Dead raft

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Totenfloß is a drama by the German playwright Harald Mueller . It outlines an end-of-the-time scenario in 2050, Germany, which is contaminated by nuclear and chemical sources. Four doomed people are drifting down the Rhine on a raft to Xanten , where they hope to survive. The premiere of the play on October 5, 1984 in the Oberhausen Theater remained without national awareness. It was only after the Chernobyl disaster that a second version met with increased interest. It premiered simultaneously in Basel, Düsseldorf and Stuttgart on October 16, 1986, and was the third most frequently performed on German stages in the 1986/87 season. A radio play and a television play were created based on the stage presentation .

content

After a catastrophe, Germany in 2050 is completely contaminated with nuclear and chemical substances. The environment is poisoned, the remaining population lives in fortresses built in dictatorial cities. Everyone whose chemical contamination exceeds a certain level is expelled to the "chemical desert", where certain death awaits him in the contaminated and poisoned nature. These death row inmates also include the play's four protagonists: Checker, Itai, Kuckuck and Bjuti.

Checker sees himself as a "survival machine", half human, half animal, who confronts the deadly environment with brutality. Itai is a fearful test tube birth . He suffers from Itai-Itai disease and is shrinking to death. The hermit cuckoo is the only "nineteen hundred" member of the quartet who knew the earth before the great catastrophe. Again and again he imitates bird calls from the time when there were still birds. Bjuti, a young woman with a disfigured face, has been expelled for owning books. She can still speak the old language, while everything around her only communicates in scraps of words and gibberish, and recites poetry.

The four outcasts are floating down the Rhine on a raft towards Xanten , the city that is becoming their utopia because, according to rumors, after being destroyed by a neutron bomb, it is now non-toxic and habitable. The journey leads from Heidelberg to Mainz , where the raft is stranded on a sandbank, via Bonn , where the quartet is shot at, to Cologne , where the anger of the three boys over the destroyed environment is discharged to Kuckuck, whom they represent the older generation hold responsible for the end of the world. Checker strangles the cuckoo, which is increasingly fleeing into selfishness and cynicism .

But on the journey through the apocalyptic landscapes of the destroyed Germany, the supposed monsters also regain their humanity more and more. They come into contact with each other as individuals and hope develops from their disturbances and fears. Itai overcomes his fear of contact. Checker also loses his brutal behavior with his protective suit and learns to say "I" to himself. He impregnates Bjuti, who gives birth to a faceless lump of meat. Finally, when the remaining ones reach the city, Xanten does not turn out to be the hoped-for paradise, but is a locked fortress. Armed men on the edge of the river refuse to land. In the end, Checker euthanized the dying Itai . Together with Bjuti, he is drifting out to sea.

Performance history

In 1982 Harald Mueller won a drama competition of the Oberhausen Theater on the subject of "Environment". From this synopsis the play Totenfloß emerged , which premiered on October 5th, 1984 under the direction of Manfred Repp in the Oberhausen Theater in Pott . The premiere as well as the play itself were not noticed by the national theater critics. It was only the critic Benjamin Henrichs , who had long been associated with Mueller , who drew the public's attention to Totenfloß in 1985 when he nominated the play in the 1985 Theater Yearbook as “Play of the Year”. When Henrichs had a portrait followed in Die Zeit in June 1985 , George Tabori had already noticed Totenfloß and was planning a radio play production and a staging at the Münchner Kammerspiele . Mueller revised Totenfloß again and personally auditioned the play at 45 German theaters.

In autumn 1985, several contracts for performances were concluded, but the dead raft only experienced a real “boom” as a result of the Chernobyl disaster and the major fire at Sandoz in Schweizerhalle . The new version premiered on October 16, 1986 at the Basel Theater , the Düsseldorfer Schauspielhaus and the Stuttgart State Theater . More than 40 other stages followed, and in the 1986/87 season Totenfloß became the third most-performed piece on German theaters, behind Open Two-Person Relationship and Der Kontrabaß . The drama also became an international hit and translated into 12 languages.

reception

The magazine Theater heute voted Totenfloß 1986 as "Play on the Topic of the Year". Dieter Kafitz called the Drama 1988, the "most characteristic example of a post-modern end-time drama", and Jürgen Schröder , the author was "the undisputed master a hard small group dynamics," which he already earlier works Mueller with the issue of young outsiders, including Big Wolf and half German , as "Prelude to the Dead Raft " saw.

However, the piece also received severe criticism. This is how Peter Iden called Totenfloß a “very German” piece: “'Romantic' in the worst sense, apparently radical, full of self-pity and blaring complaints.” For Georg Hensel, “the death raft sinks into the black sea of ​​sour kitsch that it so bravely navigate has. "He closed his meeting with the statement:" Harald Mueller speaks to our conscience, he is an honest preacher full of good will, but he is not a human dramatist. "

Peter Michalzik, on the other hand, defended the piece against criticism and described: “She was more interested in the aesthetic weaknesses of the piece than in the problems it addressed. Mueller's strength, however, lies precisely in the fact that he brings controversial issues of the time to the stage, tries to avoid any kind of aestheticisation and thus gives a glimpse of the raw reality. "

Adaptations

Under the direction of George Tabori , Hessischer Rundfunk produced a radio play in 1986 in which Klaus Fischer , Rainer Frieb , Jan Biczycki , Ursula Höpfner and Harald Mueller spoke. The production was named Radio Play of the Month in May 1986 and in 1987 the Kurd-Laßwitz Prize for best radio play.

The West German Broadcasting was dead raft on 22 November 1987 as a television play . Klaus Henninger , Felix Römer , Marlene Riphahn and Patricia Litten played under the direction of Hans Peter Cloos . The television game was shown as a movie in Scandinavia.

Publications

  • Harald Mueller: Dead raft . In: Theater heute 7/1986, pp. 35–46.
  • Harald Mueller: Dead raft . In: Spectaculum 43. Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt am Main 1986, pp. 77-125.

literature

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Totenfloss at the Rowohlt Theater Verlag .
  2. ↑ Michaela Bürger-Koftis: The drama as a citation empire. On the dramaturgy of language in Harald Mueller , p. 8.
  3. ↑ a b Rotzandkotz . In: Der Spiegel . No. 42 , 1986, pp. 276-278 ( online ).
  4. ↑ Benjamin Henrichs : The man in the dunes . In: Die Zeit of June 7, 1985.
  5. ↑ Michaela Bürger-Koftis: The drama as a citation empire. On the dramaturgy of language in Harald Mueller , pp. 8–9, 281.
  6. ↑ Harald Mueller at Rowohlt Theater Verlag .
  7. ↑ Michaela Bürger-Koftis: The drama as a citation empire. On the dramaturgy of language in Harald Mueller , p. 12.
  8. ↑ Quoted from: Jürgen Schröder : Endzeitdramatik? . In: Wilfried Barner : History of German Literature from 1945 to the Present . Beck, Munich 2006, ISBN 3-406-54220-4 , p. 866.
  9. ↑ Peter Iden : End times arts and crafts . In: Frankfurter Rundschau of October 18, 1986. Quoted from: Michaela Bürger-Koftis: The drama as a citation empire. On the dramaturgy of language in Harald Mueller , p. 63.
  10. ^ Georg Hensel : Schedule. The actor guide from antiquity to the present 2 . List, Munich 1992, ISBN 3-471-77888-8 , p. 1235.
  11. ↑ Peter Michalzik : Mueller, Harald . In: Dietz-Rüdiger Moser (ed.): New manual of contemporary German literature . dtv, Munich 1990, p. 829.
  12. ↑ Dead raft in the HörDat audio play database .
  13. ^ Totenfloss in the German Broadcasting Archive .
  14. ↑ Michaela Bürger-Koftis: The drama as a citation empire. On the dramaturgy of language in Harald Mueller , p. 279.