German Opera Berlin | Richard Wagner, Milo Rau and the “Eternal Jew”

There's a subtle way: Milo Rau hijacks Wagner's "Flying Dutchman" at the Deutsche Oper Berlin. Photo: Matthias Horn At the very end, when the last singing note has long since fallen silent, Milo Rau gives the floor to a Palestinian artist via video recording: There is always something narcissistic about guilt. Instead, he pleads for responsibility.

This advice is probably not entirely new. And one would hope that it is one last spark of self-irony that Rau ignites for the audience on this otherwise pathetic serious evening. The entire production is ultimately just a testimony to the boundless narcissism of this theater maker. With almost missionary zeal, the director imposes his absurd interpretation on Wagner's work and his blustering opinion on the audience.

No, you will look in vain for self-irony or even just a critical minimum distance from yourself and the absolute truth that you have held for yourself for life. But first things first.

Milo Rau, for whom no world crisis is too big for an evening at the theater, sought to engage with Richard Wagner for the first time. The Deutsche Oper Berlin under its new artistic director Aviel Cahn gave him space and time for this. Last Saturday, “The Flying Dutchman,” this “romantic opera in three acts,” celebrated its premiere in his direction.

It had already been heard in advance from various quarters that not only would a classic from the musical theater canon be staged, but also a commentary in the form of an opera on the Holocaust, on German history, and on the Middle East conflict. So there was a risk that a denial of dramaturgical complexity and calculated provocation would drown out every song and every orchestral sound.

Rau added a prologue and an intertext (before the beginning of the third act) to Wagner's opus. The stage belongs to the performer* Shlomi Moto Wagner [sic!] and the actress Sarah von Schwarze. He* was born in Israel, but lives in Berlin and is responsible for instant concerts in which Richard W. is given in public spaces in Israel. She was born in Munich but grew up in Israel as the daughter of two German converts. He* is the descendant of Shoah survivors, she is the granddaughter of a Wehrmacht officer. These are interesting biographies, sure, but they are probably only partially suitable for making general statements about German-Israeli relations.

In the theater, every character is always a representative of their own world. Milo Rau also lets the actors vouch for the roles that are intended for them on stage with their own personal stories. This is not a new invention in theater, but this ultimately manipulative method is exploited here.

The singers are also identified by keywords using surtitles: Who comes from which country? Whose family might have been displaced (from where and for whatever reason)? Rau's dramaturgy is intended to give the impression of something inevitable.

Everything that was to follow was just a foolhardy construction in which you can see the effort put into it. Rau's schematic worldview is reflected in the use of The Flying Dutchman as a model with which the director believes he can deal morally with the Middle East conflict.

The daring figure drawing is once again unmistakably instilled in the audience by projection - not to say armed with a staged mallet: The Flying Dutchman, that is "The German Guilt" in the German Opera; Senta stands for “The Torn Soul of Israel”; her father Daland is “The Founding Father of Israel” and her fiancé Erik is “The Proud Palestinian People.”

It must also have dawned on the director that myths like the one about the Flying Dutchman cannot be transferred one-to-one into such abstract classifications in contemporary history. Hardly a line of the libretto, hardly a piece of the music fits what must have already been conceived far away from a rehearsal stage. That's why the focus is shifted from what's happening on stage to the continuous video projections at almost any time. The musical drama on stage does not take place.

Pictures of Haifa, the border area with Gaza, and Jerusalem can be seen. We follow the artistic team on their research trip through the Middle East. A 102-year-old man is shown in close-up. As a child he fled with his parents from the extermination terror of the Nazis and has been at home in Israel for 90 years. Milo Rau makes everything that comes across the screen his own for the rather simple story that he is compelled to tell.

Shlomi Moto Wagner can be seen again and again in the video recordings performing Wagner interpretations in Israel: in train stations, on the street, in kibbutzim. In fact, Richard Wagner is, to a certain extent, taboo in Israel. His anti-Semitism is inscribed in many of his works. The composer was fanatically revered under the swastika. But the unofficial Wagner spell has already been broken. And why Berlin has to change listening habits in the Middle East, again with missionary zeal, remains a mystery. It seems as if the whole world needs to be redeemed through Wagner.

The fact that Richard Wagner once called his Flying Dutchman an Ahasuerus, the "eternal Jew", cursed to restlessly wander, may have given Rau another reason for his daring interpretation. But the director apparently enjoys being in constant proximity to taboos anyway.

His interpretation of the “Dutch” material remains rather clumsy. From the founding of the state of Israel and the expulsion of Palestinians in the first act, the second act moves on to the 1972 Olympics in Munich, which became a shocking event when Israeli athletes were taken hostage. The Palestinian terrorists on the stage of the German Opera look pretty cute.

In the third act, the German confrontation with history is discussed in an inadmissibly shortened manner based on the construction of the Berlin Holocaust Memorial. On the stage you can see German and Israeli dignitaries celebrating themselves, and a somewhat tasteless miniature memorial has been erected. This is where memories are to be buried and suffering in the present is to be covered up. Palestinian solidarity activists are accordingly driven away from the scene.

This production leaves little room for self-thinking. The opera evening seems particularly clumsy in its handling of sensitive topics. If it is conducive to the visual dramaturgy, Yad Vashem is shown as illustration with the same clarity as images from the Israeli beach coast.

At all costs this opera should be forced into the narrow framework of a simple worldview. In his obsessive examination of the German "reason of state" or what he wants to understand by it, Rau probably no longer notices what pool of anti-Semitic prejudices he draws from when he lets Daland - we remember: the "founding father of Israel" - sell his daughter for foreign currency.

In the end, everyone really understood it: Because the Germans haven't really come to terms with their mass murderous past and they don't take any "responsibility", the Federal Republic remains passive in the Gaza war. The theater maker is not bothered by the fact that people who also demand a real reappraisal and German “responsibility” sometimes take the opposite position in view of the military situation in the Middle East. For three acts it's about affirmation, not about knowledge.

During the final applause - punctuated by loud boos - a man shouts in his anger: "Shit!", "Assholes!", "Jew-haters!", "Nazis!" You don't have to go that far. But you shouldn't sugarcoat anything either: that evening you were the victim of a theatrical wrong-way driver.

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