Ferdinand Schmalz on his utopia in the crisis: the great dramatic turning point

Enlarge image

Bachmann Prize winner Ferdinand Schmalz dreams of the crisis

Photo: Georg Wendt / picture alliance / dpa

Corona crisis, climate crisis, crisis of democracy: the times could hardly be better to flee from reality to fantasy.

DER SPIEGEL asked writers to create little utopias for dystopian times.

The main idea: Dreaming against the crisis.

What follows is what Ferdinand Schmalz wrote down for us.

“The facts are known to be more than thin,” says Noam Tile Pot, while he pours some more Baden green tea into the cup on his desk. It can hardly be clarified today whether the first actions of the Mondkalb group took place here at the Applied Theater Studies in Gießen, or at least, as newly developed sources would suggest, on the studio stage of the Bad Krummfeld State Theater.

Among his colleagues in theater studies, however, it is undisputed that these first actions had already developed the attraction that led to what we would call the great dramatic turning point today, according to Kacheltopf. He, who also enjoyed a classic training in modern media history, could not avoid looking for the roots of that attraction in the years after the corona crisis, when the pressure from the so-called social networks had increased to what is hardly imaginable today. It was this mixture of fear of social decline and the greed for usable recognition that created the breeding ground on which the desire for the offer of the group Mondkalb could flourish.

In the now little-known “Correspondence” campaign, recipients were able to have members of the collective take over their mail for a week.

In an act of crossing borders, they hijacked the professional as well as private communication of their audience, wrote emails in their names in which they hid small poetic interventions.

Melo Muff, mastermind behind these early actions, repeatedly emphasized in interviews that it was precisely these inconspicuous deviations that were at stake, which should also cast doubt on the fundamental success of communication.

"Yes, is it even possible to get through to someone else by means of language?"

Stages of a life that had never been lived like this

For »Faces 1-3« they worked closely with the video artists and network activists from Kommando Lapdog, who created the first video filters for them that made it possible to slip into the identity of their customers even during video calls. You had the opportunity to give your face to the art collective for a limited period of time. While the group around Melo Muff expected little crowds, the project became a sure-fire success. More and more people registered to be represented by the artists. It seemed that they had hit the nerve of the times with their art.

One of the first customers was the tech investor Martin »Greetings« Mayer. "It was immediately clear to me that this would be the next big thing." Together they developed the improvised studio in Bonn-Beuel, which everyone just affectionately called "the bowl", in which they produced the video and photo material, based on which their customers longed for. Birthday parties, weddings, degrees, none of which had actually taken place, were produced in "the bowl". Stages of a life that had never been lived like this. There were writers' rooms who wrote résumés, anecdotes of a life that had never been lived like that. Yes, entire families were scribed through by the writers of the media cooperation. While their customers received appreciative comments for the fictional stories,they could sit back, enjoy their life outside of the overheated networks again.

Noam Tile Pot describes his first experience with this form of identity change as a great relief.

To know that you can leave the barriers of a limited subjective view behind you was one of the most liberating feelings he has ever experienced.

Nobody knew anymore what was played and what was real

At the beginning of the 1930s, Mondkalb began offering full subscriptions. Actors completely took over the identity of their subscribers, slipped into life that was alien to them, the aim was that one should no longer be sure who was facing one. Nobody knew anymore what was played and what was real. People began to pay attention to unusual gestures, to strange expressions that would have betrayed a careless gamer. Surveys showed that in the late thirties only 20 percent of the accounts on social networks were operated by real people, the rest was filled by the bots of Mondkalb AG and their click factories.

Due to a shortage of performing staff, Mondkalb AG began to hire laypeople, which led to more and more people finding pleasure in slipping into other lives. For most of them, however, it was not enough to play inconspicuous lives in their daily routine, which resulted in a creeping theatricalization of reality. Strange scenes that could be assumed to have been staged were seen everywhere. Mondkalb AG was forced to publish guides for such improvisations, the forerunners of the great playbooks.

The ways of playing became more and more affected in those years, the most everyday activities turned into events such as the court ceremony under the so-called Sun King, Ludwig the Fourteenth.

Wigs and platform shoes, elaborate props and unusual costumes shaped everyday life in those years.

Mondkalb AG developed an app with which one could participate in the big games.

A big experiment that almost everyone wanted to be part of

This is how huge multi-stranded narratives arose that linked a wide variety of life stories with one another. The city of Ulm performed the complete works of Thomas Bernhard in several attempts, Duisburg again failed because of the attempt to perform even an excerpt from Jelinek's "The Children of the Dead". You could be on the ICE and suddenly get caught up in a chapter in Hubert Fichte's “Detlev's Imitationen› Grünspan ‹”. "It was a big experiment," says Professor Kacheltopf, "but almost everyone wanted to be part of it." There were free prompts who whispered sentences on the street, set designers who became urban developers. Yes, there were entire governments whose absurd behavior could only be scripted by satirists.

Everything that had so far increased to the point of painful agony has now regained its playful character: self-portrayal, self-optimization, self-reflection drawn into the pathological. Everything worked out in the big game. Suddenly everything was theater again, and it was precisely where it became ambiguous, where it was no longer possible to distinguish between fiction and reality, that people were particularly drawn to it. “You must have wondered who is sitting across from you at the moment? I could be anyone, maybe I've been you before, maybe my name is not Tile Pot at all, but Schweiger. Maybe you are Mr. Tile Pot. Perhaps this is all just one episode in a much larger narrative. "

And while the algorithms purr softly in the background, while outside on the square the university staff rehearsed a spontaneous dance interlude, while hundreds of scriptwriters slap their fingers in the keys to deliver the next big playbook, while professionally trained performers keep our overflowing channels with us Filling more weird content, some retreat to the mountains, lie in the mild breeze, smash their far too smart phones, declare anyone who works ill to be criminally criminal and ask Büchner for macaroni, melons and figs.