Von Käfern und Menschen

Three dead people meet under the ground: Otto, who died in the 4th century while fleeing from the Huns, the guardsman Friedrich Wilhelm August Schmitt, who died in battle against Napoleonic troops, and the music teacher Barbara Stölzl, who has just been killed in a bicycle accident. Surrounded by lichen, cockroaches and beetles, the three eke out an existence as virtual holograms of their past existence: no longer materially participating in life, but only present in the world through remnants, traces and legacies. Their visibly escalating conflict about how to deal responsibly with memories is complemented by the inclusion of interviews that the production team conducted with experts on data tracking, preservation and transgenerational inheritance. Thus, from the humus of civilization emerges the panorama of an increasingly porous democracy that faces unimagined challenges from the techniques of digital storage. Does the idea of a participatory public have to be reformatted in an age that has mechanically abolished forgetting?

Following its successful production of Die Orestie (nominated for the 2021 Cologne Theater Prize), the team around director Kathrin Mayr gathers once again to follow the traces of human archetypes from the past into a possible future. With the text by playwright Clemens Mädge, written especially for the Theater im Bauturm, and video interludes from the expert interviews, a polyphonic panorama of remembrance emerges that connects such diverse topics as epigenetics, archaeology, provenance research and artificial intelligence - and does not lose sight of the organizational challenges of being dead.