Josephine Witt wants you to reflect on what you think is natural. As a writer-in-residence at the Deutsches Theater, she has been working on a play about a road trip through Germany taken by Mother Nature and her daughter, set to premiere this month at the ATT festival’s centerpiece, the Long Night of Playwrights. This journey through the seasons examines how the experience of nature is becoming ever more divorced from our culturally conditioned expectations.
It’s a critical reflection on Germany, featuring a kind of insight and penchant for drama that one can trace from Witt’s earlier life staging protests as part of the popular feminist activist movement Femen, for which she took over an altar at the Cologne Cathedral during Christmas Mass to criticise the Church’s frauenfeindlich politics and showered the former president of the European Central Bank, Mario Draghi, with confetti to protest the European Union’s treatment of southern Europe.
Since moving to Berlin, Witt has studied directing at HFS-Ernst Busch, directed at the Volksbühne’s P14 youth theatre programme, and won a spot in the Deutsches Theater’s Ateliers programme, where she is now completing her first full-length drama, dtschlnd, deine jahreszeiten. In a conversation with The Berliner, Witt describes the continuity between her work in politics and playwriting as “the joy of provocation”.
There’s this idea of nature as something that makes ideology seem self-evident or “natural”, but is there a way that you also see something in nature that can push back against ideology?
Of course it was always the case that the description of nature has never delivered what it was supposed to. So it’s not only recently that winter wasn’t white and Christmas wasn’t snowy – or that summer was not always bright and beautiful with a beautiful blue sky, but rather that there were often rainy summers.
Of course now, in the age of advancing climate change, we increasingly experience the failure to deliver on this promise that descriptions of landscapes or seasons make us. And this gap will only become bigger and bigger. And even if it is a beautiful, hot summer’s day, you begin to ask yourself, “Should I be happy about this?”
Even if it is a beautiful, hot summer’s day, you begin to ask yourself, “Should I be happy about this?”
Or, take today – should I be happy that it’s already over 20 degrees in May? Is it normal, is it okay? In this way it’s no longer obvious to feel at home in nature, but rather to always question the seasons or the climate or the weather.
This is a tendency that will only grow as this gap widens. And perhaps we can also question the possibility at the level of mythology in these stories about the nature of being one with nature – and which seem to say that this is how it is with Germany and it will always be like this. It is worth looking deeper, because these gaps will increasingly widen as we destroy the nature that we sing about or to which we feel so connected in our concept of Heimat. And that is of course an absolute contradiction.
Was it this sense of no longer feeling at home in the seasons and nature that made you choose a road trip as the genre of your play?
It is a mother, Mother Nature, who travels with her daughter through the seasons of the year. And on their trip they encounter not only the seasons but also different problems – for example, heat or drought, but also relationship problems. The mother understands that people confront her with a type of mistrust, and there are also toxic elements in this mother-daughter relationship.
They are both, of course, allegories. They are not real people with real biographies, but rather their relationship shows, as the daughter has to learn from the mother how the seasons function and what meaning they have. Traditionally, German family roles are also very hierarchically structured, which often goes unspoken. And out of this develops conflict.
Out of this develops suffering or mistrust within the relationship of these two. And so these characters serve for me as a way of looking at a kind of German climate – a German microclimate of family, in this case, the relationship between mother and daughter.
Where did you get this idea of the four seasons as a structuring device?
It’s an idea that I’ve been obsessed with for a while. And then there was this opportunity to apply anonymously to the ATT programme. I actually come from a directing background; I have always written, but it was always a process of working with and rewriting a piece in the process of rehearsal. When I applied, I applied with a scene and the concept.
I didn’t know what I was getting myself into. It was going to be about this idea of the nation and its self-description or self-narration through the seasons or through the landscape. That is the foundational concept, and I find it a wildly rich subject in relation to Germany, because this nation has really founded itself on this myth of the four seasons, which stand – metaphorically – for certain feelings on a social as well as an individual level.
Somehow the description of landscapes is given relatively a lot of space in Germany’s cultural self-description. And that was actually my way into dtschlnd, deine jahreszeiten. Also, my great-aunt, who looked after me when I was kid, always sang songs, some folk songs, or recited poems, and they were always seasonally specific. And I found that was something special and I wanted to get closer to that. And that’s how the idea first came into being.
How do you see the relationship between your former activism work and current work in the theatre?
The activism that exists in me will also of course make its way through here. It is always about questioning society about its perspective and criticising it. With political activism, with protest actions like those of Femen, it’s concise and always very pointed.
In theatre you have a little more time and can take a bit more space to say what you need to say. On the other hand, you’re covered by artistic freedom and you can say everything, so perhaps then the impact of what you’re saying is a bit watered down – because one encounters it in the space of theatre. But there is the fear and aggression that I know from activism – and the joy of provocation and playing with expectations.
What do you see as the political possibilities of theatre?
The question is, of course, always the question of the future. What prospects are there for a good life? My artistic process takes place in times of radical climate change and was driven by the idea of human alienation from nature. And while this may put you in a place of disorientation at first, it also challenges you to overthink narratives of doom and crisis.
The crisis of the owning class isn’t necessarily the crisis of the working class. Right now we’re witnessing not only climate change but also the oligarchisation of politics and the rise of ultra-nationalism. In my piece, I link the fate of the planet to the fate of women as I combine both within the role of Mother Nature. I urge women to ask about their perspectives within this political climate.
The abortion ban is only a small part of it. In Russia, the possibilities for young women are basically to become strippers or to be mothers, or to somehow throw themselves at oligarchs. It will probably develop exactly like that in the US, and we have to hope that it does not develop here in Europe similarly. But those are the possibilities under fascism for the life of a woman on this planet. And that is not the future that I want or the majority of people want.
Nevertheless, one slides ever more into this possibility and into this catastrophe. And my piece asks exactly this question: How do we continue to go on? How do we continue with this idea of the nation, which is totally artificial and constructed and that we can see is not natural, and perhaps rise above as a society in a liberatory way?
Maybe that’s a lot all at once. But this is the perspective. Where it becomes political is not where it looks to the past or tradition or folklore or folk songs or fairy tales or war rhetoric, but where it turns to: “But what will happen next year?”
What do you want a spectator to leave with after seeing this show?
Of course, I’m trying to insert into their minds some zippy quote they can’t stop thinking about! But essentially, I hope that they take with them this way of reflecting on society, with this aid, this crutch of the four seasons. It is taken a bit too far in this piece, to an extreme.
Even in everyday life it’s taken to extremes – or perhaps ultimately, it’s taken to the extreme. But I hope what’s seemingly self-evident, what seems natural, is exposed and questioned – whether what’s natural is good for people, what lies beyond it or what creeps in behind it. That is for me the primary reason and purpose of the piece.
- Deutsches Theater, Schumannstraße 13A, Mitte, dtschlnd, deine jahreszeiten (Jun 21), German, details.
