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"Empire of Death" was staged by Karin Beier
Photo: Arno Declair
Worst of all are the clowns.
When the clowns arrive, it becomes unbearable.
In the back of the stage, photos of the torture victims of Abu Ghuraib, the torture prison of the Americans in Iraq, can be seen on a large screen.
In the front the clowns are joking, in the back people are being humiliated.
And then the clowns go to the canvas, paint and write on it.
A smiley face that turns into a sun, the word "fun".
The humiliation of the humiliated.
And at the same time an outstanding theatrical moment, because it makes the viewer painfully aware that not only painting these pictures robs the victims of the rest of their dignity, but also the viewing.
The surprise here: It is not the text that gives this evening its most impressive moment, but the staging.
One was particularly excited about the text.
"Empire of Death", the new play by Rainald Goetz that the theater world had to wait for so many, many years.
Yesterday, on September 11th, Karin Beier brought it to the stage in the Hamburger Schauspielhaus, and on September 11th 2001 the story begins: the attack by Islamist terrorists on New York and Washington.
Alarm, alarm, the dust from the destroyed buildings is already falling on the actors, whose characters have names like Selch, Frau von Ade, Grotten, Roon, but who are immediately recognizable as the main politicians of the time: Vice President Dick Cheney, Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice, President George W. Bush and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld.
The big topic: torture
Immediately they start the war on terror, in which they do not care about the rule of law and democratic values.
Abu Ghraib becomes the early symbol of this.
American guards torture their prisoners with sham executions, with sexual humiliation, with extreme intimidation, with sleep deprivation.
In Guantanamo, too, the US government is subjecting its prisoners to inhumane conditions.
Water torture is becoming a common method of extracting information from suspects in interrogation prisons outside the United States.
All of this can be seen in detail on stage, which makes this evening a violent attack on the mind.
Goetz has chosen one of the great turning points in the history of the West for his new piece.
Abu Ghuraib and Guantanamo have cost the USA, long the leading power of this West, its status as well as its moral superpower.
It was already cracked before, but since then the West no longer has to accuse other authoritarian governments.
If the west calls Hong Kong, the others call Abu Ghuraib.
This is the main reason why the democracies lack soft power in their striving for the global establishment of democracy.
Goetz has also chosen the greatest taboo of democracy: torture.
Nothing violates the values of the West more than brutal interrogation, the state attack on human dignity and the right to integrity.
You can't go any bigger, but that doesn't mean that it turns out to be a great evening at the theater.
Nefarious politicians, cowardly idiots
An attack on the head would have served the attack on the mind well.
But unfortunately that doesn't happen.
There is no question that Goetz wrote a large text, a frenzied suada about the abyss of politics, as eloquent, full of allusions and thoughts as only he can.
But almost all of these thoughts go in one direction: It is very, very bad what the Americans have done.
No contradiction.
That's the problem.
One cannot contradict at all.
There is no justification whatsoever for Abu Ghraib, and with that there is no conflict in the figures.
The politicians are macho, nefarious idiots who abuse their power, who want to destroy the state that has been entrusted to them.
They are figs too.
We have known this for a long time, even through research by journalists who are viciously reviled at the beginning, "because of the fourth estate".
Goetz, who is sitting in the front left of the auditorium at the premiere, nods vigorously at these words.
In the noughties in which his play is set, he dealt a lot with politics and journalism.
He was often seen in the Reichstag, where he filmed debates and press conferences with a small camera.
He had quite a knack for the macho government of Gerhard Schröder, Otto Schily and Joschka Fischer.
Conversely, he put fingers in many wounds, including journalism.
It was interesting to see what he would make of his astute observations.
But the hoped-for political novel did not materialize.
Some of his impressions have now flowed into "Realm of Death", especially the criticism of machoism.
It is "the stupidity of the man's body" that led to the Iraq war, says Laura Bush, the wife of the US President.
Not a contradiction either.
Contradiction pointless
This play is largely subject to approval, which is not necessarily due to the subject of torture and democracy.
This taboo also has its gray areas, as the great political thinker Ivan Krastev in his new book "Is Today Tomorrow?"
has torn.
He writes, "Critics of Bush's 'war on terror' were right in insisting that the state should never legalize torture."
The exciting word here is "legalize", which does not preclude a state from using torture.
Krastev refers to the "time bomb scenario" which looks like this: "Suppose someone who knows how to defuse a time bomb that is otherwise going to kill many people is in the hands of the authorities and suppose he is his Will only divulge information under torture - may he be tortured? "
This question is an assault on the head no matter how you answer it.
Some critics of Bush, writes Krastev, had answered them in such a way that one could torture, but not in a legal act, but "as an act of civil disobedience".
This is where there is conflict, this is where thinking hurts.
Goetz spares his viewers this pain, unlike, for example, the director Kathryn Bigelow in her film "Zero Dark Thirty", in which it is implied that the water torture helps to find the hiding place of Osama bin Laden.
The fact that her film does not directly condemn this has been heavily criticized.
Goetz and Beier consistently condemn the political perpetrators, and they are right in the Abu Ghraib case.
But do you have to sit in the theater for four hours?
Especially since one is somehow led to believe that all of this has to do with Germany.
Donald Rumsfeld bears the name Roon in the play, which probably refers to Albrecht von Roon, once Prussian general and minister of war, who paved Otto von Bismarck's way into the office of Prussian Prime Minister.
He was certainly not a human rights politician, but who was that in the 19th century?
Bush's entourage also includes Ronald Schill, once "Richter Gnadenlos", who was Hamburg's interior senator for a short time and wanted to clean up with a hard hand.
But unlike the AfD, that was an error in the system that was quickly corrected.
Schill is weak evidence of German ambivalence on the question of torture and the rule of law.
There was also an interesting case in the gray area in this country.
When the captured kidnapper of a Frankfurt banker's son refused to reveal the hiding place of his victim, a police officer threatened him with pain to prevent the boy from dying of thirst.
A case for civil disobedience?
Not a case for an answer that doesn't hurt, anyway.
Virtuoso verbosity
How scrupulous Goetz approached his subject is shown at the end, when he explains why he looks primarily at the perpetrators and less at the victims.
Compassion is not enough, "in order to capture what happened beyond outrage also in its reasons, the text must come from the perpetrator".
However, his text complements the compassion for the victims with the disgust for the political perpetrator, which makes him a monument of unambiguity.
The director didn't set any counterpoints; she staged congenially to Goetz's text.
Her ensemble sends her through at least a decathlon of human movements, running, dancing, birding, boxing, wheelchair use, crawling, gymnastics, masturbating, jumping rope, collapsing.
There is a lot going on on stage, there is singing and music, smoke and dust stir up.
That has force, the force of the action, but also the force of the silence.
After a torture scene, after several shouts of "You whore, you rat, you dishonorable zero", it is suddenly quiet, very, very quiet.
The whole world sinks into this black silence.
And you know that afterwards nothing is like it was before.
Sebastian Blomberg stands out as Vice President Cheney in a great ensemble, which is why all in all this cannot be a failed evening.
Let's put it this way: a successful confirmation evening.
For four hours you were hammered into what you had already thought, but not in such overwhelming images, not in such virtuoso verbosity.
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