Exorcising Nazis in Berlin

Germania, the performance, is billed as an "exorcism" of the ADK’s past, but it doesn’t aim to purge the building of its demons. Instead, the play resurrects Nazi Germany’s most notorious figures — Hitler, Speer, propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels — and lets them parade through the academy, reflecting aloud on what the country has become since their deaths.

Many of the ghosts are portrayed in an absurd, often humorous light; Hitler is represented as a shrill, gremlin-like wolf, and Speer first appears as a giant turtle in an office-turned-aquarium. But their thoughts about present-day Germany are at times chilling, with pointed allusions to the wave of right-wing nationalism and Islamophobia that has crept across the country in recent months.

"The question is, ‘Are they really dead?’" says Hartmut Meyer, head of the stage design program at the Berlin University of the Arts who oversaw production of Germania. It’s a few minutes before showtime, and he’s leaning forward in a black leather chair, elbows on knees. "In Germany, but also in the whole of Europe at the moment, it seems that the ghosts are very alive... So maybe it’s wrong when we say they are only ghosts."

The hot tub scene, for instance, unfolds with Hitler leashed to a pole outside a glass door, looking in as the three men — former presidents of the academy — enjoy a Bacchanalian moment together in their sumo-like fat suits. The führer claws wildly at the glass, asking to join in the revelry, but the men at first laugh him off. The real Hitler was a failed artist who was famously rejected from the Vienna Academy of Art, but his ghost eventually charms the gatekeepers, and they let him in.

Hitler’s successful seduction was a "way of showing that some of his philosophies are still alive today," says Katja Czellnik, the show’s artistic director. Meyer and Czellnik spent more than a year developing Germania, after collaborating on another performative exorcism, titled Wagner, at the academy’s western campus in 2013. Three stage teams constructed elaborate sets within the building for last week’s production, which involved around 80 student actors and live musicians.

The action begins in the ground floor lobby, where some 100 spectators gather in front of a huge baby’s head meant to symbolize Germania. The baby is blonde with blue eyes that dart around the room, and three people dressed in surgical blue scrubs bow before it. They probe the head to the swell of choral music, and its eyes periodically pop out of their sockets and roll out into the crowd. A group of architects (Speer’s disciples) in yellow construction hats later emerges from an elevator and leads the audience through the building’s four floors, winding their way up zig-zagging glass staircases.

The two-hour performance incorporates text from Hitler’s speeches and Speer’s writing, along with live music composed by the likes of Richard Strauss and Richard Wagner, Hitler's personal favorite. But there are contemporary elements mixed in, as well. At one point, video from Germany’s 7-1 rout of Brazil in the World Cup last summer is projected on a big wall, showing a flurry of first half goals before freeze-framing on the now-viral image of a Brazilian boy crying into his soda.

The play is also entirely in German (I don’t speak German) and includes layered metaphors and cultural references that only German speakers or historians would catch. But the tone of each scene is unmistakable, even as it veers sharply from somber to satirical. Goebbels appears as a topless pregnant woman who thinks she’s going into labor, but instead just lets out a loud fart (executed to perfection by an off-stage tuba player). Minutes later, Hitler starts eating the head of a dead baby before tossing it away in disgust because it’s black.

It’s a relentless mix of the grotesque and absurd, and it can get pretty dizzying — like walking through a Nazi funhouse on bad acid. It’s also unsettling, because comedic boundaries are often blurred. Is it okay to laugh at a Goebbels fart? What about a Nazi architect who fishes for one of Hitler’s turds in a gold toilet? Even the biggest laughs from the largely German audience were muted and seemed to be immediately followed by a silent wince. That seems to be what Germania was going for.

"It’s our duty to do a little bit of education, but we really don’t like this kind of theater with a moral [message of] ‘You have to think this way,’" Meyer says. "We like it to be a little bit more anarchic."

Germany has gone to great lengths to preserve and remember the horrors of its history, and the nation continues to grapple with its post-war identity. In Berlin, the former seat of Nazi Germany, the memories are inescapable. Memorials and plaques are seemingly everywhere, and a yellow painted line still runs across the city where the wall once stood.

But there have been signs of a resurgence in hate-fueled rhetoric in recent years. A 2010 book that blames Muslim immigrants for the loss of Germany’s national identity has sold more than 1.5 million copies across the country. Earlier this year, thousands of supporters turned out for anti-"Islamization" rallies organized by a German right-wing group whose leader recently dressed up as Hitler. It’s concern over these trends, and a fear of where they may lead, that underpin Germania's winding narrative, as its final sequence makes clear.

As the show draws to a close on the top floor of the building, Albert Speer (in a turtle shell) rapes Germania (a dead bride with skeletal face paint) in the corner of his aquarium. The architect then slips out of his shell and runs out to the balcony, where he gazes in wonderment at what Berlin has become. He jumps up and down and cries triumphantly that his vision has been realized.

After the curtain call, as actors and spectators mingle over cocktails, I rejoin Meyer on the top-floor balcony, where he and Czellnik are savoring the last embers of a cigarette. The enormous plaza below is empty, and the wide, leafy boulevards behind the Brandenburg Gate are calm. They hazily sketch the geography of Berlin in the air, pointing to where the wall once stood and where soldiers were stationed, before returning to Germania, and the question that’s been bothering me all night: was that really an exorcism? Were any of these demons actually expelled?

"I don’t think so," Meyer says, shaking his head. "I don’t think the ghosts are going to go away."

Germania images © Dirk Bleicker