The shadow line (Tankred Dorst)

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Die Schattenlinie is a drama by Tankred Dorst , which premiered on January 28, 1995 under the direction of Hans Hollmann in the Vienna Academy Theater. Klaus Emmerich brought the play to the German stage on March 3 of the same year in the Cuvilliés Theater in Munich.

The humanist Malthus, a profound Lessing connoisseur, loses his mind after his son Jens stabbed a black African to death.

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Malthus is the Latvian married Lil. The couple has three children. Benny, the oldest, was born mentally and physically disabled. The family had to endure the "animal roar" for seventeen years until the patient was admitted to the "institution". Malthus writes educational lectures at the Academy for Adult Education - among other things on the subject of “Harmony and Violence in the Cultures of Humanity”. Since the state supports the work of this institution, its future appears financially secure. Malthus is seen by his colleagues in the academy as sociable, tolerant, but sometimes obtrusively moral. Jens, the younger son, worries the philanthropist . The boy sometimes stays away from home for days. If Jens is brutally beaten up by his cronies from time to time, then the beaten person thinks that's all right. All attempts at bringing up the father rebound from the bald son who wears combat boots . Malthus calls the offspring a “late-pubescent weirdo” who prefers “racist smear” as reading instead of Lessing. The police summoned Jens in writing about a case of disturbance of the peace of the dead . After Malthus once again preached too insistent tolerance to his son , Jens beats up the home furnishings. The father remains on the battlefield with a bloody face and only hobbles after he has got up.

Jens murders Leo, a professor of economics from Sierra Leone , with twenty stab wounds. The mother Lil blames Malthus - at least in part - for the son's crime. Because he got the knife from his father. Malthus faces the accused son during the trial. Of course, the judge doesn't want to hear the father. The judge waits for answers from the perpetrator. The latter is silent.

Jensen's amateurish prison break fails. Malthus leaves his academy at his own request and lives separately from his wife Lil and daughter Jennifer in a trailer at a garbage dump. When the daughter visits him, he suddenly no longer knows who Lessing was during the conversation. At the end of the play the murdered man appears to the now mentally ill Malthus. Malthus sings and dances to the phenomenon.

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Only in the fifth of the thirteen pictures are the viewer's eyes opened.

The place of the action could be a city in Germany. Bielefeld is not.

Occasionally the viewer is shocked as in the absurd theater : the judge hits the black mothers present in the face during the trial. And after his horrific murder, Jens ponders about the "cleaning up": "The H-bomb , I've heard it is supposed to be the best, dissolves people in slime, and so they drip down the drain."

reception

radio play

literature

Text output

  • Tankred Dorst: The shadow line. Akademietheater program booklet No. 135. With illustrations. Self-published by Burgtheater, Vienna 1994. First edition, 155 pages.
  • The shadow line. Pp. 243-301 in Tankred Dorst. The shadow line and other pieces. Collaboration with Ursula Ehler . Edition 6 (content: Parzival . Fernando Krapp wrote this letter to me . Mr. Paul . To Jerusalem . The shadow line. The history of the arrows ). Epilogue: Günther Erken. Suhrkamp Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 1995 (1st edition), without ISBN, 375 pages (edition used).

Secondary literature

Individual evidence

  1. Edition used, p. 375, last entry
  2. Edition used, p. 299, 14th Zvu
  3. Edition used, p. 288, 7th Zvu and p. 288, 3rd Zvu
  4. Edition used, p. 290, 12th Zvu
  5. Edition used, p. 290, 9. Zvu
  6. Recognize in the afterword of the edition used, p. 372, 17. Zvo