DIE ZEIT, September 7, 2000

ORAL HISTORY
Gerhard Jörder

When night falls over Marrakesh, the flying merchants pack away their stands and everything gets quieter and quieter on the big square in the center of the city, where just hours before there reigned a tremendous hustle and bustle. This is the time when they come out--the storytellers.
They crouch on the ground, in the pale light of the street lamps, surrounded by silent listeners who want to know what it was like back then...For five evenings and nights, Hamburg was now Marrakesh, the Hamburg Kammerspiele became a marketplace for history and stories. This was the unusual and wondrous undertaking with which the most well-known and distinctive private theater in the city opened its new season: as a branch for memory on time. The theater's director, Ullrich Waller, opened up the house--once a Jewish community building and owned since 1937 by the Jewish Cultural League--and sent the audience on a journey from the cellar all the way up to the attic. The initiators of the project, Hannah Hurtzig and Anselm Franke, invited 90 guests--academics, artists, politicians and media workers--to a work on memory on location: oral history.
What was it like then, life, the century, happiness, horror? A storm of memories flooded the whole building: dialogues, interviews, talk shows, separated in space, parallel in time. Hannes Heer interviewed war participants, Julius Deutschbauer expanded his library of unread books, Christoph Schlingensief turned his biography into a laughing success...the audience followed the conversations over monitors and headsets, at first there was just fidgeting, voyeurism, then one was drawn deep into a thousand pasts. A suggestive mix of intimacy and publicness arose, of the authentic and the fictional: memories, that is. "What," asks Hannah Hurtzig, "if such a space were always open?" Then the theater would in actuality be what it always wants to be: a space against forgetting.

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Süddeutsche Zeitung, 7.09.2000
From the expiry date of sausage
Sabine Leucht
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Shortly after 10 p.m., after all other monitors are already abandoned, a very gentle Lilo Wanders speaks this sentence to his guest: "Future memories can be created even now." And then, at the latest, the past hours take shape for the visitors to Hamburg's Kammerspiele: As material for the memory of tomorrow. The bearers of this material are eight times two talking heads on a screen split into 30 parts, produced in remote spaces on the theater by memory experts and witnesses of the time. Live.
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At the end of the extravagant action, some of the conversations are available in the Internet (www.filialefuererinnerung.de) for downloading. There you can also find the e-mail addresses of the new "owners". The result of the five-day exercise in memory: only a scattered archive to which, very soon, no one will have the key anymore. And concentrated fodder for the private memory of tomorrow.

Theater heute October 2000
Poetry and Truth (Fact and Fiction)
Thorsten Jantschek
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Memory in the dialogues continually oscillated between efforts for the correct reconstruction of the thing experienced and creative construction of that thing, which the spectator was also a participant in. Always conscious of the fact of just missing seven conversations, he or she became the channel-zapping or lingering co-author of the project, a sampling DJ at the turntables of imagined life or the lived history of time, sometimes with shocking results. For instance, while Hannes Heer, who put together the controversial Wehrmacht exhibition, was asking an old man about his experiences in the Russian campaign of the last World War, the singer Esther Bejarano was describing her time in the girls' orchestra in Auschwitz. Only connected in the back and forth channel jumping by a terrible dramaturgy of chance.

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PD Dr. Wolfgang Ernst (Humboldt University) May 20, 2002

THE BRANCH FOR MEMORY ON TIME FROM THE POINT OF VIEW OF A MEDIA PROFESSOR

Memory on Time

The title of the events from September 2 to 6, 2000 in Hamburg's Kammerspielen were also aptly chosen from a media theoretical perspective. Given the temporal segmentation and fleeting quality of collective memory in the age of mass media (in contrast to the stone monument's claim to the eternal), there is the corresponding fact that in current media culture, images themselves - being electronic - are time based and pure flow: ephemeral monuments. It is not only the transmission of the event that is fleeting, but also its storage. In a strict demonstration of this, the traces of conversations at the event in Hamburg were erased or dispersed after a short afterlife in the Internet as a limitedly viewable temporary storage (www.filialefuererinnerung.de), representing, at best, a temporary archive. The event created a storage of knowledge which only existed, thanks to electronic transmission, in the moment of its telling, where (almost) nothing was written down or otherwise recorded: pure overexpenditure, un-archival. The fleeting temporary storage in the Internet reminds us that we are moving from a traditional storage fixed culture to a media culture of transmission.
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Media theory of the "live"

The fusion in ancient Greek of the terms theater and theory is not by chance. Looking means nothing more than theoría. That the essence of this looking has nothing to do with the systemic theoretical difference of the observer is described by Nietzsche in The Birth of Tragedy with reference to the fact that the institution of the chorus in Greek tragedy as an artistic imitation of a throng of satyrs by the servants of Dionysos makes an inevitable "division between the Dionysian spectator and the Dionysian enchanted necessary." This erection of difference, however, was immediately undermined, given that there was no basic distinction between the audience and the chorus. In viewing, the theory itself becomes the medium. That sound idealistic, but Nietzsche reveals this to be a media dispositive, namely in reference to the geometry of the architecture of the theaters. In Greek theaters, it was possible for each of the spectators to get an overview of the world around him, and in this saturated view to imagine himself as a member of the chorus. The event in Hamburg consciously took up this theatrical-media-archaeological situation and made the cultural-technical difference between the ancient and the contemporary clear.

The space of hearing and seeing, that is, the stage of the Hamburg theater, was, for the occasion of the Branch for Memory on Time, no longer occupied by actors, rather by monitors and speakers (after the hall had temporarily been a film screening room for the UFA in 1944). In front of the monitors or in the acoustic retrieval by headsets, it was not possible for the audience to differentiate whether the transmission of conversations about the culture of memory were actually in real time ("live") or recorded, and whether they occurred in near or distant ("tele"vision) spaces. In the Hamburg branch, the bearer of the material of memory was a televised space, created by Penelope Wehrli and visomat, a superscreen made of 30 individual monitors, whose images and sounds, taken from newspapers and memory experts, were scattered across the theater from remote spaces: live, but remote (the essence of "tele"vision). Finally the theater was what it always wants to be: a place against forgetting (Gerhard Jörder). Does this memory arise only in twilight, from the time of the storytellers or in hallucinations read between book and lamp (Michel Foucault), when the noise of the street and the light of day die out? Indeed, under highly technical conditions the fragile relationship between memory and time becomes unstable; this was made current in the Hamburg event. Memory cannot be guaranteed to be any more stabile (archive, museums, libraries), but is itself time-based. The space of the theater comes into play here, which, according to the ancient Aristotelian model guarantees the simultaneity of performance and viewing (this quality in contrast to the electronic media). This event was also a meta-reflection (therefore subject as well as object of a "theory" of media) on forms of authorization in media reports, on the media politics of images of memory in which memory itself is proscribed.
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