Heldenplatz

“The empty promises of progress were nothing more than spit in the face of the martyrs of all generations. If time is just a form of perception or a category of reason, then the past is no less pertinent than the present. Cain continues to murder Abel. Nebuchadnezzar is still slaughtering Zedekiah’s sons and gouging out his eyes. The Kishinev massacre never ends. And Jews are constantly being burned at Auschwitz. Those lacking the courage to end their own lives have only one way out: they must numb their consciousness, silence their memory, extinguish the last trace of hope.” (Isaac B. Singer)

Frank Castorf stages Thomas Bernhard’s last play, HELDENPLATZ – which describes a Jewish professor’s return from exile with his family, while exploring the traumas caused by history – not as a (by now, mollified) insult to Austria, but as a text of historical depth addressing themes that are highly pernicious, both in this country and elsewhere: anti-Semitism, displacement, escaping persecution, exile – and forgetting history. And the horizon extends far beyond Vienna’s Heldenplatz square.