Oliver Czeslik

“Ulrike: Words, meaning is lost. I am only an image. My death is my subject. My subject is my death. Am I a saint? Awareness, my own survival equals zero. Goodbye, friends, comrades, companions. It is the duty of the intellectuals to commit suicide as a class.”
“Gudrun: I am the criminal, the insane, the suicidal. I am contradiction. I die in myself. I either destroy myself or others. Either dead or an egoist.”
Stammheim as a play. Ulrike Meinhof, Gudrun Ensslin and Irmgard Möller as characters. Am I playing the wrong part? Provisionally, Natascha, Sanja and Ingrid approach those controversial historical “heroes”, try their sentences, experiment with the radicality of their thinking, start to identify with them more and more. They are captured by the momentum of their characters. Snapshots in time from the time of RAF, their raids, captures and their arrests appear in stylised alienation.
But the focus of this associative flashback to the Stammheim deaths in Czeslik’s play is the apodictic and raw manner of speech of the RAF, the strict either-or way of thinking and the merciless psychological “warfare” the protagonists use to keep each other at bay.
With the dramaturgical trick of adopting a role, Czeslik manages to bridge the gap to one of the most fascinating chapters of the history of West Germany and, at the same time, present a haunting portrayal of the RAF women.