Berliner Theatertreffen | Novel »Blood Book«: Nightmare Family

With a waxen face congealed into a mask, Großmeer stares out at the audience. Arthritis entwines her hands like a thorn hedge. "Why aren't you ever here?" she hurls at the audience and her grandchild. The grandmother, in Großmeer, a Bernese-German town, is the dominant figure in Kim de L'Horizon's childhood. Everything revolves around the old woman, but she herself, in her beige cardigan and thick white tights, seems colorless next to the colorful costumes of the others.

Like driftwood, the memories drift forward, shimmering in black and white on the floor-length curtain of thread: her mouth, an insatiable gulp, into which she devours the still-too-hot pussy-cuts, her large hands threatening to grab the child, and her trucks. As souvenirs from her travels, they display the old woman's achieved prosperity, but within them, the chests contain only emptiness, which causes the child discomfort.

Jan Friedrich's production of "Blood Book" is close to the novel's original, using haunting images at the Magdeburg Theater. The production can now be seen at the Berlin Theatertreffen. In the autofictional exploration of the gender-fluid author, childhood is distorted into horrific fairytale images, almost as if a curse were weighing on the matrilineal ancestors. The Great Sea, described as a monster, passed on fear and harshness to the child's sea, who appears to him like the Disney witch Maleficent. Two blue horns grow from her head, and her heart threatens to freeze to ice if the chubby-cheeked child doesn't breathe some warmth into it with tender magic spells. Aptly, the father appears only as a blank space. His face is covered by a paper bag, from which a smiley face stares impassively into the ruins of family life.

The past and present of the narrative overlap in Alexandre Corazzola's stage design. The urban room to which the narrator has fled in Zurich rests on a pedestal, while childhood rumbles in the basement below, visible only through cameras. The footage dismembers the bodies, transforming the family trauma into a surreal body horror in which tongues are cut out with a pocket knife and fingers take on a life of their own. Amid curses and horror fantasies, the child played by Carmen Steinert crawls around on her knees, searching for a body, a gender, and a language that belong to her.

The desire to make oneself and others into objects accompanies the protagonist even in their sex life. In the big city, the transformation into a "Dolce Gabbana gay" with a bubble butt takes place. He lives by a simple equation: more muscle and a lower body fat percentage equal greater fuckability. Not only does the adolescent experience a desire for control, but racist stereotypes of his grandmother also resurface in his desires.

Just because exoticizing masculinity is theoretically rejected doesn't mean it disappears into the imagination. In one transgressive scene, the main character racially humiliates a party fling in a military role-play. "We want your bodies, but we don't want you," she later reflects. She is not only a victim, but also a perpetrator of her circumstances, and fails to free herself from racism and objectification through mere deconstruction.

This problematic legacy cannot simply be cast aside. It is as deeply rooted as the copper beech in front of the family home. Planted to mark the birth of the Großmeer family, the tree becomes an allegory for the ethnic community of family destiny. It was no coincidence that the great-grandfather chose this particular tree. Kim de L'Horizon reconstructs how the National Socialist landscape architect Heinrich Wiepking popularized the beech tree with his blood-and-soil ideology. While the great-grandfather was not a National Socialist, he was certainly a nationalist.

In the production at Theater Magdeburg, ancestry emerges in all its strenuous, unpleasant, and unsatisfying dimensions. Immersed in the magical thinking of the child, it becomes a fairytale puzzle whether one can find a way to deal with this legacy. Between witches, talking trees, and magic potions, the only thing left to do is work through the pain, shame, and guilt, as Kim de L'Horizon has achieved with his language and Jan Friedrich with his shrill, haunting images.

Performances at the Theatertreffen: May 3 and 4. www.berlinerfestspiele.de