Ostermeier writings [1]

The crisis of contemporary German drama after Heiner Müller and Werner Schwab is a crisis of content, of form, and of the mission to which it might commit itself. The wealthy constituency of communism's Western conquerors no longer sets itself the task of recognising and analysing the misery and the dependencies of many within this society, in order to then address and change this situation. It is a crisis of a politics that merely manages its day-to-day business, unless it happens to be waging a war somewhere. The collective, understood as a community of free, self-determined and responsible human beings, however, lives on as a nostalgic yearning, even where it prostitutes itself in the form of teamwork' in the service of enhanced capitalist productivity. Capitalism has no problem with the fact that human beings perceive themselves as objects with neither identity nor a capacity to act, and to see this idea of humanity represented on stage.