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Sophie and Kessel and Charly Hübner: verbal exchange of blows
Photo:
Sandra Hoever / ZDF
Frantz Fanon's name is mentioned for the first time after 28 minutes.
“With tz”, Thomas, the inspector, wonders, “what's that supposed to mean?”.
Sartre also appears later by name.
At least allusions are made to Socrates, Descartes and Nietzsche.
After all, Judith, who interrogates Thomas in an anonymous hotel room on Christmas Eve, is a philosophy professor by profession - and possibly a passionate terrorist.
Which would describe the height of the discourse and the fall of »The Interrogation in the Night«.
The thinkers not only reveal what Daniel Kehlmann, the author of the model for the television film, may have read while writing.
They also indicate the theoretical superstructure of what is negotiated in Kehlmann's play ("Heilig Abend") and staged here by Matti Geschonneck for television.
Is violence legitimate as a possibility and expression of protest against a state?
Or, as they say after 39 minutes: "Where's the bomb?"
And is there a bomb at all?
Thomas (Charly Hübner) have exactly 90 minutes to clarify these questions.
Originally, the scenario is a classic race against time, but the watch remains out of the game for television.
We only learn that the revolutionary ex-husband of Judith (Sophie von Kessel) is also being interrogated.
And that at midnight the bomb, if it exists, will go off.
The Kammerspiel draws its charm less from the tension and more from the duel between two strong characters.
Because the professor and the policeman struggle for the truth, the law, the justice and the intellectual sovereignty in the room.
Judith refers to “the oppressed on earth,” Thomas replies, clearly speaking that the banks are all criminal and the politicians are for sale: “I would also prefer the goods to be better distributed.
First to me, second to everyone else «.
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Sophie von Kessel as Judith: Enigmatic and quick-witted
Photo: Sandra Hoever / ZDF
At least at this level, both opponents are not kidding themselves.
Sophie von Kessel has already played Judith at the theater, an enigmatic, quick-witted and largely defensive person.
Charly Hübner as Thomas, on the other hand, puts all the weight of state power into his role, vacillating between flattery and threatening.
For a brief moment the two characters are even man and woman, no longer a cop and a professor.
It then hurts more when the attempt at flirtation fails.
"Christmas Eve" is not one of the currently so popular "courtroom dramas" in which the judgment is made on an ethical question after the negotiation.
The power struggle takes place in their faces, the actors move around each other in a subtle choreography, and comparatively elegant suspense music - on the verge of inaudibility - is rarely heard on television.
It serves a piece of discourse that is sometimes noticeable on paper - for example when Judith (»Poverty is done«) randomly spreads knowledge about the mining of uranium in Niger, which looks like (von Kehlmann) googled.
That does not change the validity of their analysis.
If something looks constructed on the rendezvous in an elegantly darkened room, then it is the academic's left-wing terrorism.
Thomas himself thinks that he is currently rather wrestling with religious warriors (Judith's reply: "Jihadists are the great pretext, in truth they support the system they believe they are fighting") and admits: "When we came across them, there we even had to laugh!
'Is there still something like that today?' A colleague asked me! "
A good question.
At a time when ammunition is being "lost" en masse in the Bundeswehr, police officers keep letting their fascist fantasies run free in chats and deadly violence does not tend to come from left-wing extremists.
The dramaturgical option of an updated RAF seems rather far-fetched.
From around 1976.
The reason is obvious and has a dramaturgical foundation, especially since the play does not take sides.
A verbal exchange of blows between revolutionary violence and state violence requires something like moral legitimation on both sides.
Kehlmann can easily imagine a revenant of Ulrike Meinhof, but not a rhetorically and theoretically equal Beate Zschäpe.
The policeman would certainly not "even have to laugh" at such a figure.
In it he might even be able to recognize himself, which would have set completely different dynamics in motion in this interrogation and really promoted new knowledge.
So it remains with the classic confrontation between the fundamentalist impulse ("Sometimes it is better to do something wrong than to do nothing!") And the ethically motivated attempt to prevent the obviously wrong (the bomb), even at the price to preserve what is possibly structurally wrong (the system).
Strangely enough, »The interrogation in the night« seems to have made a mistake in the door of ZDF.
In the ARD theme week "How do we want to live?" It would have been a highlight.
»The interrogation in the night«,
Friday, 8.15 p.m., Arte and Monday, 8.15 p.m., ZDF.
Already in the media libraries
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