PANDÄMONIUM GERMANICUM: LENZ IM LOOP

theatre

“Goethe! Goethe! Had we but stayed together.” (J.M.R. Lenz: Pandämonium Germanicum)

Goethe? No, Lenz! Lenz is the poet of Storm and Stress! What to Goethe had only be a temporary phase was a mission to Lenz: a cultural revolution! The parting of Goethe & Lenz in 1776 in Weimar terminated the rise of the first youth movement in Germany. While the North-American colonies declared themselves independent Goethe became a Geheimrat and Lenz turned insane.

andcompany&Co. come up with a new version of Lenz’ ingenious parody of a genius „Pandämonium Germanicum”: He wanders about hauntingly in his room, he sleeps in oversized books, duels himself, flies across the mountains on writing feathers, and he makes annotations on theatre: “In my imagination I am building an incredible theatre, where in front of our eyes we shall have a defile of the most famous actors of old and new times.” Sometimes he wanders across the mountains, sometimes he does something foolish, sometimes he lives in the forest: Lenz in the loop.

Thus this “meteor of German literature” (Goethe on Lenz) time and again flies past in the sky like a comet: Since Büchner’s novella Lenz has become the archetype of the insane artist and of a despairing when it comes to German circumstances. The failure of the first post-war generation is being mirrored in the failure of Storm and Stress: “I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness” wrote beat poet Allen Ginsberg. In Western Germany it struck down on Bernward Vesper. The ex-boyfriend of Gudrun Ensslin and son of an infamous blood & soil poet, and  described in a lucid way in his novel "The trip" how the ‘summer of love’ went by and ended in the ‘German Autumn’. Storm and Stress was followed by the Weimar classical period, 200 years later APO & RAF were followed by punk & postfordism: "All of us want to be artists!" But what we are dealing with today is the failure of the business punks, the postfordian counter-revolutionaries. And the nation of culture that refers to its classics as if it were summoning ghosts. Or demons. Goethe? No, Lenz!