Motor (UA)

A post-truth farce from the Frankfurt secondary school

How does one stage a didactic play today? The art collective Frankfurter Hauptschule—which gained fame with the“Bad Beuys go Africa”campaign and was awarded the Authors’ Prize at the Heidelberg Stückemarkt—answers with its usual humorous hubris in its new play,MOTOR: By placing themselves in the same league as Bertolt Brecht and Heiner Müller. 

Brecht’s*Maßnahme*premiered in 1930; 45 years later, Müller’s response,*Mauser*, premiered. Both works address the issue of violence within the left—once before the revolution, once after. Now, after a similar span of time, the collective responds to both didactic plays and asks: What does this have to do with us today? 

Not only are Brecht’s and Müller’s didactic plays conceived as tragedies, but the development of the Left over time—from the Weimar Republic through divided Germany to the present day—has also unfolded tragically, both in the literal sense of the word—fatal—and in the genre-specific sense —becoming guilty through no fault of its own. This brings us to the lesson for today’s democratic, anti-fascist civil society. Are we complicit in the shift to the right? What have we done to prevent AfD members from being elevated as relevant discussion partners by other parties, companies, and talk shows for the past fifteen years—and fattened up with all of our tax dollars?

The Frankfurt Hauptschule is once again blurring the lines between artistic disciplines and is now premiering its second play. It attempts to use the tools developed by Brecht and Müller to explain where we stand today. An attempt at order that, in various ways, makes the hopeless chaos in which we live tangible: Postmodernism, a grand narrative? Communism, the worst thing that doesn’t exist? Acceleration, the knowledge society, fake news, contemporary art, “I’m a Celebrity… Get Me Out of Here!”, climate collapse, selfie addiction, “Humans of Late Fascism,” the end?

www.staatstheater-kassel.de