justification for his outfit. As he explains, he copied the tracksuit from the side of the Berlin Marathon last Sunday. Where history was made by Tigist Assefa’s new world record. The tracksuit demonstrates that the writer Goetz is always right at the heart of the action.
This evening he takes the space given to him responsibly, the color of hibiscus blossoms. For a total of 60 minutes, the dynamic Suhrkamp superstar is available to intellectually troubled academics, well-read literary scholars, and authors eager for new text forms in the crowded foyer. Today they are all here. Her eyes light up when Goetz speaks of the “rentrée,” the French word for the start of the new academic year in September. An exclusive word that can only be understood by those who also know its other references. In his lecture he uses Péter Szondi’s theory of drama, names Jonathan Meese and Wolfgang Herrndorf as sources of inspiration for his performance today and provides a list of his inspirations for the piece as a social conflict: “Durkheim, Benjamin, Merton and Coser”.
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These names are now in the room. They are not explained. Of the minutes in exclusive close contact with the author, 20 are dedicated to his lecture and 40 to the audience discussion, it is explained. In exactly the same time as in the seminar, Goetz, 69, who is admirably athletic for his age, slams his bag on the desk and begins to distribute books and pieces of paper on the table. There is a teaching assignment that the lecturer has to fulfill. With the blue rollerball, Goetz makes quick notes in a notebook.
As a spectator, blue
Goetz explains how his piece “Baracke”, which premiered at this house on September 22nd, is structured and what motivated him to write it. It is the first of his nine plays to date to have its premiere here in Berlin, he adds, at the start of the Deutsches Theater’s season. He sat in the audience at two performances. In a blue sweater and jeans, not yet in the bright costume.
The play is about Bea, Ramin and Uwe, who form a love triangle and somehow become a family from a party community with museum visits and violent excesses. This family is recreated on a second level within the piece in an abstract family. It has four acts: “Party,” “Love,” “Friends,” and “Family.”
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Goetz was not at the rehearsals. About the piece he says it was given directly to the author by the world. And he passed the text on directly to the theater. After that he had nothing more to do with it. In this case, passing on his text to the theater would have worked well. He was very happy with the production. And so he reads out the names of everyone involved in the production again. They “grabbed the piece and threw it on the stage”. A rare “epiphany of the theater” was created.
History as myth
Goetz also goes into the content of his piece in the lecture. The play itself is about a single theme: “Family and violence”. These simple, archaic topics interested him. For him it is a “primal intuition” that family and violence belong together. If you’re lucky, the family you end up with won’t have anything to do with it. On the one hand, there is “the sexuality, the high pressure”, and on the other hand, the “excessive closeness of the characters” due to the genes. The background against which the piece takes place is the noughties. Those years in which the “real causes” of the torture at Abu Ghraib and the NSU murders lie. A “world eclipse” that only occurred for Goetz after the “Summer Fairy Tale of 2006” – shocking for him – and caused the “ground of history” to shake. Goetz dealt with Abu Ghraib in the previous piece to “Baracke”, “Empire of Death”. “Recent history is my myth,” he says.
“Barracke” should not become another political social piece. There should only be a “diffuse presence” of the political. It’s about the journey from falling in love to love, from friendship to family. Goetz convincingly explains his “floating style”. The banality of everyday life is always paired with the inextricably political aspect of the family. That’s why the piece is dedicated to everything: there are relationship dialogues, there are theoretical monologues, a receipt is read out. In this sense, “Baracke” is also a romantic piece, one might think, because for Goetz it is about nothing less than love as the “prehistory of reality” of each individual.
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He cannot write without “maximizing what is interesting.” In Goetz’s usage, “reviving” means not only transforming the experience of everyday life into text, but also the truth and politics that correspond to it. The political urges Goetz, “words become text in order to find peace in them.” Experience thus becomes a text and then a “world of words, moved towards the opposite,” because the text again produces new truths and politics. And why the slapstick, you ask? He describes himself on stage as a “soldier of his art”, but also as a “joke figure”. In the piece, the receipt from Rewe City is read out. A type of text that is intended to replace the monologue, as he says in the lecture.
There was definitely laughter in the piece. Parents in particular, who recognized themselves in the madness of the family, in the stupidity of the family members at the dinner table and the failure of all attempts at parenting, laughed. It explains with gentleness how one grows into the family, how it suddenly creates itself without one being able to foresee the consequences. But you don’t want to miss them, you can’t, because you now have children who are the most wonderful things in the world. Goetz conveys this convincingly in the text.
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The piece is too long, says Goetz during the lecture. It is a “brain physiological fact” that you cannot concentrate for longer than 45 minutes. Art must be understandable. This is the highlight of his talk. Because even if you have to have attended at least one preparatory course in the humanities to use the word “rentrée” correctly, this does not apply to his piece or his lecture. Even if Rainald Goetz wants to please academics, and he obviously succeeds, you don’t need to recognize all the references to understand the piece. The lecture oscillates between helpful explanations and exuberant references to figures from the humanities and social sciences. But if you take away the mental search for references that is obviously already eating him up, you get a distilled art experience that is fulfilling either way. No one needs to have read Szondi or “Durkheim, Benjamin, Merton and Coser” to understand the philosophical content of the piece. It simply says: Family is violence.
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