Berliner Volksbühne: Fucking on the facade

If you look north along Rosa-Luxemburg-Strasse in the twilight of an autumnal Thursday evening, there is a buzz of excitement in the air. Road closures, crowds of people. On the lawn in the square, curious people sit close together; it smells of Berlin with top notes of late beer, the yuppie perfume Santal 33 and a bit of dog poop. The crowd stares excitedly towards the Volksbühne, whose “real” season is finally to be opened this evening by Florentina Holzinger and her team.

Due to extensive renovations to the upper machinery, this is only happening now. Since the large house had not been playable in the last few weeks, the new director Matthias Lilienthal had put the Volksbad, a 25 meter long swimming pool, on the site in August as the first production of the season - and thus immediately caused a scandal.

Lilienthal is known for starting new projects with projects in public spaces that point out social and infrastructural problems in the respective city. In 2015, when he took over the Münchner Kammerspiele, he built his “Shabbyshabby Apartments” out of scrap materials, in which you could stay overnight in downtown Munich for little money, in order to point out the poor housing market situation there.

In Berlin, it was the sad situation of the inner-city outdoor pools that the Volksbühne wanted to help the black-red Senate. A swimming pool for everyone, that's the promise: free of charge and without ID checks, right in the middle of the city.

This was the first set of complaints in the election campaign heatwave of the silly season: the water is too shallow, the water is wasted, the online booking system is too complicated, and the only thing that will come anyway is the “culture bubble”. This all finally culminated – somewhat surprisingly – in the lamenting speech of a young CDU politician.

On Instagram, the woman complained about discrimination against white people because the swimming pool was an afternoon for Each One Teach One e. V. was reserved, a community-based organization that advocates for the interests of black, African and Afrodiasporic people and therefore did not address them. Thanks to hate-rewarding algorithms, the pain of the privileged has escalated into an unsavory shitstorm. It ended in the cancellation of the event for black children and young people because their safety could no longer be guaranteed.

After that, public interest in the public baths suddenly and exhaustively waned. The online ticket regulations were relaxed, and so in the following two months most visitors were ultimately able to take their short rides undisturbed and often spontaneously throughout the late summer.

Even on Thursday evening the pool was still fenced in and quiet. It's just after 6 p.m., still nothing has happened, the crowd is staring, transfixed. A fragment of one of Holzinger's stage sets sits enthroned on the roof of the Volksbühne: the reclining female torso from Gustave Courbet's painting "The Origin of the World", which appears to have been amputated. Printed and inflated into a giant plastic doll with no limbs and no head.

Then finally the first performers appear on the roof. The crowd, apparently the entire city, falls silent. The electric guitar sounds waving, the words of one of the performers scratching into the microphone. You can barely understand them downstairs, but that doesn't matter. The plot quickly becomes clear: naked people abseil down the building, then clean the facade with white towels and brooms, then fuck: the women writhe in their climbing harnesses in wild copulatory movements.

To the expectedly increasing music, the action reaches its climax (!) in the symbolic peeing (or squirting?) of the Courbet doll on the square, followed by spraying fountains from the pool. A faint cheering from the crowd, a lot of amused corners of the mouth twitching. After just under 20 minutes, the spectacle ends as inconspicuously as it began. Only the white flags that are finally hoisted pose a mystery: Will this be a surrender right from the start? And if so, in front of whom?

The crowd disperses. "I was swimming here again yesterday," someone says, "and a woman with a broad Baden dialect spoke to me. Was I from Berlin? She had already visited the Brandenburg Gate and the Reichstag today, and because she had heard that left-wing extremists would soon take over everything here, she wanted to take a look, which is why she is here now." “So, what did she think of it?” "She was very surprised. Nothing was scary or disgusting, on the contrary. Like here, she would find it really, really great."

Meanwhile, on the roof, the naked origin collapses. Summer is over. The air is out. And perhaps the next debate will be a little more cool.