“German Autumn” in Bochum: Germany wallows in melancholy and fear

Most people probably associate the term “German Autumn” with the year 1977: the year of crisis in the Federal Republic when Hanns-Martin Schleyer and the Landshut plane were hijacked in order to free the imprisoned RAF members.

However, this does not occur in Christopher Rüping's production, a co-production between the Ruhrtriennale and the Deutsches Theater Berlin. The basis of the evening is rather the journey of the Swedish reporter Stig Dagermann through war-torn Germany in 1946, who wrote about hunger, misery and desolation in his book “German Autumn”. It deeply impressed the director Rüping.

The stage at the Jahrhunderthalle Bochum is an extreme 80 meters deep - and remains almost empty that evening. Only strange pink pool noodles grow out of the steel beams, huge transparent plastic structures stand on the sides, and a lonely piano waits in the middle. The actress Wiebke Mollenhauer comes from far behind and begins this evening very quietly and delicately. She is plagued by chronic dizziness, she says, and is visiting her father, who has dementia. She tries in vain to reach him: with the old hymn book “Frau Musica”, with piano sounds and folk songs.

Only later do you understand: This father is us, the audience. Representing the German people who have experienced so many German autumns - and yet act strangely oblivious to history in times of the shift to the right. Strange characters join Wiebke Mollenhauer: young campers who sing “Deutscher Herbst” by the Böhse Onkelz, the song with which the band broke away from right-wing rock. A man dressed like Caspar David Friedrich, who quotes from “Frau Musica”. The singer Blümchen in flashing neon fur, a 1990s icon who demands unconditional fandom. And – a fine gentleman in a suit.

Steven Adjei Sowah plays the Swedish author Stig Dagermann, who wanders across the stage in a somewhat astonished and distant manner and talks about the pale fishy faces of the cellar Germans, streams of refugees, tuberculosis, soggy potatoes, bricked-up school buildings and a lost youth. Figures with green masks wander across the stage, ghosts of memory and green screens - projection surfaces of a story that is becoming increasingly blurred and can be charged with many perspectives.

Wiebke Mollenhauer wanders along, questioning, amazed, a little bourgeoisly indignant at times, a naive traveler through a strange world. She repeatedly defends herself against the figures who harass her, trapped in an old trauma that she does not understand but from which she cannot escape.

Only later do we understand: Director Rüping takes us into the head of the main character, the stage is her ear - and the pink pool noodles turn out to be the inner ear hairs that cause the dizziness. This evening, this becomes a symptom of illness and a contemporary diagnosis of a society that is losing orientation, meaning, ground and moving to the right.

The first half of the three and a half hours is dark and melancholic. The actors act casually and rather underwhelmed, stringing associative things together, sometimes random things - just like they get mixed up in their heads. It seems almost banal, chatty, or like children's theater: color codes are listed for minutes. Singer Blümchen writhes on the floor like a catchy tune. Wiebke Mollenhauer talks about the mustard yellow sofa from which she looked at Caspar David Friedrich's painting “Abbey in the Eichwald” as a child. To the dark brass sounds, the actors themselves become monks carrying coffins: Germany wallows in melancholy and fear. It's so sad and gloomy that it almost seems grotesque.

Only after the break does consolation come into play: the audience should sing along to the beautiful folk songs. In a crazy, beautiful moment of intoxication, a gigantic transparent foil structure floats in the room, carried into the air by autumnal leaf blowers. And the great actress Almut Zilcher speaks a text by Stig Dagermann about the consolation that we all need and must seek in order not to despair.

Unfortunately, the clairvoyant author Dagermann took his own life at the age of just 31. And yet at the end there is something liberating, almost silly, in the air when everyone dances together to Blümchen's techno song "Liebe Liebe", it is the childhood choreographies of the main character - who somehow now gets access to his own memories. This is comforting and funny – and at the same time a moment to be ashamed of. Maybe we shouldn't all take ourselves too seriously after all. This evening is strenuously associative, often quite banal: more meditation or thought play than analysis. Tightening would have been good for him. A fluctuating journey into fluctuating states of mind - which probably not everyone can get involved with.