Die heilige Johanna der Schlachthöfe

A piano player’s jazzy rhythms pervade her; Brecht’s blank verse, usually a little antiquated, sounds like a libretto straight from the 1920s. The business men wear latex half-masks, straight out of a production by Ruth Berghaus, which wipe their faces empty of emotion. Meanwhile, the Kings of Cool look irretrievably ridiculous in their cowboy hats and their grotesque costumes – it’s as if someone had raided a dusty alienation storage room at the Berliner Ensemble. This is roughly what the East imagined capitalism would look like in the 1950s. But the further away the production pushes Brecht’s script, the more the old story seems to come closer. The laws of supply and demand have not changed; where morals and intelligence exist, they are mostly used to secure one’s own interests. The difference is that a solution is no longer in sight, not even as a utopian dream. Only at the end does the outward appearance of Baumgarten’s production reach the here and now. The markets have recovered, wages may be 30 percent lower, prices 30 percent higher and there may be 30 percent more unemployment, but that’s just the way it is. 70 percent at least get by fairly well.

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