Immersive Theater | Resistance Cell

One feels somewhat transported to the final scene of François Truffaut's masterful adaptation of Ray Bradbury's "Fahrenheit 451." 451 degrees Fahrenheit is the temperature at which paper catches fire. In this dystopian novel, set in a totalitarian state, reading or even owning books is punishable. And yet, in the film's impressive conclusion, we see them all: the resistance fighters, the conspirators, gathering in a remote forest to remember the printed word and pass it on through speech. Knowledge is preserved and shared. It's not a happy ending, but it does offer images of courage that resonate beyond the film's end.

You can also feel like a conspirator in Strausberg, Brandenburg. The "Speicher" (storage warehouse) stands somewhat secluded, a few S-Bahn stops from Berlin. This wooden, futuristic-looking building, located on the edge of the forest next to the local theater, the Anderen-Welt-Bühne (Other World Stage), invites visitors to visit for a month starting October 16th. Two performers guide guests through the structure. It's cozy here, yet also somewhat enigmatic. Books upon books, lovingly wrapped in reddish paper, line the shelves.

The two women tell fragments of a story. One comes from far away. From a distant place or even from another time, we don't quite know. Having escaped catastrophic living conditions, she and the other lead us through the room called the "storage." Here, in our reality, with her help, the worst is to be averted, the apocalypse rolling towards us is to be prevented. No escapism in the book corner, but rather, we are to seek ways out. Towards a different kind of coexistence, to a different kind of economy.

Time slots can be booked online for a two-hour visit to this library and cell of resistance. During these visits, you will be gently transported by the performers. The spectacle represents what has become a fashion in contemporary performing arts under the term "immersive theater." You are in the center of the action, unable to retreat to the stalls with your eyes closed (although the "storage" also offers places of retreat), and are gently invited to interact. But you can also, to a greater or lesser extent, withdraw from direct involvement and pull books from the shelves: volumes on sustainable agriculture or climate change, children's books and nonfiction can be found there, including Harald Welzer and Karl Marx, Naomi Klein and Pussy Riot, titles from the peace movement and fictional stories with hopeful endings.

This isn't the first stop for the "Speicher" in Strausberg. Under the title "Transit," the artist Mona el Gammal already stopped at Berlin's Futurium in 2021. That such a project, balancing an enlightening function with artistic ambition, would venture from the metropolis to the supposedly provincial region is perhaps audacious. But the venture could be worthwhile.

The impulse to seek hopeful narratives in times of global crisis is also daring. Throughout its millennia-long history, theater has relied primarily on conflicts and irresolvable contradictions as perennial themes. A critique of false conditions through their repetition on stage. But perhaps this spectacle finally takes Brecht's claim to show the world as a changeable one literally.

The "Speicher" can be visited from October 16 to November 16. https://wissensspeicher.online/