Heldenplatz

Universitätsring 2

1010 Wien

 

“The empty promises of progress were nothing but spit in the faces of martyrs of all generations. If time is just a form of perception, or a category of reason, then the past is as present as the present. Cain continues to murder Abel. Still Nebuchadnezzar slaughters Zedekiah's sons and gouges out Zedekiah's eyes. The Kesheniev pogrom never ends. Jews are constantly being burned in Auschwitz. Those who do not have the courage to end their existence have only one way out: to kill their consciousness, to paralyze their memory, to erase the last trace of hope.” (Isaac B. Singer)

Frank Castorf stages Thomas Bernhard's last play HELDENPLATZ about a Jewish professor family that has returned from exile and the traumas of history not as a now-pleasing insult to Austria, but as a text of historical depth about topics that have remained very virulent, in this country and elsewhere: Anti-Semitism, expulsion, flight, exile - and forgetfulness of history. The horizon is stretched far beyond Heldenplatz in the heart of Vienna.

 

(Source: burgtheater.at)