Alexander Cocotas and Fabio Thieme are sick of the Holocaust kitsch on stage. Longtime friends, Cocotas – a Jewish writer whose viral essays have lampooned Germany’s obsession with Jews – and Thieme – a rising Berlin film and theatre director – have spent the last three years fashioning a manic tale of two con men on a road trip through Poland, which properly confronts the pieties of, and profiteering from, memory culture.
Die Hölle ist Leer (“hell is empty”) premieres at HfS Ernst Busch Theatre this month. The duo spoke with The Berliner about how they approached the heavy topic of postwar German identity with, if not sweetness and light, comedy and critique.
How do you see your play fitting into Berlin’s theatrical landscape?
Fabio Thieme: It was always super important for us that this [premiere] is happening in Berlin and in contemporary Germany, because it’s so much about Germany. In the three years that we were working on it so many things happened that really, unfortunately, fell in our lap – the situation we were writing about became much more serious and real, especially now with the election. The right is rising in this country, and it’s much worse than I would have expected three years ago.
We wanted to use comedy as a subversive tool to upend people’s expectations.
Alexander Cocotas: I think we were also reacting both positively and negatively to things we’ve seen on the stage in recent years in Berlin, and wanting to do things in a way that we felt better expressed our own sensibilities, and that is not something we necessarily see so prominently on the stage at the moment – which is to have that light, comedic touch. We didn’t want to lecture people. We wanted to use comedy as a subversive tool to upend people’s expectations.
How did you go about achieving this as a duo?
AC: The writing really began in spring 2024. That was when Fabio figured out the opening scene, which is something we were both really struggling with. He came up with the idea that the character of Stahl – Friedrich Stahl, the grandson of a famous Nazi perpetrator who ran a concentration camp in what is today Poland – would deliver a monologue inside of a trunk before stepping out onto the stage. That was when the writing really began.
And then over the course of the next couple months, we went back and forth. Initially, we identified with different characters in the play: Fabio was Stahl and I was Christian Boczek, the young Polish-German journalist. We were separately writing the scenes in which one character or the other seemed to predominate. By the summertime, we had a draft of the script, which we read with a circle of friends of ours in my apartment. We got a lot of great feedback, but it was also a process of learning what does and doesn’t work on a stage.
FT: It was actually a very nice experience. First we tried to write together, drinking Pharisäer in a bar in Neukölln. I don’t know why we thought it would work, but it didn’t. And then it really started when we just sat down, suffering and writing on our own. We would send each other what we wrote, overwriting each other’s text, taking up each other’s jokes and bringing them one step further in the next scene. I thought it was a beautiful process.
AC: The trunk, for example, became this very central motif which gets used over and over again throughout the entire play. The stage, from what I understand, is going to be filled with trunks. Mirrors also became an unexpected motif. The whole play takes place between a mirror and a trunk on some level – they became two symbols of identity, something locked away and something you see yourself reflected in.
- Die Hölle ist Leer, Mar 22 – 25, HfS Ernst Busch, Zinnowitzer Str. 11, Mitte, in German with written English translation provided, details.
