Ingolstadt

These are the hottest days of a long summer. In the stifling confinement of a rural Catholic community is a seething underlying energy that seeks an outlet by zeroing in on the weakest points with terrifying precision. Marieluise Fleisser’s two best-known plays, Purgatory in INGOLSTADT and PIONEERS IN INGOLSTADT, written in the latter half of the 1920s, are not as much a portrait of her hometown as a provincial cosmos from the point of view of a young, “forgotten” postwar generation.

Roelle, expelled from his school a short while before, is an outsider, a self-proclaimed saint and chosen one who “receives angelic visits”. Having found out about the unwanted pregnancy of the convent schoolgirl Olga, he hopes to blackmail her into getting intimate with him. Fabian has fallen in love with Berta, his father’s maidservant. She, for her part, has taken a fancy to the soldier Korl and refuses to accept his callous rejection of her. Her friend Alma tries to gain independence by selling her body on her own account. The sergeant in command of the soldiers who are temporarily stationed in Ingolstadt to build a bridge across the Danube is attacked by his own underlings and drowns in the river.

The violence portrayed in Marieluise Fleisser’s INGOLSTADT wears the masks of religion, family, military order and sexuality. But speech is its medium.

Marieluise Fleisser (1901–1974) is a standout figure of 20th-century German-language drama. Lion Feuchtwanger supported her, Bertolt Brecht revered and almost destroyed her, Ödön von Horváth learned from her, and an entire generation of German postwar playwrights was influenced by her. After several major guest performances at the Wiener Festwochen, this is internationally acclaimed director Ivo van Hove’s first production in Vienna.