Max Frisch's "Lehrstück ohne Lehre" tells of the failure of bourgeois values in the face of the unimaginable: an abstract threat that unexpectedly becomes quite concrete.
Gutbürger Gottlieb Biedermann strives as an ambitious businessman for external success. That he sometimes goes over dead bodies for it, it is to be concealed. In this way he and a whole society of Biedermanns stir up fears by proxy. Levelling fear formulas, which warn globally of a danger from outside - "arsonists" who threaten the community - make it difficult, however, to see the real danger: for does it really lie in the incursion of the stranger, or does society not rather carry the germ of its destruction within itself?
Frisch's thesis that it is the small cowardly falsehoods of the ordinary citizen that ultimately ignite the fire seems highly topical, in any case, when one considers the rise of populist politics, the new salability of nationalist thinking, and the isolationist and segregationist tendencies of entire countries. In the same way that we remain stuck in the status quo and claim non-action in the face of supposedly too complex information situations or ideologised self-optimisation against our better judgement as political acts, Biedermann is also practising suppression. When a couple of arsonists openly take up residence with him, he opportunistically prefers to look the other way and unceremoniously declares the barrels of gasoline they store in his attic to be hair tonic. "Alternative facts" that could bring a world crashing down.
Text source and more information about this event: http://www.staatstheater-wiesbaden.de/programm/spielplan/biedermann-und-die-brandstifter-2017-2018/4763/
