Review of the audio production Fatzer Versuch #1, by Anderer Kunstverein e.V., directed by Ferdinand Klüsener, 19 Dec. 2024.

Fatzer Versuch #1, directed by Ferdinand Klüsener, is a radio play based on a series of workshops at the Anderer Kunstverein e.V. in Leipzig, in which the workshops’ participants—youth both with and without an immigrant background—engaged with Bertolt Brecht’s unfinished Fatzer. This forty-minute play is an experiment in sound, form, and community-building, embracing fragmentation as a means of reflecting not only the chaotic realities, moral dilemmas, and trauma arising from armed conflicts, but also the underlying tensions between individual desires and solidarity. In the end, the play merges the participants’ diverse lived experiences with collective artistic expression, creating a space where community and art serve as a counterforce to the isolation of death, hate, and destruction.

The play has a collage-like quality, embedding recurring elements within a layered soundscape where multilingual voices and sounds—both raw and synthetic—overlap, interrupt, and disrupt each other. Amidst this productive confusion, several recurring anchors emerge that shape the play’s dialectical content. These anchors can be categorized into five main types: meta-reflections and commentary, testimonies, dialogic fragments, recordings from participants working and reflecting on the play, and songs. Aside from the songs, most of these elements appear unscripted, which produces a raw, documentary tone that reinforces a sense of unpredictability and authenticity while also fostering powerful sensory and emotional responses that stimulate audience immersion through layered sound and vocal manipulation. For example, in the case of a Syrian refugee recounting different traumatic experiences of and reflections on war and violence over the course of several separate segments, the play continues uninterrupted for minutes at a time. Eerie sounds accompany the testimonial fragments and references to perpetrators of violence; in combination with vocal distortions, such as of the perpetrators’ reported speech—altered to sound ominous, almost Darth Vader-like—they create a sinister atmosphere that is viscerally felt.

Such moments of deep immersion and heightened attention are short-lived. They are repeatedly disrupted by abrupt cuts, such as a sudden transition from testimony relaying a family member’s execution for refusing to fire from inside a tank into a residential street where children were playing, to a different voice offering meta-commentary on Brecht’s Fatzer, which is then itself cut off mid-sentence. This interruption then gives way to a seemingly unrelated dialogic fragment, in which another speaker poses a casual question about when someone last went climbing. At first, these shifts appear disconnected, yet upon closer reflection, they subtly recontextualize a central moment from Brecht’s original text, namely the act of desertion, when the soldiers “climb” out of the tank. The question of desertion becomes central to this play as well, when participants reflect on how they would react if war came to them. By weaving together different fragments in this associative manner, the play enters a dialogue with Fatzer by cycling through some of the text’s major themes, continuously alternating between captivating and frustrating its audience, thus walking a fine line between emotional engagement, intellectual stimulation, and critical distance. In this way, the play invites the audience to navigate the interplay between art, violence, resistance, and everyday actions.

A central element of this radio play is its array of rap songs. Within a total of eight songs by varying participants, the play covers a wide range of emotional states—between hope and disillusion, escapism and self-destructive behavior, love and betrayal, success and failure. The songs’ recurring themes align with the traditions of the hip-hop genre, referring to money, violence, drugs, and loneliness, both as means to an escape and as cause of suffering. In the context of this play, the songs serve to balance personal experiences with larger social questions and move between escapism and the confrontation of these issues head on. In combination with the play’s other segments, such as the dialogical and testimonial fragments (which usually contain some hints of community through conversations or active listening by other participants), these songs relate primarily to the respective individuals and their experiences. They focus on the need to express oneself and one’s individuality, yet they do so in ways that make the audience understand how those desires and struggles are shared by many. As much as this radio play is the work of collective artistic expression, it also leaves this room for individual articulation, showing the depth and complexity of both individual and collective desires and struggles. It hints thereby at underlying tensions, just as Brecht’s original text does through the conflicts it stages between its four main characters and the respective political ideals and contradictions they represent.

While this radio play contains many other elements that could be fruitfully discussed in more depth, such as its references to the German Democratic Republic, the current events in Ukraine, and to Star Wars—a way of acknowledging how history is repeating itself, serving as a nod to the cyclical nature of power and oppression, in which individual choices matter—this play is essentially about the traumatic kernel of solidarity. The play frames solidarity not only as forged through trauma, loss, crisis, and rupture, in which exclusion serves as a condition for inclusion, but also as unstable and always threatened by its own internal conflicts, between love and aggression and between identification and rivalry. In this way, Fatzer Versuch #1 offers a compelling example of how the didactic intentions of Brecht’s Lehrstück remain relevant today.

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