It may be due to our times, in which the disintegration of an old order is becoming more and more obvious and merciless: Sophocles’ Antigone is booming on German stages. The wave of new interest in the troubled but resistant daughter of the city of Thebes, who buries her brother Polynices, branded as a traitor, despite the ban of the ruling king Creon and pays for it with her life, has begun brilliantly at the Deutsches Schauspielhaus Hamburg, which has had the “Anthropolis Marathon” on the schedule for three years. The monumental and celebrated project presents all five plays en bloc, set in the ominous city marked by violence and guilt.
On Thursday, Antigone celebrated its premiere at the Berliner Ensemble in the broadcast by Friedrich Hölderlin, staged by Johan Simons and featuring a top-class cast with Jens Harzer, Constanze Becker and Kathleen Morgeneyer.
The fact that an advanced theater is once again turning to this classic theater material can be read as an indication that the – also politically significant – questioning of the necessities and depths of heroic figures has become more urgent. For a long time it was necessary to deconstruct the apparent splendor of the heroic from the perspective of liberal, democratic societies: due to its entanglements in violence and domination and the perpetuation of ideals such as bravery, toughness or willingness to sacrifice that totalitarian systems adopt. But as important as this work remains, it is now clear that the deconstructive desire has maneuvered itself into a dead end. In times of increasing destabilization, heroism and its promise seem to be making a comeback, for better or worse.
Two normative orders collide
This tendency is certainly ambivalent, as it is driven by political aspirations that do not necessarily have any connection to emancipation. Wanting to break with determined absoluteness a given order that is perceived as unjust or bad can be a fight for independence against a repressive system that has politically good reasons. However, at the same time it also has the widespread fascination of society their part in mythologizing the seemingly heroic striving to change social conditions in such a way that it releases a destructive, deadly force. One reason for its topicality is the unfolding of the tragedy between the coordinates of a resistant unconditionality and the price of destruction.
Antigone defies the law The new ruler of the city, King Creon, refused to bury her brother Polynices. Creon acts out of the logic of maintaining the political order, Antigone sees herself as committed to her conscience and the divine law of the peace of the dead: two normative orders collide. The history of the city of Thebes is crucial for the actions of both sides. Their story is preceded by a sinister circle of violence.
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The Labdakid family carries a tremendously powerful past – one could say: a curse – with them. Oedipus is the father and brother of the two living siblings, Antigone and Ismene, the man who, as is well known, killed his father, fathered four children with his mother Jocasta and gouged out his own eyes. Jocasta hanged himself. The sons, Polyneices and Eteocles, are cursed by Oedipus and plunge the city of Thebes into a fratricidal war, of which both fall victim.
Creon’s ban on burial is patriarchal tyranny and at the same time occurs against the background of violent history. Antigone looks for a way out of the disaster by resisting. What begins as a good intention and is supposed to bring healing to the family curse, leads – as the tragedy unfolds – to further victims: Antigone takes her own life and her husband Haimon, Creon’s son, also commits suicide in the end.
Antigone is a projection surface
Is Antigone a political heroine because she follows her individual conscience and sense of justice with absolute abandon, risking her life in the process? Or is Antigone’s heroism precisely the trait that, insofar as he puts his own standards above all else, eludes real politics? So must their sense of justice be viewed less as genuine concern than as self-righteousness? Whether she is understood as a resistance fighter, martyr, dangerous fanatic or saint of her conscience: Antigone is a projection surface on which political battles of interpretation are fought.
The evening in the Berliner Ensemble takes up Antigone’s complexity and ambivalence by neither glorifying nor critically deconstructing her radical actions. He does something different, in a sense more existential: he takes away Antigone’s political convictions and instead motivates her actions out of a rebellion against the disparate wreckage of her circumstances. She is looking for a way out of the inhuman burden of her history, out of the maelstrom of hatred, guilt and revenge.
The stage, impressively set by Johannes Schütz, is an arrangement of endless circles that evoke the feeling of a fragmented but never-ending past. Objects of different orders – toys, a crown, limbs, children’s shoes – lie disparately around, relics that refuse to be put together into anything meaningful.
What Antigone offers is neither a confident strategy nor a sophisticated plan. Jens Harzer shows us Antigone primarily as a suffering, lost being who touches you more out of existential pity than out of idealistic motives or a strong sense of duty. In general, Simon’s production suggests less that it is pure grief for her specific brother that drives Antigone to risk her life, but rather an all-too-human affective structure of despair, errors and unconditionality. “I am not for hating, I am for love,” her famous saying, is a self-imposed task that sounds noble. But the excessive personal responsibility of this task, the goal of making her family whole again, leads to self-destruction.
The evening is a quiet rejection of everyone who sees Antigone as a heroine and wants to project onto her the political hopes of someone who acts with conviction and coherence. After her decision to break the law and after the ensuing tragedy, which once again fails to contain the disaster, dissonant jazz from quietly screaming brass instruments resounds through the hall of the Berliner Ensemble. And yet: Perhaps the claim to see Antigone as a heroine is the wrong perspective on someone who, out of trauma, dares to break an order into the unpredictable.
The philosopher Antonia Birnbaum recently found the formula “courage without heroism” in her essay to characterize Antigone’s actions. Her intransigence is not an action of purity, but rather it is an action in the midst of falsehood that cannot be right, but sets in motion a puzzling sequence of entanglements and meanings: “Antigone’s unconditional desire is not to be found in the sublime splendor, but in its lackluster shadow.”