What can culture and theater do in the face of war? What can it even say or do? The “hopes for the power of peace and dialogue” were “bitterly disappointed” by Putin’s attack, wrote the Hamburg Senator for Culture and President of the German Stage Association Carsten Brosda (SPD) in a statement. The war also aims, he says, “at the opportunities for art and culture to develop freely anywhere in the world.” Because it is precisely these who “can create the basis for peace and understanding across borders.” Brosda hereby calls on what is the basis of our understanding of culture: that art, theater somehow make us better people, violence contained, the probability of peace increases.
Friedrich Schiller wrote about this in his famous Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man vehemently argued, but unfortunately lost more and more faith in it in the course of his life.
That’s actually how I feel right now. The war is not only a shock or shakes one’s own sense of security, it also triggers a profound cultural crisis. In view of a new arms race, also from the German side, which was completely unimaginable up to now, I am thinking less: “Theater – now more than ever!”, but rather “Theater – why now?”.
Ukrainian filmmakers are now taking up arms
The many symbolic solidarity actions and declarations that have been taking place in the theaters since last week have actually reinforced this feeling. Some houses were lit up in the colors of the Ukrainian flag, yellow and blue, and some were the websites. Readings, discussion rounds or concerts were and are spontaneously put on the program because people didn’t want to remain “idle”. Whereby these solidarity actions are probably less useful for the people in Ukraine, but rather serve their own coping strategy, which of course you can’t blame anyone for. This became clearest during a reading at the Gorki Theater in Berlin entitled “Defending the Language Speechlessly”. The theaters, which can often explain everything to us so well, are now standing there without a word.
So as far as the terrible question of the relationship between the artist and war is concerned, there can probably be no answer. In the culture news you can read that the theaters in Ukraine are now caring for the injured and those fleeing, offer their basements as protection against bomb attacks, that theater makers produce Molotov cocktails. Ukrainian filmmakers are now taking up arms instead of their cameras, whereas according to reports in the American trade journal Variety the film actor Sean Penn was “on the ground” in Kyiv to document the raid by the Russian military. Who would say what makes more sense?
These painful contrasts show with glaring clarity that peace is also needed for culture and theater.
“Peace is the be-all and end-all of all philanthropic activity, all production, all arts, including the art of living,” wrote Bertold Brecht and, to commemorate this, had Picasso’s dove of peace painted on the curtain of the Berliner Ensemble. This curtain has now been hung again. Who would have dreamed that?
In this new world situation, I can’t get a production I saw a few weeks ago out of my head. I had traveled to Hamburg to see the sensational performance of Lina Beckmann in the role of the stage monster Richard III. Her game is breathtaking, illuminating the power-hungry cripple so abysmal that it makes you dizzy. But at the same time, how far away this tyrant seemed to me, who murders everything that stands in his way, thinking everything in terms of the deadly logic of maintaining power. A distance that has now given way to a terrible nearness. And how could I think it was all just a game?