German

Do It Again, Ivan!

From the Second World War to the present: how The German-Russian Soldier's Phrasebook at the Sophiensaele reproduces cliches of good and evil

The production The German-Russian Soldier's Phrasebook returns once again to the subject of the Second World War. At first three women and three men sit apart from one another, absorbed in studying German and Russian phrase-book vocabulary. As the figures begin to move, they enter the action, and the first episode is a rape scene: Soviet soldiers "dishonour" a German girl, force her to lie on the ground and lock the cellar door. She screams, sinks into despair and "wants to forget." A little later we hear that German soldiers "took children by the legs and smashed them against walls."

The bilingual text of the performance does not tell individual stories; rather, it presents figures frozen in impersonal patterns. Their movements are rehearsed, and their words are borrowed from the military phrase books of the Wehrmacht and the Red Army.

The idea behind the staging by directors Aglaja Romanovskaya and Elena Kharlamova is not without interest. The young performers display good technique: they handle the text well, speak clearly and quickly, move with flexibility and can even whistle. They are most captivating, however, when they sing; at those moments the audience is completely drawn into their world.

The main weakness of the production is that the directors do not manage to get beyond stereotyped thinking. Even an occasionally effective collage of phrase-book expressions and diary entries cannot overcome this problem.

People are instructed to renounce love, not to write, not to die. Sometimes they return. Then another drama begins: women wait, mourn, become victims of violence or are unfaithful. Their sexuality - whether voluntary or forced, conscious or instinctive - is invariably accompanied by guilt. In the end, the men control their war, while the women control their "guilty" bodies. Understanding between them is impossible.

These predictable and simplified stories have been told thousands of times. The production becomes especially questionable when Germans and Russians, men and women, suddenly discover common ground by performing "national classics" together. Goethe's Erlkonig, Tchaikovsky and even religious motifs are heard on stage. But we live in the twenty-first century and know very well that national high culture has never in itself been a remedy against the terror of war. When used consciously, it could open personal and public spaces for reflection; otherwise it could become an integral part of racist propaganda and is ill suited to building a cultural dialogue.

The essence of the production is that it deliberately revives a naive and outdated idea of "international understanding," based on a simplified and populist notion of bilateral cultural exchange.

Ines Kappert