2023-10-14 12:30:53
Political theater is often said to do nothing more than campaign with artistic means. Occasionally the prejudice is correct. Almost a year before the state elections in Saxony, the Dresden State Theater is showing a new version of “The Threepenny Opera” that is tailored to Saxon conditions.
While Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill relocated their global success to the London demimonde and underworld, Volker Lösch and Lothar Kittstein feature all sorts of old and new right-wingers from Dresden and the surrounding area – from “Corona deniers” to Free Saxony to the AfD. Lösch is one of the best-known directors of political theater with the Brecht rod; its author Kittstein is also known as the glue activist of the “Last Generation”.
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In “The Threepenny Opera” by Lösch and Kittstein, Peachum is no longer the cynical beggar prince who makes his business of pity, but rather an official of the “Perspective for Germany” party, which uses white letters, a red arrow and a blue background to show its resemblance to the AfD doesn’t even hide. “My business is to arouse human anger – but in moderation!” said Peachum, who organizes protests by “concerned citizens”. Shortly beforehand, he and his wife, both in blue suits, cheerfully beat up a cliché neo-Nazi in a bomber jacket and combat boots. There is no leniency for the business-damaging behavior of freelancers.
The “Nazi” as the final orientation figure
After being rubbed down, the Boot Nazi gets a new costume and slips into the next cliché: checked shirt, sandals with socks and a black, red and gold fishing hat. Now it is a new insight to explain to the audience in 2023 that the new Nazis no longer look like the old ones or that right-wing parties that demand a “spiritual-moral-patriotic turnaround” are not as harmless as they appear However, that is by no means the case. Knowledge would also mean not just sorting things into the same grid – with the strange effect that “Nazi” becomes the last political and moral orientation figure in the democratic monotony.
Novelty, on the other hand, wants to claim the interpretation of Mackie Messer, although it simply comes from the Non-fiction bestseller “Affronted Freedom” copied from Oliver Nachtwey and Carolin Amlinger. Half petty criminal, half hipster, Mackie gathers a colorful group around him, the punky Peachum’s daughter Polly, a spiritual shaman, an old rocker with a mustache and a denim jacket, an aluminum hat wearer, a rainbow hippie, a teacher who doesn’t want to wear a mask – all “conspiracy theorists.” “, who cavort under the flag of “freedom”. For Nachtwey and Amlinger this is called “libertarian authoritarianism”, the new bogeyman in late capitalism.
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To cut a long story short: The members of the motley crew turn out to be solid Nazis who carry out an armed coup with the Kalashnikovs handed out by Police Chief Tiger Brown. “A popular uprising. Dresden first!” exclaims Mackie Messer. Arrested in between, he is eventually pardoned. The PfD wins 58 percent of the votes in the state election, the CDU congratulates and is “ready for constructive discussions”. No trace of a “fire wall”.
“What is a coup against a state election?” continues Brecht’s “What is breaking into a bank versus the founding of a bank?” And Macheath, he has a party register, but you can’t see the party register? In the end, are everyone always Nazis – even the left-wing deviants or ex-leftists?
The intellectual somersault in “libertarian authoritarianism” consists in understanding rebellion against authority as authoritarian – and not the demand to obey it without objection. This becomes a social theoretical crash landing because the internal collapse of authority – whether government or science – does not become the starting point for reflection. So any opposition seems merely ridiculous instead of justified or even necessary.
“My hobby: thinking for myself,” is an evil mockery in “The Threepenny Opera.” But with Kant, enlightenment begins with this. Should it be better to let others think for you? Or stop thinking at all? Anyone who denounces the claim and not its prevented realization is engaging in counter-enlightenment.
The world spirit is left-green
“The Threepenny Opera” faithfully follows the script by Nachtwey and Amlinger: Anyone who rails against financial capitalism and elites must end up with the “Umvolkung”. The same applies to Ostalgie or the talk of “woken discourse guardians” and “cancel culture”. Even “arms madness” becomes a right-wing cipher. It shows that this is a misconception Steffen Maus new Suhrkamp study “Trigger points”.
But the new metaphysics of history says: The world spirit is green-liberal. Anyone who deviates from this must be an enemy of progress. It is unimaginable not to use green and progressive interchangeably. The production can no longer be distinguished from its own image of the enemy of “conspiracy theory” and “whispering”, where the mask-skeptical teacher is hyped up as a threat to democracy – up to and including an armed coup. So the “Reich citizens” should not be missing, the favorite object of border-paranoid projections who create an apocalyptic threat out of half-confused nonsense with manageable danger potential. The problem: Anyone who sees the ultimate threat behind every more or less convoluted anti-government group becomes blind to what is really threatening.
As crazy as it sounds, there is a method to it: many on the left now believe that democracy must be protected from the people and no longer from the interests of those in power. They stand firmly on the side of Chancellor Olaf Scholz, who describes demonstrators as “fallen angels from hell” without a shred of sense in their brains.
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Morality and biology meet in resentment against the mob. In “The Threepenny Opera,” the mustache guy with a mullet – a cliché of the “white trash” underclass – is insulted as a “retarded, stupid, fat pig” who “would have been better off masturbating on the stove.” During the break, students joke while smoking, saying that was their favorite sentence. The disinhibited left-wing bourgeoisie ends up with birth control for the lower classes.
After three hours, the premiere audience, exhausted by unproductive brain acrobatics and dull gymnastics in the Dresden Zwinger stage – is only occasionally revived by the Brecht-Weill songs – and is also maltreated with the appearance of the Zwickau activist Jakob Springfield. The commitment of the 21-year-old author of the book “Among Nazis” is counteracted by the fact that it invokes diffuse cohesion and defensive democracy for the purpose of edification. As if this abstract belief in community, which, in the worst German tradition, always looms over the conflict of selfish interests, wasn’t the true breeding ground of the right.
Nothing but enemy image production
So we learn nothing about how the crisis of democracy, which must be defended by all means, is connected to the old and new right. This borders on sabotaging knowledge.
With the Dresden “Threepenny Opera” there is now clear evidence that political theater in this country is on the brink – from ideological criticism to ideology. On stage nothing but decals and stencils, it is a frightening document of the social theoretical decline of the cultural left.
It is one thing to consider today’s liberalism to be perverted, but it is another thing to find such vulgar criticism of it on the left that does not go beyond producing enemy images. A political theater that can only buy its own election campaign compatibility through such serious sacrifices of reason is betraying the cause that it claims to be its own: the political.
#Left #culture #Authoritarian #antiAfD #theater #WELT