Wolken.Heim

Gyrating voices. They formulate, they search, they know. They add up to form assumptions, allegations and certainties. Departures and demarcations are evoked. Across eras, mentalities and canonisations. It’s about theories and about action. New set pieces arise, trying to grasp and explain something; set pieces to provide self-assurance. They revolve around the question of what is German and wherein the particularity of the German nation lies. “Wolken.Heim” is a collage about the issue of identity (or identities?), a great synchronicity of various eras and mentalities, high ideas and outdated theories. The text is a collage not only in content, but also in structure: Elfriede Jelinek compiles texts from Hölderlin to Heidegger, from Fichte to the RAF.

    A strong yearning is evident in both the language and the speakers. They revolve around the evocation of hoped-for departures and expected discoveries, as much as around the differentiation from the other. A never-ending discourse ensues, looming and murmuring. Full of hope and sometimes desperate, very serious and at times very disparaging, eerie and at times excruciatingly funny. Jelinek doesn’t just quote: She continues, develops, parodies and fractures. Towards the end, speech starts to stutter. The quest for consistency and connection continually ends up confronted with the impossibility of these things: A realm of voices serves as an archive of the German soul. 

“Wolken.Heim”, Elfriede Jelinek’s great breakthrough as a dramatist in 1988, will open the newly constructed Diskothek. Following his productions of “Rechnitz (Der Würgeengel)” and “Die Schutzflehenden / Die Schutzbefohlenen”, Schauspiel Leipzig’s artistic director Enrico Lübbe continues his exploration of the Nobel Prize for Literature laureate and most distinguished German-language dramatist of our times.

The set will be designed by painter Titus Schade, a visual artist who is considered one of the most prominent young representatives of the “Leipziger Schule”. A graduate of the Leipzig Academy of Fine Arts and a master student of Neo Rauch’s, this is his first work for the theatre.