Helmut Krausser

With his diptych, Krausser presents a two-part grotesque which transcends the stereotypes of the expressionist drama in a stifling, intense parody. It treats the morbid mother-son relationship, the omnipotent but absent father, the inescapable quotidian of the petty bourgeois abyss.

The language that Krausser puts into the mouth of his characters is just as consistently transcendent. There is the jealous mother who brandishes her vicious slogans like a knife, the whimpering son who has "begun a little drama over the years," and the cosmopolitan, naive Elke, from the supermarket. The horrible end of Tuesday is just an episode in this ever-unwinding saga of family life. The horror vacillates between the routine destruction of a whole series of "Annas" under the hatchet of the mother, and the lack of choice which causes "Elke" to become an "Anna," and therefore also a victim. The figures take on their roles in this Oedipal horror without rebelling against their "destiny" even for a moment. Unless, that is, they long for an end to the evil: the Anna / Elke, Wednesday, the serial murders which in their monotony copy the patterns of pornography.

The conviction and the linguistic precision with which Krausser pursues this drastic aesthetic of the ugly is impressive, as is the way in which he makes the spectator into a voyeur of the monstrous.

Diptychon was presented at the Heidelberger Stückemarkt 1999.