Hans-Thies Lehmann (1944-2022)

Traueranzeige: “Die Zeit” vom 8. September 2022, S. 52.

The International Brecht Society mourns the passing of Hans-Thies Lehmann, Professor emeritus of Theater, Film and Media Studies at the University of Frankfurt (Germany) and former President of the IBS. Below we would like to share personal remembrances and correspondences.

Contributors

Helmut Lethen
Erdmut Wizisla
Inka Paul
Florian Vaßen
Mischa Twitchen
Gerd Koch
Ingrid Dormien Kordela
Philip Watkinson
Markus Wessendorf
Marc Silberman
Brandon Woolf
Amy Chan
Alex Karschnia
Bernice Chan

Gesammelte Nachrufe, Erinnerungen und Reaktionen aus Deutschland

Helmut Lethen

Unter der Überschrift DER ÜBERVATER hätte ich die Nachricht vom Tod meines Freundes in der FAZ am 20. Juli 2022 nicht erwartet. Er war jünger als ich und er war mein Lehrer, als wir zusammen 1976 in der Rostlaube der FU-Berlin Brechts „Hauspostille“ unterrichteten. Wie unfair: er starb mit 77 Jahren im fernen Athen. Er inspirierte mich, die Verhaltenslehren der Kälte zu schreiben (das Buch hielt er dann skeptisch für einen „Schlager“), indem er mir – im Widerspruch zu Peter von Matts „Brecht und die Kälte“ – die reflexive Seite der Kälte entdecken half.

Am 20. Juli liegt sein Nachruf im Feuilleton direkt neben einem sehr schönen Portrait der Malerin Ottilie Roederstein von 1904, das mich an Genia Schulz erinnert, einem Artikel über das hautnahe Abbild von Beethovens Lebendmaske, das in London versteigert wird, Dietmar Daths Filmkritik eines „Horrorfilms über Geschlechterschrecken“ und einem Gespräch mit dem Biologen Axel Meyer über Geschlechtsunterschiede bei Pflanzen und Tieren… So lagert sein Nachleben zwischen Texten, deren Aktualität womöglich schnell vergessen wird. Aber auch dem Vergessen konnte er mit Nietzsche etwas abgewinnen. Es sollte wie das Essen produktiv im Stoffwechsel des Lebens wirken.

Als ich ihn 1974 kennenlernte, waren Texte im Sinne von Peter Szondi (er berichtete von der verzweifelten Suche nach seinem Lehrer in den Wäldern, bis man ihn ertrunken im Halensee fand), die letzte, wenn auch flackernde Instanz des Sinns. Später hat er die Schauspieler ermutigt, aufzuhören, Zeichenträger zu sein. Jetzt sehe ich seine Fotografie, die dem Nachruf beigegeben ist, und habe wirklich nicht mehr als dieses Zeichen, sein Körper hat aufgehört, Zeichenträger zu sein, und ich höre noch die schon von Parkinson malträtierte Stimme, als er am IFK in Wien war. Auf dem Zeitungs-Foto sind die Augen verschattet, das punctum rührt von seiner Stimme. Sie ist sanft und streift wie ein Pfeil. Oh Thies, warum verrat ich Dich durchs schiere Überleben.

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Erdmut Wizisla
Thies singt

Ich weiß nicht, wann ich Thies zum ersten Mal begegnet bin. War es erst 2006 in Augsburg? Seinen Namen kannte ich längst. Ich verband damit Innovatives und eine Kühnheit und gewisse Strenge des Denkens. Wie überraschend dann, bei der persönlichen Begegnung, die Wärme und Zugewandtheit dieses Mannes. Dabei gehört das doch zusammen.

Wir haben uns ab und an im Zusammenhang mit der IBS getroffen, in seiner Wohnung in der Nestorstraße, im Brecht-Haus, in der Akademie. Wir hätten mehr aus unsren Begegnungen machen können.

Seit er tot ist, fällt mir immer wieder ein Abend bei dem Augsburger Brecht Symposium 2006 ein (“Brecht und der Tod”). Sicher hatte Thies als Präsident der IBS tagsüber klug über Brecht gesprochen. Sicher hatte er sich entschieden an den Debatten beteiligt. Nachdem das Tagespensum absolviert war, trafen wir uns in einer Kneipe. Irgendwann setzte Michael Morley sich an ein Klavier und intonierte Brecht-Lieder. Vera Stegmann war dabei, Charly Weber, glaube ich, Antony Tatlow, vielleicht Jamie Lyon – und eben Thies. Ein Lied gab das andere, wir konnten nicht aufhören: O Himmel, strahlender Azur! Freilich dreht das Rad sich immer weiter. Das Fleisch schlägt auf in den Vorstädten. Es wechseln die Zeiten.

Thies übertraf alle. Absolut textsicher. Absolut begeistert. Absolut ansteckend.

Irgendjemand hat ein Foto gemacht: Thies singt.

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Inka Paul
Lesen lernen

Ich kenne kein Leben ohne meinen Bruder. Er war da, als ich geboren wurde – wenngleich nicht unbedingt begeistert: Sein Lächeln auf dem Foto, auf dem er mich im Arm hält, gleicht eher einem gehorsamen Grinsen. Man hatte ihm ein Geschwister, kein Baby angekündigt, deshalb sein Kommentar: „Die ist so klein, mit der kann man ja gar nicht spielen“.

Später, auch wohl eher dazu angehalten, sich um mich zu kümmern, schleppte er mich im Leiterwagen mit, wenn er mit seinen Freunden spielte. Zu Fuß konnte ich nicht Schritt halten, fand es aber aufregend. Erst als ich schneller laufen konnte, war ich besser gelitten bei den „Räuber-und-Gendarm“-Spielen.

Wenn er mit Freunden allein abzog, fühlte ich mich hintangesetzt; – das Los der jüngeren Geschwister – wenn kein Freund zur Hand war, spielten wir Fußball – seine Bälle trafen das Tor immer, meine so gut wie nie; oder wir spielten Seeräuber auf einem zum Schiff umgebauten Sofa – der Fußboden war das Meer. Jungsspiele, versteht sich, bei den Puppen machte er sich eher unbeliebt, weil er das Vergrößerungsglas unseres Vaters benutzte, um vor meinen Augen in der Mittagssonne ein Loch in das schöne Puppen-Cape zu brennen und darauf auch noch stolz zu sein.

Als Hans-Thies als Austauschschüler nach Jackson, Michigan ging, freute ich mich, endlich meine Eltern für mich allein zu haben. Meinen Vorschlag, „Er könnte eigentlich auch dableiben“, quittierte unsere Mutter mit: „So etwas darfst du nicht sagen, nicht einmal denken!“ – Meine Zerknirschung währte lange: ich hatte es ja gedacht. – Die ersten zwei Wochen seiner Abwesenheit genoss ich. Dann wurde es langweilig, dann öde, dann fand ich, er könnte endlich wiederkommen.
Dies Jahr der Trennung veränderte viel. Danach stritten wir nicht mehr, wir redeten viel, ich teilte sein wachsendes Interesse an Literatur und Theater und an der politischen Auseinandersetzung mit der Elterngeneration; und so blieb es. Ich kenne – noch – kein Leben ohne ihn.

„Ein großartiger Lehrer und Lernender“ hat René Pollesch meinen Bruder genannt. Ich möchte ein Scherflein seines sich früh manifestierten Lehrer-Talents beisteuern, denn lehren und lernen machte unser Verhältnis zu einem großen Teil aus, ließ mich seine Freude am Lernen teilen und – wenngleich erst spät – seine Freude am Lehren. Das begann in der Kindheit.

Ich bin etwa vier, Hans-Thies also acht, als er mir lesen, schreiben und rechnen beibringt. Ich sitze an unserem Kindertisch und schreibe, mein Bruder schnauzt: „Stell dich doch nicht so doof an!“ Unsere Mutter reißt die Tür auf, entsetzt über das Anschreien; aber selbst mir ist ihr Schlichtungsversuch unverständlich, denn ich habe ja nicht kapiert. Prinzipien der Pädagogik sind uns beiden noch fremd. Unsere Schulstunden sind Klasse.

Ich bin in der ersten Klasse und male: Am unteren Bildrand einen Streifen grüner Wiese, oben einen Streifen blauen Himmels. Auf der Wiese stehen zwei Kinder, rechts in der Ecke hängt eine gelbe Sonne mit langen Strahlen.

Hans-Thies: Was ist das Weiß zwischen Wiese und Himmel?

Ich: Das ist die Luft.

Hans-Thies: Unsinn. Die Wiese geht bis zum Horizont und dann in den Himmel über.

Ich (nicht faul dagegen): Quatsch. Himmel ist blau, Luft ist durchsichtig. Und überhaupt, dann würden die Kinder in der Erde stehen!

Hans-Thies: Ach ja? Komm mit. (Wir gehen in den Garten.)
Wo ist deine Luft? (Unwillkürlich schaue ich nach oben.) Da ist der Rasen, und der geht über in den Himmel. Steht der Baum auf dem Rasen oder im Rasen?

Ich lasse mich überzeugen. Am nächsten Schultag male ich die Kinder ins Grün. – „Seht euch das an!“, sagt meine Mitschülerin Inge Krossa, „die stehen ja in der Erde!“ Andere Kinder gesellen sich dazu und lachen mich aus. Ab da male ich wieder unten grün, oben blau, die Mitte mit den Kindern bleibt weiß.

Meine erste Begegnung mit Brecht verschaffte Hans-Thies mir, da war ich 13, und er gab mir „Die Dreigroschenoper“ mit in die Sommerferien. Aus wohlbehütetem Elternhaus verstand ich so gut wie nichts, wusste nicht, was eine Nutte ist, was mir ein entscheidendes Grundverständnis für den Text entzog, aber ich war fasziniert und las gleich die anderen Stücke in dem Band hinterher. Sicher hatte sich mein Bruder über meinen Wissenshorizont keine Gedanken gemacht, aber wer weiß, vielleicht war er schon damals ein Anhänger des Nicht-Verstehens.

Ob Rechtschreibung, den Satz des Pythagoras, das erste Violin-Konzert a-moll von Bach, oder der Kinobesuch von „20.000 Meilen unter dem Meer“, alles wollte er vermitteln, alles nahm ich an. Mit 15 wurde Hans-Thies Mitglied in der Olbers-Gesellschaft (für Astronomie) und bekam zur Konfirmation ein Fernrohr. Daraufhin pflegte er mich nachts aufzuwecken, damit wir die besondere Konstellation zwischen Jupiter und Saturn beobachteten, auch wenn wir dafür das Treppengeländer hinunterrutschen mussten, weil die Stufen knarrten und sie die Eltern geweckt hätten. – Jemand, der alles wissen will, immer neugierig auf Neues ist, dafür auch gerne Altes vergisst, und der jedes Wissen und jede Neugier mit anderen teilen will, das ist mein Bruder. Am klarsten war es mir in seiner Abschiedsvorlesung in Frankfurt mit dem Titel „Lücken sehen“, in der er nicht über seine gemachten Erkenntnisse sprach, vielmehr aufriss, wo die Forschung jetzt ansetzen oder weiterarbeiten sollte. Auch im Abschied das Neue. „Neubeginnen kannst du mit dem letzten Atemzug“. Das ist wieder Brecht. Oder, um Hans-Thies selbst aus dem „Postdramatischen Theater“ zu zitieren: „Etwas Neues wird kommen.“

Etwas Neues. Hans-Thies hatte es nie sehr mit den Erinnerungen. Ich, vier Jahre jünger als er, musste ihm immer seine Erinnerungen erzählen. Und hier kommt schon wieder Brecht ins Spiel: Ich glaube, mein Bruder war ihm geradezu dankbar dafür, dass er „Lob der Vergesslichkeit“ geschrieben hat, es war die perfekte Rechtfertigung für sein schlechtes Gedächtnis. Jede Erinnerung, pflegte er zu sagen, nimmt Raum, und unser Gedächtnis ist begrenzt. Ich brauche den Raum für Neues.[1]

Die Dankbarkeit für das, was war, für das, wofür er Grundsteine für Zukünftiges gelegt hat, beginnt – sehr langsam – sich in mir gegen den Schmerz und die Trauer durchzusetzen. Und die mich überwältigende große Zuneigung für ihn, die ich in den vergangenen Wochen in zahllosen Anrufen, Briefen, E-Mails erfahren durfte, ist ein großer Trost. Auch dafür hier: Danke.

[1] Wie erhöbe sich ohne das Vergessen der
Spurenverwischenden Nacht der Mensch am Morgen?
Wie sollte der sechsmal zu Boden Geschlagene
Zum siebenten Mal aufstehen
Umzupflügen den steinigen Boden, anzufliegen
Den gefährlichen Himmel?
Die Schwäche des Gedächtnisses verleiht
Den Menschen Stärke.

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IBS Sympiosium, Porto Alegre Brazil (2013)

“Brecht is Love”: Hans-Thies Lehmann (left) and Paula Hanssen (far right) at the IBS Symposium in Porto Alegre, Brazil (2013)

Florian Vaßen
“Ich muss…immer an unsere Schiffahrt denken…”. Thies in Brasilien

Hans-Thies Lehmann ist am 16. Juli 2022 gestorben, als Mensch und Wissenschaftler wird er uns fehlen, und wir schauen zurück und erinnern uns an die vergangenen Jahre. Auch ich habe nachgedacht, wann und wo ich eigentlich einen besonders engen Kontakt zu ihm hatte. Zu meiner Überraschung war es nicht in Frankfurt oder Berlin und auch nicht auf den IBS-Tagungen etwa in Berlin, Augsburg, Hawaii oder Oxford und selbst bei den sehr intensiven und produktiven „Brecht-Gesprächen“ in der Villa Vigoni im März 2015 am Comer See nicht. Vielmehr haben wir in Brasilien, im Kontext des ALEG-Kongresses 2003 und des IBS-Symposiums 2013, besonders intensiv zusammengearbeitet und eine persönliche Beziehung entwickelt. Im „Gespräch“ über Bertolt Brecht und Heiner Müller, über Theater und Lehrstück, konzentriert im Fatzer-Fragment, „waren wir uns“ „nahe“, wie es in Brechts Lob der dritten Sache heißt:

Wieviel besser war doch unser Gespräch
Über die dritte Sache, die uns gemeinsam war
Vieler Menschen große, gemeinsame Sache!
Wie nahe waren wir uns, dieser Sache
Nahe! Wie gut waren wir uns, dieser
Guten Sache nahe! (BFA 3, 307)

Als Willi Bolle, der Präsidenten der Associación Latinoamericana de Estudios Germanísticos (ALEG), und seine Mitarbeiter von der Universidade de São Paulo 2003 den XI. Lateinamerikanischen Germanistenkongress Blickwechsel planten und organisierten, habe ich sie unterstützt und mich dabei vor allem um den Kontakt zu den europäischen Kolleg*innen gekümmert. Wir haben auch Thies eingeladen, und ich habe mich sehr gefreut, dass er nach Brasilien gekommen ist.

Wie Bolle in der Begrüßung betont, ging es auf dem Kongress vor allem um „Visibilität und Visualität“, aber auch um das „Transitorische“ und um „Erinnerungskultur“[1]. Auf diesem „Wanderkongress“, der am 26. September in São Paulo begann, in Paraty fortgesetzt wurde und am 3. Oktober in Petrópolis endete, korrespondierten Thematik und Organisationsform. Abgesehen von den differenten europäischen und lateinamerikanischen Perspektiven, veränderte sich ständig der Blickwinkel, allein schon durch den wechselnden Aufenthalt an diesen drei sehr unterschiedlichen Orten, in der Metropole São Paulo, der idyllischen Kleinstadt Paraty direkt am Meer, Geburtsstadt der Mutter von Thomas und Heinrich Mann, und Petrópolis, Sommersitz der brasilianischen Kaiser in einem angenehmen Höhenklima in den Bergen und zugleich Ort, an dem sich Stefan Zweig das Leben nahm. Die Teilnehmer*innen machten sehr unterschiedliche Erfahrungen und erlebten die Vielfalt Brasiliens, von der Faszination der Riesenstadt São Paulo bis zur wunderschönen und beeindruckenden Natur. Die „Bus-Karawane“ von Ort zu Ort, Exkursionen und andere Aktivitäten verstärkten in besonderem Maße die Kommunikation und führten zu gemeinsamen Erlebnissen. Noch sieben Jahre später, bei der Vorbereitung des IBS-Symposiums in Porto Alegre schreibt Thies über unseren eintägigen Ausflug mit einem großen Motorsegler bei Paraty: „Ich muss […] immer an unsere Schiffahrt denken…“ (Email vom 1.12.2010)

Thies sprach auf dem Kongress in der Sektion 1 „Literatur und Öffentlichkeit“ und „konzentrierte sich in seinem Vortrag Text- und Theaterformen politischer Öffentlichkeit „…auf theatrale Experimente im öffentlichen Raum der Stadt…Dabei verbinden sich postdramatische Theater-Formen mit politischer Aktionskunst, Dokumentation und szenisch dargestellter Reflexion zu einem neuen szenisch-theatralen Verständnis für das Politische in der Öffentlichkeit.“[2]

Die Zusammenarbeit von Thies und mir für das 14. IBS-Symposium The Creative Spectator: Collision and Dialogue vom 20.-23. Mai 2013 an der Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul in Porto Alegre hatte einen deutlich anderen Charakter: Sein Entwurf des Symposiums wurde von Günther Heeg, Alexander Stillmark, Erdmut Wizisla, Marc Silbermann und mir diskutiert und ergänzt. Obwohl das Theater-Department als Veranstalter vor Ort das Symposium stärker auf Workshops und Gruppenpräsentationen ausrichtete, gab es selbstverständlich auch eine große Zahl an Vorträge; die Auswahl aus den vielen eingereichten Abstracts oblag Thies und mir von deutscher sowie Marta Isaacson und Jorge Dubatti von brasilianischer Seite. Es war insofern kein leichtes Unterfangen, als wir Aspekte wie Auslandsgermanistik, Nachwuchswissenschaftler*innen, Themenvielfalt berücksichtigen mussten und wollten, und sich die Kommunikation mit den Kolleg*innen aus Porto Alegre – ganz anders als die sehr gute Zusammenarbeit von Thies und mir – zeitweise als recht schwierig erwies. In einer Email vom 27.11.2012 schreibt er: „…ich hatte auch noch ein paar Abstracts bekommen, etwas unübersichtlich das alles“ und am 8.12.2012 heißt es: „Mit Deiner Wahl…bin ich sehr einverstanden, auch mit 4 und 15, 10 [die Nummern der eingereichten Abstracts] würde ich evtl. noch dazunehmen.“ Ich denke, wir haben eine richtige Auswahl der Vorträge getroffen, das Symposium verlief erfolgreich und wir haben gemeinsam eine gute Zeit in Porto Alegre verbracht.

Die zwei Tagungen hatten einen deutlich unterschiedlichen Charakter, beide aber waren wissenschaftlich produktiv und im persönlichen Kontakt sehr angenehm und intensiv. Gern würde ich noch weitere Kongresse und Symposien in Brasilien oder anderswo mit Thies zusammen planen und veranstalten, aber das ist ja nun nicht mehr möglich. Deshalb sage ich obrigado und adeus.

[1] Willi Bolle: Begrüßung. In: Blickwechsel. Akten des XI. Lateinamerikanischen Germanistenkongresses. São Paulo – Paraty – Petrópolis. 3 Bde. Bd. 1. Hg. v. Willi Bolle und Helmut Galle. São Paulo: Monferrer Produções 2005, S. 4f.

[2] Marcus Mazzari / Günter Pressler / Florian Vaßen: Literatur und Öffentlichkeit. In: Ebenda, S. 296; Lehmanns Vortrag ist wohl aus Termingründen nicht in den Akten des Kongresses abgedruckt.

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Lehmann at the 13th IBS Symposium in Porto Alegre, Brazil (2013)

Mischa Twitchin
Lehmann’s Voice(s)

Not only a profoundly thoughtful scholar but also, as I’m sure everyone would acknowledge, a very generous one, Hans-Thies Lehmann combined qualities that do not always keep such good company in academia! He kindly agreed, for example, to record two texts in German for me (one each by Bernhard and Beckett), reading for sound tracks to performances that were still only intuitions at that point. (These “monologue” performances, which were also made in French and English versions, were composed of independently conceived sound tracks and action-images, the latter being played in juxtaposition with the fixed timeframe of the former, with the whole emerging in a relation between the third and first person.) I no longer remember where and when we recorded the Beckett – fragments from Ill seen, ill said (in Elmar Tophoven’s translation, Schlecht gesehen, schlecht gesagt), which were then interwoven with moments from Schubert’s Winterreise accompaniment, played by Gerald Moore, and a Brahms chaconne, arranged for left hand, played by Paul Wittgenstein – for a performance, with Penny Francis, entitled In the Zone of Stones; but I have a vivid memory of our recording the Bernhard. This involved fragments from Alte Meister (Old Masters in Ewald Oser’s translation) for a performance entitled Vienna: the Black Hole of Childhood. Lehmann was giving a series of lectures at the University of Kent – part of the work for his book, Tragedy and Dramatic Theatre (translated by Erik Butler) – and the recording was done in his office there. With Bernhard’s usual excoriating humour, the first fragments evoked a contrast between the front-of-house cakes and the backstage toilets in Viennese cafés: “On the one hand this megalomaniac cult of gigantic gateaux, and on the other these frightfully dirty lavatories, he said.” While Lehmann was, of course, a consummately “professional” reader of both authors’ work, we barely managed to get a complete recording of these opening sentences, as each time he was overcome with laughing. For about twenty minutes we tried in vain to reach the full stop before waves of laughter finally brought – untragic – tears to our eyes. This comedy of the tension between wanting to speak seriously and submitting to the humour of what is being spoken offers its own testimony to Lehmann’s commitment to questions of artistic form. Besides the scholarly voice, then, hearing him read aloud from two of his favourite authors recalls the warmth of Lehmann’s actual voice, which can still be shared through these recordings. (Films of both performances are freely accessible on Vimeo, where the audio is intricately edited and the visual is a single continuous take, just as the live performance, without any editing: https://vimeo.com/manage/videos/48990838 [Bernhard]; and https://vimeo.com/manage/videos/86850387 [Beckett].)

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Gerd Koch

Es ist März 2015. In der Villa Vigoni (Italien), der wunderbaren, dialog-freundlichen Tagungsstätte, findet eine Konferenz mit diesem Thema satt: „Texte, die auf Geschichte warten“ statt. Es gibt zwischen den Vorträgen und Debatten viele, gute Gelegenheiten zum informellen, auch lebens- und fach-geschichtlichen Austausch. Ich habe das Vergnügen, mich wieder mit Hans-Thies Lehmann zu unterhalten: Wir können über die norddeutsche Hansestadt Bremen plaudern, in der Thies aufwuchs, in der ich 4 Jahre als Groß- und Außenhandelskaufmann tätig war, und in deren Nachbarort Delmenhorst ich 1965 mein Abitur am Oldenburg-Kolleg machte. Unabhängig voneinander hatten wir ab 1962 das Glück, einen ‚Modernitätsschub‘ eines / des westdeutschen Stadttheaters als Besucher mitzuerleben: Kurt Hübner (Intendant), Peter Zadek (Regie) und Wilfried Minks (Bühnenbild/-bau) leiteten nun das „Theater am Goetheplatz“ – es fand eine ‚Entstaubung‘ statt. Und Thies und ich waren Zeugen! Das motivierte! Damals – und später wieder in unseren Gesprächen auf Konferenzen und / oder nach Theateraufführungen an anderen Orten (speziell in Berlin).

Mit großer Freude kann ich 2016 im Brecht-Jahrbuch Nr. 40 (Hg. Theodore F. Rippey) und im Dokumentationsband der Villa-Vigoni-Tagung „Brecht gebrauchen. Theater und Lehrstück Texte und Methoden“ (2016; Hg. Milena Massalongo, Florian Vaßen, Bernd Ruping) einen Brief von Hans-Thies Lehmann und Helene Varopoulou mit der Anrede „Verehrter Bert Brecht“ lesen – beide hatten ihn schon im August 2015 im „Theater Hebbel am Ufer“ (HAU 1) in Berlin zu Gehör gebracht. Schön gleich im 2. Absatz diese An-Rede-Passage: „Sie waren eben nicht einer, sondern immer ein ‚Anderer‘, und dadurch ein Veränderer“. Gut gesagt, richtig, liebe Helene, lieber Thies!

Und ich erinnere mich bzw. dieser Satz, diese Erkenntnis von Helene und Thies, erinnert mich an eine Begebenheit von etwa 1966, die ich auch mit Thies kommunizierte: Dass Bertolt Brecht primär ein Dialektiker sei, sagte uns Studentinnen und Studenten im Internationalen Studentenheim Eichkamp in Berlin während seines Vortrags im Keller-Club der Theaterkritiker Andrzej Wirth, der erst kürzlich Polen verlassen hatte (später tätig als Professor für Angewandte Theaterwissenschaft in Gießen und Begründer dieses neuen Studiengangs). Wir fanden Wirths These vom Dialektiker Brecht im Übrigen gar nicht so zustimmungsfähig, weil uns die vermutete klassenkämpferische, un-dialektische Faust beim Brecht damals wichtiger erschien; denn „brecht!“ – das sei ja – auch – ein Imperativ!

Wie gut, dass ich den Satz von der dialektischen Dynamik des Anderns und des Änderns im Brief an Herrn Brecht, geschrieben von dem verehrten Hans-Thies und der verehrten Helene, gefunden habe. Eine Erbschaft! Mit Dank an Euch!

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Helene Varopoulou (left) and Hans-Thies Lehmann (center) reading the “Brechtbrief” at HAU 1 in Berlin, August 2015. Image (c) Simone Steiner

Ingrid Dormien Koudela
A Brief Note About Departure

Memories are strongly influenced by moments where affection surprises our mind and body. The moments I remember with Hans-Thies Lehmann are linked to the 2013 IBS Symposium of the International Brecht Society held in Porto Alegre, Brazil with the title: The Creative Spectator/Der Kreative Zuschauer.

In the Editorial written by Theodore Rippey he points to the keynote addresses that opened the section. One of them was written by the author of this brief note: Theatrical Play in Brecht: Experience of a Reflection.

As Rippey underlines, my contribution seems to confirm broad assumptions about the differences between Brecht work in Europe (a highly specialized, socially remote intellectual undertaking) and South America (a practice-based enterprise seeking direct social impact). What struck him more was how alive Brecht became and how the human expression and social context draw their energy in large part from theoretical nuance and carefully established connection between thought, creative action and context.

I was impressed how Hans-Thies Lehmann was always present during the sessions of the Symposium, followed by Nikolaus Schöll, Florian Vassen, Gerd Koch, Joachim Lucchesi and other German researchers. They collaborated with the host nation participants, asking questions and asserting their presence during the full days of events and workshops. This distinguished this meeting from many others I participated in.

The kindness of Hans-Thies Lehmann was noticed by all of us! And this will always be kept in memory for Brazilian people.

Rest in peace, dear Professor!

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Philip Watkinson
“There are so many things in academic life that are right, correct, but not interesting”: Notes from the Seminar Room with Hans-Thies Lehmann

I arrived at the University of Kent’s beautiful hillside Canterbury campus in September 2011. Having checked into some questionable lodgings, I opened my emails and could not believe my eyes. There at the top of the schedule for Kent’s MA European Theatre was the following:

Seminar: “Conflict: Playfulness and Tragedy in Contemporary Theatre and Performance”, with Prof. Dr. Hans-Thies Lehmann (8 sessions)
Lecture: “The End of Tragedy?”, with Prof. Dr. Hans-Thies Lehmann (6 lectures)

As a student fresh from a degree in postdramatic theatre at the University of Winchester, this was incredible. Some of the sessions from that Autumn semester at Kent have now passed into academic lore, such as Lehmann and Richard Schechner debating the merits of ‘Theatre Studies vs Performance Studies’ (a binary that both found reductive) or Patrice Pavis presenting a detailed critique of postdramatic theory. However, the focus of this tribute is a more personal and intimate one, the setting of the seminar.

The seminar format both amplified and distilled the qualities that Lehmann was loved for, his kindness, knowledge, generosity, and perspicacity. He had a way of immersing you in history at the same time as placing you so close to the artistic cutting edge that you had to watch your fingers. These seminars will stay with me for many reasons, but there are two that stand out vividly from the foggy landscape of memory. The first was Lehmann’s unrivaled ability to find some element of interest or relevance in whatever point was ventured by his students. On many occasions I recall contributing a point that I felt was so unformed or tenuously connected to the topic that I was embarrassed uttering it, but each time Lehmann would make a connection, reframe an idea, or invert an argument that both guided me in the right direction and did justice to whatever I was hoping to say. I never forget the confidence that this pedagogical skill instilled in me, and it is something I continually strive for in my own teaching.

The second memorable aspect of these sessions was Lehmann’s penchant for a pithy turn of phrase. He would cite Heiner Müller, Patti Smith, Walter Benjamin, Bertolt Brecht, Monty Python and Jacques Lacan with precision and a wry smile, but it was Lehmann’s own bon mots that really resonated. While often taking the form of maxims or aphorisms, these statements rarely spoke of certainty or timeless truths. As with his writing, Lehmann continually foregrounded ambiguity, uncertainty, and openness in his seminars, particularly in light of evolving political and historical situations. To cite one of these phrases: ‘no text is what it is without context’. As such, a word of justification is perhaps needed as to why I have taken these quotes out of the context of the seminar room and compiled them into the format of a list. My hope is that, through doing so, they acquire a new kind of context, one which highlights and remembers a lifetime of theatre making, spectating, theorising, and teaching. These statements can only ever represent the tip of the pedagogical iceberg, but I believe they are worth documenting to highlight the deeply inspirational way that Lehmann taught. In so many of these lines, Lehmann’s warmth and humour shine through, alongside his fervent belief in the political power of theatrical forms.

The 8 seminar sessions were each 2 hours long and included 6 postgraduate students. The following quotations are taken from my own hand-written notes from these sessions, which took place at the University of Kent between October 2011 and January 2012:

“Never try to be right when you start thinking.”

“Most spectators are expectators.”

“No text is what it is without context.”

“Treat a text like a human being. It is an individual. Get to know it better.”

“The text is never an illustration of what the author is thinking – the author is probing what they are thinking. As Heiner Müller once remarked, ‘the one and only thing that I do not say openly is my opinion.’”

“It is the task of art to make reality impossible.” – Heiner Müller [this was by far the most frequently cited quote by Lehmann in these sessions]

“When art is on the edge of not being art is when it becomes most interesting as art.”

“We must fight the forgetting of history … today!”

“Theatre as a practice is hard to untangle from normative, institutional structures, but it needs to be liberated. Theatre is a practice, a behaviour, then it becomes art, and only then does it become an institution.”

“Art must run a risk of being judged as immoral.”

[spoken in mischievous Hegelian jest] “It’s not interesting, it’s a deep and profound truth!”

“The existence of art practice demands another way of life – it must not be silenced!”

Speaking about academic writing and practice:

“We have a responsibility not to remain in the sphere of art practice. We must find ways to open up in-between spheres. For example, through interruption, caesura, and ambiguity, you should experience your own behaviour – but I can’t give you a formula for that!”

“When theorising about theatre, it is essential that you start with your spontaneous reaction, in a spirit of uncertainty and openness, even if it is not conceptually interesting.”

“99% of what you know about the argument will be left out.”

“Take a subject that is a bit more simple than you think.”

“There are so many things in academic life that are right, correct, but not interesting.”

“Avoid the application of theory to practice too quickly. Let both sides have their own way, like electric energy goes between two plates. Let concepts grow, and let the artistic go free, then you have the best chance.”

“Speak slowly, let people think along with you.”

“Art doesn’t help us to make decisions – art makes it more difficult – but it also demands that a decision be made”

Finally, a phrase which feels more relevant than ever in 2022:

“Go against the conservative academics! Don’t be afraid!”

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Markus Wessendorf

My earliest memories of Hans-Thies Lehmann date back to my first four semesters as a student at the Institut für Angewandte Theaterwissenschaft at Justus Liebig University Giessen, the period from fall 1986 to summer 1988. Thies was still an assistant professor (wissenschaftlicher Mitarbeiter) then. I vividly remember his seminars on Brecht, theatre and machines (I can’t recall the exact title), and Baroque drama (co-taught with a colleague from the German department: Günther Oesterle [?]) as well as his Propädeutikum, a required course for all freshmen that was an introduction to theatre history as well as critical theory. To instill an appreciation for Brecht’s poetry, Thies concluded each session of his Brecht seminar by reading one of “poor B.B.’s” poems. Of his many brilliant lectures, his introduction to the writings of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari still resonates with me these many years later. I also remember a group excursion with the Baroque theatre course to the Schauspiel Essen for a performance of Hansgünther Heyme’s staging of Daniel Casper von Lohenstein’s Sophonisbe. Brecht (and particularly his Lehrstücktheorie), Heiner Müller (who had recently directed Hamletmaschine as a “scenic project” with students at Giessen), Walter Benjamin, and Jacques Derrida were frequent references in Thies’s classes, as were Jean-Luc Godard and Stanley Kubrick. Thies also mentored students individually, for example, by providing “guided reading.” He invited me to study Michel Foucault’s The Order of Things with him, and for a while I dropped by regularly at his office in the Philosophikum II on Karl-Glöckner-Straße to discuss the book, chapter by chapter. I eagerly welcomed and followed up on any literature suggestions that Thies would make in class, or in conversation: Jacques Lacan, Julia Kristeva, Louis Althusser, Lucien Goldmann, Wolfgang Hilbig, old issues of alternative. Zeitschrift für Literatur und Diskussion, and Friedrich Kittler’s Grammophon Film Typewriter (which had just come out). I also tried to catch up with Thies’s own publications (on Brecht, Müller, Robert Wilson, and his anthology of Beiträge zu einer materialistischen Theorie der Literatur from 1977). Thies’s first wife, Genia Schulze, was also teaching at Giessen University at the time, in the German department, and I was enrolled in her seminar on feminist GDR literature. When I wrote a paper on Christoph Hein’s novel Drachenblut (which was written from a female point of view) as a class assignment, she invited me to their apartment on Aulweg to discuss it with her. (Andrzej Wirth, the founder of the Giessen Institute, lived in the same building.) When Thies joined us in their living room, our conversation soon became very lively and turned to other topics (for example, the dialect spoken in and around Giessen: das Manische), while we were drinking the honey liquor Bärenjäger.

Thies was also an affable and sociable presence at the institute. He made a self-mocking cameo appearance in one of René Pollesch’s early pieces on the institute’s Probebühne, and I still remember his chuckling laughter during Ginka Steinwachs’s performance of her Gaumentheater des Mundes on the same stage. A quality that later contributed to the success of Postdramatisches Theater was already apparent in Thies’s teaching in the mid-1980s: His ability to interrelate advanced theory (often derived from literary studies and criticism) and contemporaneous (and equally advanced) performance aesthetics in such a way that both became more accessible. At the time, his ideas strongly reverberated with, and illuminated, the impressive range of performances that his students could see in nearby Frankfurt (William Forsythe’s choreographies; the Ring cycle by the artistic team of Ruth Berghaus, Klaus Zehelein, and Michael Gielen; Einar Schleef’s stage productions; the Wooster Group on tour at Theater am Turm). Thies seemed to have modeled his own Gestus after Brecht, or, more precisely, after the mottoes noted by Benjamin while visiting Brecht in Svendborg in 1934: “Truth is concrete” (which was painted onto a ceiling beam) and “Even I must understand it” (which was the sign adorning a head-nodding toy donkey). He rarely raised his voice or tried to dominate a conversation or discussion. Similar to what Hanns Eisler described as Brecht’s “Chinese politeness” (according to Hans Bunge), Thies “usually adopted an attitude of listening respectfully” to whoever he was engaging with. He was fond of Benjamin’s aphorism from Einbahnstraße: “Überzeugen ist unfruchtbar” (“[trying] to convince [someone] is fruitless,” which plays with the double meaning of “über-zeugen” as “to hyper-procreate” or “to try too hard siring [a child]”). Thies drove a beat-up car, and his outward appearance was decidedly unfashionable—particularly with regard to the stylish all-black dress code of the German theatre intelligentsia in the 1980s. The slipovers which he often wore over his shirts made him look like a clerk, but they were the perfect costume for a self-assured mind who didn’t want to persuade by the force of personality. In the fall of 1988, Thies started his tenure as Professor of Theatre Studies at Goethe University Frankfurt. We stayed in touch, not meeting often but regularly, and two decades later co-developed the idea of organizing an IBS symposium on “Brecht in/and Asia” in Honolulu. Of all the years that I knew Thies, the first two, as one of his students, are still the most memorable ones because of their lasting imprint on my mind.

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Photo courtesy of Amy and Bernice Chan

Marc Silberman

My first encounter with Thies Lehmann was quite by accident. In 1970-71, I was an MA exchange student from Indiana University at the Freie Universität in Berlin, looking for interesting classes in the Wintersemester. I happened across a lecture course in the Comparative Literature program on Lawrence Sterne’s novel Tristram Shandy. Offered by the young American assistant professor, Samuel Weber, who became an important transatlantic literary theorist, I thought it would be intriguing (and maybe easier with an American teacher) to work on this challenging prose text. One of the “Tutoren” in the crowded course was Lehmann, but in fact I found enough other courses in the Fachbereich Germanistik so that I stopped attending after the first few sessions. To my surprise, I ran into Thies again that semester via his partner and later wife, Genia Schulz (1951-2001), in a proseminar on “DDR-Dramatik” (which I believe was one of the very first courses on GDR literature taught at a West German university). When we got to Heiner Müller’s Der Bau, Thies turned up at a discussion group we had organized for our collaborative presentation and clearly had some good ideas about this unusual play. I stayed in touch with Genia because we both continued working on Müller, she with her 1980 Metzler volume Heiner Müller, and I with my 1980 Heiner Müller Forschungsbericht (Rodopi). Meanwhile I had become involved in the International Brecht Society, and Thies had moved on to the Universität Giessen where he was among the founding faculty of the Institut für angewandte Theaterwissenschaft. Our next, more serious encounter was over a decade later. Lehmann had now joined the theater faculty at the Goethe Universität in Frankfurt/Main and enjoyed a semester as guest professor at the University of Virginia. One of his colleagues in Virginia was Renate Voris with whom he organized the 8^th IBS Symposium in Augsburg in 1991 under the provocative title: “The Other Brecht / Der andere Brecht.” Not only was this the first post-unification IBS Symposium but it also marked a generational and intellectual turn in Brecht scholarship, documented in the selected proceedings published in Brecht Yearbook 17 (1992), co-edited by Lehmann and Voris during my tenure as the Yearbook’s managing editor.

Over the next decade, Thies emerged as one of the strongest voices in German theater studies, strongly grounded in Brecht and with an ongoing interest in Heiner Müller. We obviously shared some interests and our exchanges continued. Among other things, he contributed a short piece to Brecht Yearbook 23 / 1998 (Drive b: brecht 100) that I edited, and I contributed a chapter to the Heiner Müller Handbuch that Thies edited in 2003 (Metzler). When it came time for the IBS elections at the end of 2003, I asked him whether he would accept a nomination as next IBS president. He was a busy man and wasn’t certain he could take on the responsibilities. I assured him that I would help in the background, but we needed someone with his reputation and connections in Germany to become the face of the Society. Our mutual trust paid off. Thies served five two-year terms as IBS President from January 2004 until December 2013, with input and organizational savvy especially for the IBS Symposia in Honolulu in 2010 (Brecht in/and Asia), in Porto Alegre in 2013 (The Creative Spectator: Collision and Dialogue). I recall the collective planning meetings in 2009 at his Berlin apartment in Nestorstrasse for the Hawaii conference and the many phone calls and faxes we exchanged in 2012 as planning for the Brazil Symposium got underway. My most meaningful “adventure” with Thies and his second wife, Helene Varopoulou, herself a theater critic, journalist, and translator, was in fact in this context. In the second half of March 2012, they spent a two-week residency at my university in Madison that included a public lecture, video screenings and discussions of post-dramatic performances, and meetings with grad students. This was an exciting learning experience for the grateful audiences but we also spent time working on a draft call for papers for the Brazil conference. We met almost on a daily basis to throw ideas at each other, generate prose, revise and hone the language, until we came up with what I consider in hindsight to have been an original and stimulating challenge to the international Brecht community. This is where I experienced Thies – the powerful thinker – most profoundly.

Thies was also a word-crafter, which I came to appreciate especially as translator of several of his texts into English. Most stimulating was certainly the preparation of his keynote address on “Brecht Translating / Translating Brecht” that he delivered during the 15^th IBS Symposium at the University of Oxford in June 2016 and published in Brecht Yearbook 42 (2018).

I continued to meet with Thies and Helene during my regular sojourns in Berlin, gracious hosts and spirited interlocutors despite his illness. My last encounter with him was haunting, poignant. Thies was a member of the Akademie der Künste in Berlin, and on the occasion of the 20^th anniversary of the publication of Postdramatisches Theater he was honored with a two-day conference in November 2019. The gathering of theater people, translators, and scholars from around the world who have been influenced by this path-breaking book brought together a large community to whom Thies – present but unseen – listened, and at the end – also unseen – spoke through an actor who read his response to the conference proceedings. This is a “voice” I will never forget, one that will resonate, I expect, for many, many years to come.

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Brandon Woolf
Danke, Thies

A returned package sat on my desk (in two different New York apartments) for many months.

The padded manilla envelope sat in the purgatory of Greek customs undelivered for many months before that.

I didn’t bring myself to re-open it until I heard of Thies’s passing in July.

The new book never made it to Athens. Neither did my words of thanks (in that iteration at least) for more than a decade of correspondence, exchange, teaching, wisdom, grace, inspiration, and generosity.

It is not an understatement, nor an act of (American) sentimentality, to say that Thies’s thinking changed everything for me.

The ways I read. The ways I watch. The ways I teach. The ways I make work. The ways I wonder about what theater can do. And what it can’t.

As a graduate student in Berkeley, the newly translated Postdramatic Theater gave words to so many questions I had (and still have) about theater and theory, performance practice and politics. In 2010, we invited Lehmann to lead a symposium (alongside Freddie Rokem) on the conjunctions of theater and philosophy. I was grateful to be his tag-along of sorts for the week: chauffeur, eating companion, fellow flaneur at the Berkeley Bowl and the SFMOMA, and most importantly student-sponge.

I’ll never forget my nervous stomach as Thies sat in the front row in a London conference hall as I (still a graduate student) dared to situate his “political” thinking in a tradition of other Frankfurt forebearers. Afterwards, at lunch, he took my hand, squeezed it, smiled, told me to call once I got settled in Berlin (I had just moved there full time) – and to submit the essay to the forthcoming volume on Postdramatic Theatre and the Political.

So much of my time in Berlin consisted of what felt like constant (often kaleidoscopic) motion between the theater, the library, the archive, the classroom, the demonstration, the living room, the park, the canal, and the café.

Thies and Helene were always the most gracious guides, unlocking a city (and a new theater culture) that continued to reveal itself anew: at their home on Nestorstaße for tea and theory, over a meal, at the bar after a performance, and in their openness and eagerness to forging connections across their seemingly boundless Rolodex of co-conspirators.

In my own performance work, Thies’s voice was (and still is) always in my ear as I think about questions of contingency, spectatorship, interruption, the productive-non-productivity of “Unfug” – and sometimes even the “post” (as in the “mail”).

And both of the book projects I’ve had the opportunity to work on in the years since we first met have been explicitly committed to engaging more deeply with and expanding upon his work: as a so-called “formalist” thinker and as a theorist of institutional reimagining.

In 2018, I was grateful to be able to host Thies at New York University (where I now teach) and to take part that same week in an inspiring retrospective that Frank Hentschker organized at the CUNY Graduate Center in honor of his thinking and teaching. There was time to spend a second day together with Thies and Helene strolling through New York and the then-new (and short-lived) Met Breuer. Afterwards, we stopped for a beer in a hotel lobby. I teared up as Thies reached for my hand, squeezed it, and whispered (as was his way in those final years) his own thank you for this time together, which he knew would be his last in New York.

I was sad the book never reached Thies in Greece. But I hope he knew – I think he did – just how much he helped to shape it. And I hope he felt my gratitude along the way.

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Amy Chan
A Letter from Hong Kong

Dear Prof. Lehmann,

We miss you very much. And thank you so much for your guidance, support, wisdom and big heart.

When I first encountered “Postdramatic Theatre”, I found much resonance through your writing. I knew I was not alone in this exploration of aesthetics of light and performance. Certain aesthetic characteristics like musicalization and scenic poetry had already in my artistic practice before the encounter, and a concept like “staged text (if text is staged) is merely a component with equal rights in a gestic, musical, visual, etc., total composition” was already in my mind, just that I didn’t know how to articulate them particularly in the context of the largely dramatic and literal, narrative-predominant local theatre scene. Witty comments on dramatic theatre like the “tradition of the written text is under more threat from museum-like conventions than from radical forms of dealing with it” were also my observations to local theatre. The book provoked me to critically reflect on my troubled relationship with local theatre, and the cultural system and institution behind it. Therefore, when you agreed to be the external examiner of my MFA thesis project researching light in postdramatic theatre in 2015, it meant a lot to a little artist like me striving to explore light and postdramatic theatre. I learnt a lot from you through your critical thinking and insights on light, theatre and arts, your love and passion for arts, and your support and companionship to artists.

I was so lucky that this learning and our relationship was not limited to the MFA assessment and your visit to Hong Kong but had extended beyond. I still remembered that you generously shared your upcoming public speech, your freshly-made iced rooibos tea with lemon and honey, and your favorite König pilsener with me when I visited you in Berlin in 2017. Also the T-shirt that you wore when you welcomed me at the doorstep made my day. It was a t-shirt with photos of both you and Brecht on it. There were no big statements or teaching when we met. However, through your speech, your tea, beer, t-shirt and humor, I gained much more insight and reflection on what theatre, arts and artists could and should be than from a formal class or lecture. Even when you were not well and stayed in Athens after 2019, you still used your social media platform to connect artists, scholars and companions from different continents, and showed support to young artists like me. You are not only a great theatre scholar inspiring us with theories, but, as an artist myself, I am especially grateful for your companionship and critical insights for artists, especially those striving to explore different perspectives on theatre. Your relationship with artists reminds us of the potential and the significance of the intersection between academia and arts. Although you have left us, I will always remember your teaching and humor. Your vision on theatre and your warm hugs will continue to inspire and support me in both my work and artistic research in the future. Thank you so much for everything that inspired us.

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Photo courtesy of Amy and Bernice Chan

Alex Karschnia
“… again! … again! … better!”

1998 was a crazy year in Germany. My memories begin with two scenes seen on TV: 1) the ultra-conservative prime-minister of Bavaria, Edmund Stoiber, congratulating Bert Old Brecht on his 100th birthday (“…not that I am a big fancier of his work…”) and 2) Christoph Schlingensief announcing his participation in the upcoming national elections with a party called CHANCE 2000. Slogan: “Failure as chance!” The mission: to call on individual people (especially unemployed) to take part: “Vote for yourself! We know how to do it!” And they did – it was actually not that complicated: just collect 200 signatures from people eligible to vote in a voting district of your own choice and then you are on the ballot! A genial idea, I felt, a vision for a more direct form of democracy – beyond political parties! In my memory both events, Brecht’s birthday and Schlingensief’s party, converged through a third one: Hans-Thies Lehmann’s decision to direct a performance (for the first time in his life). In reality it was a bit more complicated: Lehmann did plan a “Fatzer”-project for his students on the occasion of Brecht’s birthday, but he had no intention to direct it himself. Only after he could not find a director, he decided to do it himself – a good choice! In the early months of 1998 he approached me, one of his students at the Institute for Theater, Film and Media Studies at the Goethe University in Frankfurt/Main (just like all the other students he suspected of having an affinity for practice). Nothing was more unlikely than my participation in this project though – too much of Schlingensief’s project had already absorbed me. In addition to more appearances on TV, Schlingensief’s closest ally came to our Institute to teach: Dr. Carl Hegemann, head dramaturg of the Berlin Volksbühne. By then Schlingensief had expanded his plans. He did not only call on individuals to take part in the elections, but asked us to form regional associations. CHANCE 2000, which had started as a political rhizome (“Germany’s most modern network”), was about to turn into a regular political party. We welcomed this step and enthusiastically repeated the lines from Brecht’s The Measures Taken: “Who is the party? You and you and me!” After all, 1998 was the year in which this play was finally staged at Berliner Ensemble. Nevertheless I joined a rehearsal of Lehmann’s “Fatzer”-project at the IG Farben Building. I was curious to enter, since it was still a no-go area. The US army had used it as headquarters for decades. After they left, it remained unclear what would happen with it. The European Central Bank had declined to use it – the building was just too prestressed with historical weight… Only recently had it been announced that the University would use it instead as a new campus. The area was still sealed off with a high fence that the US army had erected after the Baader-Meinhof group had bombed it in 1972. Security guards patrolled to prevent curious citizens from strolling around. But taking part in a rehearsal was a good excuse. In the ghost-like cafeteria building I heard human voices, trying to form a chorus out of Fatzer’s words. I sneaked inside and saw some fellow students standing on ladders, trying out a kind of rap about the meat of five bulls… I decided that I had seen enough and shifted into reverse gear to sneak out.

At this moment, Hans-Thies Lehmann turned around (as if he had eyes in the back of his head), smiled at me, who had appeared more than an hour late, opened his arms and said: “You made it! Come on in!” Trapped! Lucky me – the work with Lehmann and my fellow students turned out to become a turning point in my life. I met Nicola Nord, my future partner with whom I founded the theater group andcompany&Co. a few years later. “Fatzer” was our first collaboration. Three nights in a row we would perform from sunset to sunrise. For many urbanites who were only attracted by the idea to spend a whole night in Frankfurt’s haunted house (the “first sky rise”) this probably became one of the strangest nights in their lives: “From now on/ and for quite some time to come/ your world will not see any victory anymore/ but only defeat!” It was a peculiar sound to accompany the defeat of Helmut Kohl who had governed the Bundesrepublik for 16 years, entering the history books as “chancellor of national unity”. But it did fit in an uncanny way Schlingensief’s slogan “failure as chance” – like Beckett’s notorious “Try again. Fail again. Fail better.” – by now an almost stereotypical platitude of Silicon Valley thinking (at least what the Valley calls „thinking“), a favorite phrase of tech-nerds like Sergey Brin & Larry Page who founded Google in the same year. It seems that they have never read the full text. If they had, they could have realized the tragic irony of them quoting Beckett. But it was not their time yet – the crash to come in the year 2000 was our first recession and it only opened the doors for their ascendance: Instead of a global breakdown induced by the “millenium bug”, the so-called “new economy” was taken down by the collapse of a company called Enron. In hindsight we know that this only was the foreplay for the financial crisis following in the years 2007ff. The verdict “too big to fail” had strange repercussions to Schlingensief’s slogan. Maybe not to fail was the biggest chance that was missed – not being taught the lesson that Einar Schleef had described at that time in his book Drug, Faust, Parsifal as “boosting the awareness of tragedy”. It was Lehmann’s monumental book about Tragedy and Dramatic Theatre, published only in 2013, that completed what we now see as a trilogy: starting with Theater and Myth (1992) and Postdramatic Theater (1999). Tragedy was an experience to be contained by the focus on drama. Although Brecht distanced himself from the tragic – with good reasons – he also showed a way to work through it, especially in The Decline of the Egoist Johann Fatzer: at the bottom of the teaching or doctrine (Lehre) – which is also the emptiness (Leere) – you find wisdom: You are no longer needed! (This should be understood as relief.)

P.S. In 2010 Lehmann left the Institute. And stepped into the plane to fly to São Paulo where andcompany&Co. was developing a performance with Brazilian collaborators called “FatzerBraz” – Fatzer mashed up with Macunaíma, the “hero with no qualities”. A talk was organized with Lehmann at the Goethe Institute. Masses of people showed up, eager to ask very concrete questions about “postdramatic theatre”. In the years to come Lehmann would spend a considerable amount of time traveling. We realized he had become a sort of wandering sage. In São Paulo we witnessed why: Lehmann acted as agent – an agent for the “other Brecht”. His message: It is allowed to laugh! Bert Old Brecht wants you to grin and giggle. Hasn’t humor always been the weapon of the oppressed? It may be true that it is only a small step from the sublime to the ridiculous. But it is also true that it only takes a small step further to return to the sublime. This is what we used to call “tragic”. It is after all funny, droll, comical and as weird as Beckett & Brecht reading “Worstward ho!” and The Measures Taken to each other, rolling on the floor laughing: “… again! … again! … better!”

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Bernice Chan

Thank you so much, Prof. Lehmann, for your kind and generous support to IATC(HK). We invited you to Hong Kong in 2016, with the collaboration of the Drama COLLABoratory, for a lecture series on postdramatic theatre. Your insightful sharing, to me, did not only extend our knowledge, but you also showed me your love and passion for theatre and artists. You demonstrate the importance of being critical as an observer, but also express your appreciation to the people who work hard on pushing the boundaries of contemporary theatre. I truly see how sharpness and tenderness can co-exist. I still remember vividly your happiness at finding your lost glasses again, which I made an effort to find in a restaurant. “You made my day”, you shouted, and we went for a walk (with ice-cream) along the lake to celebrate this special moment. That was our sweet encounter in Bucharest in 2017. I really appreciate our encounter, short though very meaningful.

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