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| http://www.faz.net/aktuell/feuilleton/buecher/autoren/heinrich-von-kleist-aus-dem-leben-11534227.html |
It is the 200 year anniversary of the German poet/writer Heinrich von Kleist's death. It ended with a carefully orchestrated murder-suicide out in Wannsee, outside of Berlin.
Kleist wasn't very well-received during his life, and only wrote a small number of plays and prose pieces, but he is very popular today among scholars of German studies, also because his writings often theorize writing itself. He has a unique style, with lots of long, complex sentences, and brutally violent scenes. If you want to read something, you can get
The Marquise of O and Other Stories in English. The title story, for instance, begins with a raped woman who, finding herself pregnant, puts an ad in the paper to find the father of the baby. Yes, crazy stuff.
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| from Hermannsschlacht production |
In honor of this anniversary, there have been lots of events going on...including a theater festival at the Maxim Gorki Theater. I went to three plays:
Hermannsschlacht, Penthesilea, Die Familie Schroffenstein. I have to admit, it wasn't really my kind of theater...people stripping down naked...yelling at the audience...cutting down the script.... I'm also not a connoisseur of modern theater and don't really go to productions like this very often, so I also had trouble judging the merits of the stagings.
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| Penthesilea |
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| Die Familie Schroffenstein |
It is the 200 year anniversary of the German poet/writer Heinrich von Kleist's death. It ended with a carefully orchestrated murder-suicide out in Wannsee, outside of Berlin.
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