THIS IS NOT A PERFORMANCE ABOUT YOUR BEAUTY

IN THE MORNING THEY PACKED THE CHILDREN INTO BAGS AGAIN AND
CARRIED THEM DOWN THE STREET.
THEY MADE OPENINGS IN THE BAGS AND PULLED THE LITTLE HANDS
OUT, SO THEIR MOTHERS COULD KISS THEM, AS THEY'RE BURIED.

 

...

 

...

...
 

You close the laptop.

You get ready for the theatre.

You try to forget.

As you walk down the street, it still feels like you're following the trail of blood
the bags left behind.

In fact, it feels like you’re carrying one of those bags yourself.

You try to shake off that corpse from your shoulder.

“Think about something else.” You concentrate.

“Think about the weekend, sex, Frank Sinatra, personal growth.” This cheers you
up.

So you think of something else, but briefly.

And now you feel guilty.

You must return to the bags, even though they are not yours.

Why would you bother yourself with those bags? Nobody ever brings them up.

The bags are not spoken of.

But maybe you are the body in the bag?
Excuse me?! Nah.

What a stupid thought.

This bag is only the burden of your civilized view on violence. That’s right.

It holds your shock, your disbelief, your astonishment, your horror... you would

do everything differently.

You set your conflicts in language, you settle them by talking and never raise your
voice.

You never hit a woman. Well, not as much as you could have.

Never, and you are not being ironic.

You are a composed guy. Your authority springs from reasonableness and
accurate information.

And, ultimately, you don’t trust everything you see on the news.

All of it may as well be a high-tech hoax.

The bag over your shoulder, however, it’s still here.

Crap, they’ll never let you into the theatre with the bag?!

You enter the lobby, but no one stops you.

You nod to an acquaintance, who makes absolutely no notice of anything strange.

Weird.

You walk over to the coat check. You take off your coat. You think, the bag will
now fall off, too.

But it doesn’t. It is here and here.

No one seems to notice it, except for you.

This worries you a bit.

You walk up the steps of the auditorium.

You squeeze into the eighth row and take your seat.

Awfully weird.

You have a strange feeling that the realities you navigate between have begun to
overlap.

What are the consequences? You have no idea.

Maybe you are just overreacting? You’re tense.

The lights go out.

Relax. You’re at the theatre.

It’s starting.

Women take the stage.
 

 

***

 

Here we go.

We are walking down Potsdamer Straße,

from the Sony Centre towards Lidl at Kleistpark U-Bahn station.

A new war is raging somewhere and it is again a crime to talk about trees,[1]

although right there, at the centre of Kleistpark, a copper beech is growing.

It survived two world wars and hundreds of human misdemeanours.

They pissed on it, shot at it.

They fired shells and wounded it with shrapnel.

They tore off its leaves and broke off its branches.

They carved their names and dates into its bark.

But it still gave them oxygen.

It still offered them shade.

It did not move an inch.

 

***


We keep walking

here buildings used to lay in pieces.

We put them back together.

Brick by brick.

With our bare hands.

Then the men returned.

First came the winners and everything was theirs.

Then came the husbands and everything was theirs.

Thousands of them.

Eyeless. Legless. Humourless.

They came home to mess and dust, and dinner wasn’t ready either.

–Who did we die for?

–What did we fight for?

–What did we long for?

We stood there, fidgeting with the bricks.

We said nothing.

–For this?!

They looked at our faces, but they couldn’t recognize us.

Then they raised their hands

and balled them into fists the size of sidewalk slabs.

Up close, they seemed even bigger.

They slapped us on our faces our backs our asses

On everything that stood close, but became unfamiliar.

They thought—it’s the way to possess us again.

It’s the way to come home again.

That’s why.

Otherwise, they wouldn’t have.

This is what they said:

–THE HANDS WORK AGAINST THEMSELVES, BECAUSE THEY HAVE

TO.

After all, they HAD TO return somewhere.

They HAD TO defeat someone.

Someone HAD TO pick her teeth off the floor.

We collapsed like buildings.

In the middle of the kitchen.

We didn’t defend ourselves.

We knew we had to save our strength for reconstruction.

We let the men come at us.

And as we know…

… there were thousands of them.

When they were done, they said:

–Get up. It was just a smack.

–It didn’t hurt. And even if it did...

–Neither first, nor last.

We hid the bruises beneath the dresses.

Beneath the irony.

No one ever saw them.

There isn’t a single photograph.[2]

Which means it never happen.

Which also means it didn’t hurt.

And even if it did...

 

***


We keep on walking, that is, into the past.

Here we died a thousand times, and we will do it again.

Here we were enemies once before, and we will be again.

Here is where we said we could not go on,

yet we kept going anyway.

For the sake of love.

For the sake of children.

For a peaceful home.

Who else if not us?

Once this war is over, and the one after it,

we will remove tons of roof tiles from the street and scrub it to a shine.

And you, you will raise your hand and ball it into a fist, because you have to.

Because of that eye, that leg,

the damages done to our faces,

and all the other shit you had to swallow the previous years.

Someone will have to pay for the humiliation, the mess and the dirt.

You will still have to defeat someone.

As before. As in the future. As always.

And, of course, you will be one of a thousand.

Our man or their man.

Here or somewhere else.

In this city or some other.

In this war or some other.

The protocol remains the same.

We will go through the routine.

We will fall and get up, fall and get up, fall and get up. Fall.

We will joyfully open our arms.

We will eagerly spread our legs.

We will turn our heads to the side.

We will concentrate on some random trifle.

The tip of your ear. The fly on the wall. Cobweb on the ceiling.

And exactly that ear, that fly and that cobweb will reduce your small victory to
abstraction.

We’re fine. We’re fine. We’re fine.

And even if we were not...

So, that’s how you will finally come home.

 

***


Some of us will continue to smile.

Some will hold their tongues forever.

 

***


The compulsive need to clean and build will nevertheless remain inscribed in our
character.

In our bodies.

Like irony, or a slap.

It gives us the itch.

It urges us to tidy up the closets and change the world.

It urges us to hit back

(of course it does!)

but it is not in the nature of our neurosis.

We must do it differently.

We slowly inhale, and exhale.

We count to ten. To twenty.

We say to ourselves:

“Be like a tree.

Be the copper beech in Kleistpark

It has survived far worse.”

And so it passes.

Ten.

Here we are, back on our feet.

Twenty.

We fix our clothes and ask if anything needs doing.

–Are you hungry? Can I get you anything?

–In a second.

It’s not easy to wear the hands that can build Berlin,

then cook dinner,

plow the field,

scrub the toilet,

all of it in a second.

Hands that can turn shit into gold,

caress a child’s hair and get back to work.

Hands that work against themselves even when they rest.

And which would never, ever kill.

 

***


Example No 1:
 

One summer evening in 1986, not far from Paris, Virginie Despentes hitches a ride with three men who will go on to beat and rape her. She clutches a switchblade in the pocket of her jacket, but at no point does she pull it out to defend herself. ‘It never occurred to me to use it’, writes Despentes. “From the moment I realised what was happening to us, I was convinced that they were stronger than we were. (...) I felt I was a woman, utterly and only a woman, in a way I’ve never felt before or since. Saving my own skin didn’t give me the right to wound the man”.[3]

 

***


We work against ourselves, with hands heavy with love.

They hang from our arms like sandbags.

We drag them all the way.

But we don’t complain.

Here, houses were built on the sand.

Graves were dug in the sand.

Our children played in the sand.

They would build castles, only to stomp them with their sneakers.

With a few strikes.

They would cry bitterly over the ruins.

We would take them in our arms,

dry their tears and wipe their runny little noses,

kiss their cheeks and carry them to bed,

take off their sneakers and wipe the blood and ashes from their soles,

and we would coo at them as they sleep:

...Mein Mäuschen… Mein Bärchen...

… Schlaf du nur… Mama wird alles wieder aufbauen...

They would take us literally.

Time would then fly by.

The children would grow up into men with fists as hard as the slabs paving

Potsdamer Straße.

Enough to flatten a life-size city. With a few strikes.

This is what we taught them.

We would crawl into shelters,

then crawl out from under the ruins,

...blah blah blah,

no need to repeat.

Everything would be our fault, again.

 

***


We keep hauling this sand as if it were gold,

just in case something comes of it,

our spines are creaking under the weight and our back muscles are burning,

but we keep hauling,

because we are idiots

because we are giants

because we repeat ourselves,

it’s in our nature.

With this sand we will build a palace with 514 apartments

fitting at least two thousand people of immigrant origin

including children, plants, dogs and satellite dishes,

and this palace will become something of a political idea,

a social experiment,

a monument to utopia,

an expression of pure spite,

like the copper beech in Kleistpark,

who got to know us inside out,

and became our history our witness our book

which contains incredible sentences

which tells us that all this already happened

and that it has already repeated itself,

and will again.

The copper beech was here.

Concealed behind its crown,

(if you enter the park from the east),

stands the courthouse where Claus von Stauffenberg was sentenced to death

after a failed attempt to assassinate Hitler,

who gave his first speech as Germany’s Chancellor

just a bit further away,

at the Sportpalast, at house number 172

(some two hundred metres diagonally).

He was announced by Goebbels, his hands in his pockets.

His thumbs sticking out, a proper redneck.

He counted the audience at the sports hall,

added another twenty million listeners by their radio sets

and the citizens gathered around ten loudspeakers in public places around Berlin.

The majority.

Then the new Chancellor took the podium.

He replaced the term ‘majority’ with terms people, nation and empire.

He looked like a clown, but no one,

not a single person laughed.

All this time, your grandparents held each other’s hand tightly.

Their palms were sweating.

Then they suddenly outstretched their arms, and extended their damp hands in the air.

 

***

 

This is a very important gesture.

It should be described slowly, looking towards the imaginary diagonal above their heads:

Then they—suddenly—outstretched their arms—and extended their damp hands—
into the air.

Afterwards, they had to cut those hands off.

 

***

 

It actually happened.

They believed they were on the side of historical necessity.

They claimed to be fighting for the dignity and safety of the little man.

They said they wanted nothing but the best for their children.

And maybe a small piece of arable land in Poland.

A tiny one.

Just that.

Then they headed home down this very street.

They walked some two hundred metres diagonally.

They crossed through the park. They passed by the copper beech.

They stopped. They took a deep breath.

As if having a premonition.

As if understanding something.

But they got it all wrong.

They should have laughed,

but they were dead serious.

They were the majority—the people—the empire.

Then Grandpa died at Stalingrad.

Grandma was raped by the victors while picking nettles at Kleistpark in the spring
of 1945.

At the site of the sports hall now stands a palace with 514 apartments[4]

accommodating two thousand people of immigrant origin

including children, plants, dogs and satellite dishes,

and this palace is indeed something of a political idea,

a social experiment,

a monument to utopia,

an expression of pure spite,

something to have faith in, like a tree

and write it in capital letters:
 

ONCE IT IS ALL OVER

WE WILL LEARN TO LIVE TOGETHER

LIKE A FOREST.

 

***


What a strange performance. These women scare you.

What do they actually mean when they talk about trees and street numbers?

Who are they addressing when they say ‘you’?

Should you feel guilty about something?

You have been fighting a panic attack for fifteen minutes now.

Your heart is about to jump out of your chest, your mouth, the eighth row.

And now those women.

They stand at the edge of the stage and look straight at you.

Actually, no! They are not looking at you, but at the bag.

They have noticed it!

It means you are not crazy. The bag exists.

But what are you going to do now? It will seem like you brought it into the theatre on purpose.

Who would believe you that you could not throw it off?

Shit, you’re thinking; are they now going to ask you to hand over the bag?

You don’t even know what’s inside! You’re in major shit.

The women come off the stage.

They are immense.

Their faces are painted white, their eyes lined with pencil and eyeshadow.

Their drooping eyelids.

They come up to you.

They reek of sweat mixed with baby powder.

They gesture for you to hand them the bag.

You give them the bag. You offer no explanations.

You don’t want to be rude. And everyone is staring.

The exchange takes place in complete silence, so you can hear the noise outside
the auditorium.

It sounds like a fucking revolution. Explosions, machine gun bursts, screams...

But again, no one reacts, so neither do you.

Maybe there is another performance taking place at the same time?

Maybe this is ‘expanded theatre’ or something like that?

Maybe this is...

The women leave, but one looks back as if she knows what you’re thinking.

She winks at you with her pencilled eye and gently opens the theatre door.

Through the partly open door you can see what is happening outside.

A man, completely engulfed in flames, is running frenziedly in front of the coat
check.

The fire has blinded him and he crashes into the walls. Then he falls and quietly
melts away.

A woman arrives. She is walking briskly towards the hall, dragging along a boy
of about seven.

A sniper’s red dot pulsates on her chest. She collapses without a warning.

For a moment the boy looks at his mother’s body, then turns and runs in the
opposite direction.

The sniper’s red dot, however, keeps flickering. It travels across the walls into the hall, it crawls across the floor, grazes the side of your shoe and climbs up your knees all the way to your forehead.

You jump out of your seat! Aaaah!

You jump out of your seat as if from a nightmare and the theatre doors mercifully close.

Darkness.

Nobody noticed a thing.

You sit back into your seat.

No-body-not-a-thing.

Everyone is looking at the stage.

You have no explanation, except... except that you did not see what you just saw.

You did not.

Your heart would surely explode from fear.

But no, it is beating peacefully.

The heart is always right.

The audience is always right.

 

***

 

Translated from the Croatian by Mima Simić
 

This contribution is part of the theatre play developed during the workshop ‘While History Writes Itself’, which took place at Maxim Gorki Theater, Berlin during 2023.

 

 

[1] ‚Was sind das für Zeiten, wo
Ein Gespräch über Bäume fast ein Verbrechen ist
Weil es ein Schweigen über so viele Untaten einschließt!'
Bertolt Brecht, An die Nachgeboren

[2] “When we speak about conditions of systemic violence, we should not look for photographs of or about systemic violence, but explore photographs taken in such zones of systemic violence. The places recorded in them are exactly the same places where rape took place: Maybe not on the third floor, but on the second; maybe not in the apartment on the right, but in this one on the left; Maybe only three soldiers and not four, and so on and so forth. The impossibility of stabilizing this kind of information, which may be crucial for individual cases, is counterbalanced by the possibility of exploring, through photographs, the destroyed urban spaces in which hundreds of thousands of women were held hostage, raped and ruled by produced food shortages as modes of politico-physical subjugation. The mass rape in Berlin not only should be reconstructed, it must also be understood as foundational to post-war democratic political regimes. In the following years, similar combinations of procedures – forcing people to leave their homes, destroying social fabrics, introducing food shortages and regulating provisions – were applied, and hundreds of thousands more women were raped, in other places, where new political regimes were imposed; and in those cases already researched, as well as those that have not yet come to light, the violence against women will be kept outside of the factual regime of photographic archives.” Ariella Aïsha Azoulay, The Natural History of Rape (2017/2022).

[3] Virginie Despentes, King Kong Theory (London: Fitzcarraldo Editions, 2022), 46.

[4] The Pallasseum or Sozialpalast/Pallas is a housing block in the Schöneberg district of Berlin, near Potsdamer Strasse, built between 1974 and 1977 after plans by architects Jürgen Sawade, Dieter Frowein, Dietmar Grötzebach, and Günter Plessow. It is considered a prime example of brutalist architecture in Berlin. The famous sports arena (Sportpalast), which previously stood there, was demolished on 13 November 1973.