Sebastian Baumgarten brings the GDR cult novel “Franziska Linkerhand” to the stage – with Katja Riemann as one of three Franziskas who explain socialist housing construction. An extremely desolate stage construction site. By Barbara Behrendt
There they stand like look-alikes: bobbed hair, striped shirt, trousers. Franziska three times. And they proclaim pathetically: “It must exist, the clever synthesis between today and tomorrow, between dreary block buildings and cheerfully lively streets, between the necessary and the beautiful, and I am on the trail of it, haughty and, oh, how often, timid, and one day I will find her!”
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Katja Riemann, Alexandra Sinelnikova and Maria Simon share the role of Franziska Linkerhand. It is the age-old tic of post-drama to have several actors embody a character – as if an actress is not capable of expanding multiple facets. To make matters worse, these three Franziskas don’t even reflect different sides, but simply represent the title heroine, who is tender as well as passionate as well as angular and naive: stubborn, hard and assertive.
Build houses where you can be happy
Anyone who grew up in eastern Germany in the 1970s couldn’t ignore her: “Franziska Linkerhand”, published posthumously in 1974 after the writer Brigitte Reimann died of cancer at the age of 39. It became a cult book and is still considered one of the great GDR stories today: the middle-class upbringing of young Franziska after the Second World War, her development into an ambitious, idealistic architect in the 1960s who wants to build houses in which people can be happy .
Franziska could have a career in Berlin, but chooses the province to make people’s lives better in housing construction. She goes to Neustadt, synonymous with Hoyerswerda, where Brigitte Reimann herself lived. Here Franziska fights for a lively city center, for cinemas, for individualized apartments – and fails because of the typical prefabricated building of socialism. The stubbornness of the party, the male rule, the bureaucracy.
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Only pitiful remnants of love remain
But first and foremost, “Franziska Linkerhand” is a book about great love, written like one long letter to Franziska’s lover Ben, with foreshadowing and rewinding and a dense, highly poetic language that makes the story shine. With her sensual descriptions (censored in the GDR publication) the author draws you into young Franziska’s hunger for life, longings, loving and dreams.
However, only pitiful remnants of the great hunger for love and life remain on stage. It is truly rare to see such an uninflamed and distant pair of lovers as Franziska and Ben on this theater stage.
Sebastian Baumgarten rushes hectically through the scenes in less than two hours, always with the question at the center: Which cities do we want to live in? It is, at least unusually, a production about the history of socialist urban development, told based on Franziska’s life story.
Katja Riemann as Franziska
Now, urban development is not necessarily one of the particularly sensual stage topics. But with believable characters who captivate the audience, anything is of course possible. Alone: These figures in particular are missing. The stage is like a busy construction site. There are hardly any shavings left of the poetic Reimann language in the noisy sound.
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Production has found an apt image for quick and inexpensive mass construction with prefabricated parts in series production: various prefabricated walls hang from the ceiling, which are then lowered for one scene or another. Not pretty, but functional.
In addition, videos in particular shape the production. They show crowds of people in urban areas moving their mouths animated by AI and saying something about housing construction. They show the “Schwarze Pumpe” brown coal plant, where Brigitte Reimann also worked. In between, manifestos are thrown on the walls, such as the “Principles of Urban Planning from 1950”. Or a clip with the architect Oscar Niemeyer, who gossips about Bauhaus architecture and raves about his planned city of Brasilia. The evening is increasingly becoming a lesson for architecture aficionados.
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At the end, when Franziska asks the brightly lit audience in a housing construction lecture how we want to live together, the present moment wafts in for a brief moment – but then immediately fades away again in airy phrases about the risks that have to be taken when building and the courage that it takes.
Last but not least, the evening jumps back to the recent past. In a video someone talks about the right-wing extremist riots in Hoyerswerda in 1991. What does that mean? That the dreary planned cities led straight to extremism? It would be a final short circuit in a dull production that itself looks a little like a building ruin from the day before yesterday.
Broadcast: rbb24 Inforadio, October 19, 2024, 7:55 a.m
