Experiencing Sorokin

Gatín and I spent a couple of days in Munich. We took the opportunity and saw the play A Month in Dachau by the Russian author Vadimir Sorokin. The play was a rather shocking experience for Gatín, who did not know the work of Sorokin.

Let's give a short summery of what we were presented: In 1990, the author Sorokin travels from Moscow via Braunau to Dachau. He is welcomed by three polite SS men and their German Shepherds. At the side of his guards Margarethe and Gretchen, he goes through 26 cells of the concentrations camp. It is a unrestrained, brutal, cannibalistic and pornographic nightmare, looking into the abyss of German and Soviet totalitarianism. In a grotesque eternal triangle, which ends with a romantic marriage, the past and the present are mixed to a unbridled journey through language and time.

Of course, we could not just walk out of the theatre in the Haus der Kunst (built on Hitler's request), without discussing the play. Our discussion ended in a hip bar on a disagreement, whether Nihilism is of French or Russian origin.

For once, I was right. The Russian novelist Ivan Turgenev popularised the term in his novel Fathers and Sons (1862). But what's the point of being right, when the world, and especially human existence, is without meaning, purpose, comprehensible truth, or essential value.