Wolken.Heim.

"We’re here. We belong to us. We’re here at home." In Elfriede Jelinek’s Wolken.Heim. the word "we" is used to excess: "We but we but we but we...". The text was written in 1988, a few months before the tumultuous years of reunification that made it possible to turn Germans into a collective subject again. In a spinning vortex of language, the play conjures up an incantation in a frantic search for a definition of who "we" are. What is essentially German, what is the German nation? "We" is a place somewhere between heaven and home, between a castle in the air and a crypt. "We" are a country of idealism, a country of fascism: in between there is Germany, in the middle of nowhere on a never-ending search for an identity that defines itself by excluding what is foreign. "We’re here. The others are there. But not us, not us!" Elfriede Jelinek’s highly artificial prose text is interwoven with quotations: distorted, subverted versions of Hölderlin, Hegel, Heidegger, Fichte, Kleist and letters written by the German RAF become testimonies to nationalism. The words of poets and thinkers, and the speeches of the perpetrators and murderers, flow into one in this language archive of the German soul. The ensemble of the director Martin Laberenz, who previously staged Elfriede Jelinek’s WUT at the Deutsches Theater, sets off in search of the phantasms of the German "we" thirty years after the fall of the Wall and the publication of this play.