Vergeltung

With "Retribution", Sebastian Baumgarten devotes himself to a subject that exposes the repressed shadows of the Second World War without embellishment. As a live radio play with six images, the production unfolds a dense acoustic topography: falling bombs, flickering pulses of light, fragmented voices - a sensory compression that transfers Gert Ledig's 1956 novel into a contemporary space of experience. The narrated city remains nameless, but the historical references allow Cologne to resonate as a possible echo, especially in the reference to the destroyed city center after the air raids of spring 1942. Baumgarten dispenses with heroic narratives and reveals the mechanisms of military rhetoric, which are marked in the text itself as a declaration of war on terms such as "fatherland", "heroism" or "honor". The six images structure the radio play into clearly delineated acoustic-visual sequences that focus on individual experiences of violence, loss and moral disorientation. The live production of sounds and the deliberate use of stroboscopic light create an irritating realism that undermines historical distance and evokes the question of how war narratives can be told today without falling into simplification. As the last premiere at Depot 1 in the current season, the production combines aesthetic experimentation with a reflective examination of memory and the present.

With English surtitles