Der Auftrag von Heiner Müller / Psyche 17 von Elemawusi Agbédjidji

Translated from the French by Annette Bühler-Dietrich

#dolls #masks #elevators

With a secret mission, the French Revolution is to be extended to the slaveholding colony of Jamaica. Three emissaries are on their way there to throw liberty, equality and fraternity into the world as a "fire torch of freedom". But the European export of values fails. Not only because the characters have not overcome their old roles, but also because the just freshly designed values do not succeed in Europe itself: Napoleon has crowned himself emperor.

The great East German author and linguistically powerful historical metaphorist Heiner Müller, who always sought the traces of his present in the past, performed poetic mourning work in 1980 by writing The Order and showed the failure of a utopia. And today? The European sense of mission is badly tarnished, but still - for example in West Africa - finds no end. Marshall and master plans are still being drafted in European capitals. But from which orders can a just, common future really be developed?

Where Heiner Müller ends in a great, metaphorical declaration of bankruptcy, Jan-Christoph Gockel, who has been working with artists from the African continent for many years, will seek the approach for a new narrative together with the Togolese author Elemawusi Agbédjidji. 43 years after Müller, Agbédjidji writes a contemporary commentary on Müller's Man in the Elevator , who delivers a dreamlike monologue as an enigmatic insertion in the commission. Agbédjidji asks how the elevator left behind, an ancient technology that helped manifest hierarchies, can be used in the future.