Der Zauberberg

Director Sebastian Hartmann shows these spheres of experience – loss of control, helplessness and violence – as an increasingly expressive performance by an anonymous cast in white make-up and shapeless padding. There is no trace of the novel’s highly-controlled narrative structures which he still adhered to ten years ago, in his first “Zauberberg”-production in Leipzig. The storyline has been scattered to the four winds, identifiable characters have been lost and even Hans Castorp would be hard to find.

Deutsches Theater Berlin, of course, was closed on opening night. Instead, the piece was streamed live on a single date, 20 November 2020, recorded from various camera angles in front of an empty auditorium: theatre for a pandemic. The stream was a flow of images showing dissociation and dissolution. The succession of texts used is a wild scrap collection where space and time dissect themselves. Dream sequences in which Castorp believes himself to be wandering Arcadian landscapes alternate with murder and fantasies of witchcraft, with descriptions of nature and ponderings on the difference between dead and living matter, essential questions of life such as – “What is the body?” – and impressions from the lung sanatorium’s radiology lab. All this is interposed with Markwart Müller-Elmau’s shivering and feverish invocations of increasingly bloody World War-scenarios. The actors operate on a high level of energy throughout: faces twisted with pain, panicked entrances, desperate whispers or hyper-mechanic movement frenzy.

“I am lost to the world” – the leitmotif-quote by Castorp, a fugitive of time, suspended from everything that happens in the world of the valley during his seven-year rest cure, suddenly resounds through the storm of text and images and is a rather sobering and accurate description of the situation. The time portrait presented in “Zauberberg” may not help to clarify the current condition, but it presents a pretty good likeness.