A Little Light. And All This Silence. (Ein wenig Licht. Und diese Ruhe.)

Sibylle Berg's play is set in a world that feels disturbingly like our own. War breaks out in Europe. In Berg's world, it is a war between Liechtenstein and Luxembourg ... When mobilization begins, it dawns on a nerdy, boomer-like engineer who has been drafted into military service: perhaps his own queerness was never compatible with his job in the arms industry. He, who was involved in the development of autonomous drones, is now suddenly supposed to go to the front himself. His belief in his own value-driven worldview, his love of mathematical precision in technology, the freedom he hoped to find in mechanics, circuits, and the logic of bits and bytes, ohms and amps—all of this gets stuck in the mud of the trenches in the face of a looming reality.Somewhere, sheltered from the next detonations, the engineer begins to search: for the texture of thought that our world should be. The fear of war, but also the existential loneliness of a very real person, meets empty words; the desire for connection meets the buzzwords of a present that offers no home. "Ein wenig Licht. Und diese Ruhe." (A little light. And this peace.) takes place in a bunker, in a basement, and at an excavation site. But also in an exhibition. An exhibition of the interior of our minds. Sibylle Berg excavates nine concepts in her stage essay. In her unmistakable associative, erratic, and lovingly cynical style, she questions their meaning—and their ideological reinterpretation and the reversal of their former meaning. Because Sibylle Berg's character cannot find meaning in our time. Her play is a monologue about despair in our present—a present whose discourses rotate like an engine idling—and also about the fear of the recurring militarization of our society. Her text does not have to be read as a concrete commentary on the political debate about the reform of compulsory military service. Instead, her play can also be understood as an attempt to overcome loneliness and despair in art. For one evening. With music. And a little silence. By Lukas Nowak