Rolf Dieter Brinkmann’s “The words are evil” on the Cologne Theater | EUROtoday

A protracted-haired one! And in 5 copies. Fashion simply cannot be killed. The complete angle of the younger man with the stringy black hair behind his excessive brow, who drags himself from 5 corners of darkness to the middle of the stage firstly of the night in Depot 2 of the Cologne Theater, is a harbinger of dying. He shuffles like a zombie that has simply emerged from the grave and may’t even muster up the braveness to scare the dwelling correctly. It might have been copied from an inexpensive horror comedian ebook, whose artist lazily disregarded facial options wherever there was an excuse. In his hand he holds a puny bouquet of flowers, the type you should purchase on the cemetery nursery or get thrown on the carnival procession. Everything is washed out, bent and falling aside on this, in probably the most pitiful sense of the phrase, non permanent look. Only the coiffure is hanging.

One instantly associates it with a sure time, the Seventies, however from this time, with its epochal type of mutual references, it stands out as a mere signal of distinction from an outdoor world that’s handled as detached. The night doesn’t faucet into nostalgic emotions for beat literature, counterculture and the youth motion. The lengthy haircut won’t ever look stylish once more, it’s not modern and due to this fact can’t be killed, eternally and ever the cipher of the mere truth of individuality.

With lengthy hair, in blue denims, a purple shirt and a diarrhea-brown fake leather-based jacket: This is how Rolf Dieter Brinkmann comes as soon as once more among the many individuals of Cologne, performed by two actresses and three actors. Wolfgang Menardi staged Brinkmann’s radio play “The Words Are Evil,” which was commissioned by Westdeutscher Rundfunk and broadcast on January 26, 1974, a 12 months and 1 / 4 earlier than the dying of the creator, who was run over by a automobile in London. The program is saved within the ARD radio play database. At least from the perspective of administration and departmental obligations at WDR, it isn’t a radio play. Brinkmann acquired the order from the “Kulturelles Wort” editorial workforce as a part of a sequence documenting the “everyday life of an author” in Cologne.

It can’t be denied that WDR fulfilled its data mandate by accepting the commissioned work. What does on a regular basis life sound like for an creator who’s loaned a tape recorder and has six months earlier than he has to ship one thing broadcastable? We get to know a author who lives in precarious circumstances, exploits his small household life and both sits in his cramped house or wanders aimlessly by town, the place he does not have another ideas. In elements, the actors transfer their lips to Brinkmann’s unique tone, which counteracts the rambling of the exterior motion decided by the experimental setup with a speech melody of imperious dedication. Other elements are re-spoken; Above all, the actors repeat sure phrases and allow them to cross from mouth to mouth. In addition, additional fragments from Brinkmann’s lyrical work have been integrated, in order that the play model lasts nearly twice so long as the 48 minutes and 54 seconds of the unique.

Even although this system might have confirmed many radio listeners’ concepts of being an creator as a waste of time, particularly since this author expressed himself like a bully, Brinkmann’s pointed criticism of the media additionally gave purpose to doubt the data content material of his compact and rambling self-disclosures. He did not wish to know something extra in regards to the media, or not less than the media. “How I live? Without a daily newspaper, without television, little music, without radio, no longer going to the cinema at all.” At least he is nonetheless alive, however his environment are clearly totally different: “Front gardens that look like cemeteries. People who look like cemeteries.” For him, canceling his subscription to the every day newspaper was not an important sufficient gesture of protest. “I remember strolling very slowly across the street. Then breaking a window. How I threw a full beer bottle – unfortunately it was full – at the ‘Kölner Stadt-Anzeiger’ car at night.”

Does the “Kölner Stadt-Anzeiger” nonetheless have its personal fleet of automobiles for delivering newspapers, whose automobiles could be acknowledged by the promoting? Menardi, who’s his personal set designer, constantly avoids any native coloration with a time index. Brinkmann’s cursing of Cologne is a poetic feat of power that derives its impact from the truth that a spot identify stands because the epitome of the ugliness of the world. But native peculiarities should not essential, and any illustrative element would weaken the affect. “A yellow, dirty sky, a yellow, dirty sky, a lousy, yellow, dirty, dirty Cologne sky, a lousy sky, a damn shitty sky, a lousy, yellow, dirty, Cologne cursed, miserable shitty sky, such a wisp of light, shitty sky, a rotten piece of heaven, a shitty sky, a huge shitty sky.” Menardi even withholds the wisp of sunshine from the Cologne viewers.

In the again proper, a cathedral spire has fallen onto the flâneur’s tiled round path. Cologne has by no means supplied such an image of destruction even in the course of the struggle – the continuation of which is a central theme of “The words are evil”. Brinkmann takes a German sufferer perspective; the recollections of the Allied bombing raids are talked about for the longest time. Brinkmann’s spouse Maleen delivers such a childhood reminiscence on command. “When I went to bed in the evening, I was fully dressed with socks, dresses, a coat and shoes. And newspaper was wrapped around my shoes so that if there was an air raid alarm, I could get up immediately and run to the basement.” So newspapers are nonetheless good for one thing.

German perpetration past justifications for struggle is simply mentioned in a single place. “A tram is driving past in the back into a suburb. It’s dragging people away again.” The image is hanging, however in essence the deportation as a logistical precursor to the genocide is a component of a cultural criticism that interpreted reconstruction as a continuation of warlike destruction. “I walk along Friesenplatz, musty, gray, desolate, managed. They plan everything, they destroy everything everywhere.” In this context, Brinkmann’s polemic towards the car-friendly metropolis is kind of typical.

Curiously, the poetic chronicler additionally encounters this evil within the type of the individuals whose job it’s to make use of chopping instruments to show the continual loop of his life into one thing that may be broadcast over the transmitter. When he’s instructed within the WDR studio to cease attempting to noticed the microphone in half, he sees himself as a sufferer of the “administration”.

Thomas Zenke, himself a radio editor for many years, wrote within the FAZ in 1975 in regards to the typeface of Brinkmann’s posthumously printed final quantity of poetry, “Westwärts”: “Gaps and spaces arise between and within the lines and then closely spaced blocks and spaces again.” In this fashion, Brinkmann broke the phantasm of immediacy inherent in his poetic course of. The acoustic equal of those graphic means is chopping. Wolfgang Menardi and his actors in Cologne don’t work with crossfades and blurring. Their choreographies serve to isolate the scenes from which “The Words Are Evil” is reduce collectively – and the person who made the phrases.