"Who is ringing the bells?" Thomas Mann begins his novel "The Holy Sinner" with this question. The surprising answer comes in the next sentence. "Not the bell-ringers," because they left the bell tower long ago and are already walking in the streets to hear the sound of Rome's churches that fills the "bursting air." So who's ringing the bells? According to Thomas Mann, "it's the spirit of the story," that has entered the body of the story-teller as a mere medium, a vessel.

Thomas Mann evokes the romantic topos of the artist who is only an instrument to pass on that which he has received – after all, "The Holy Sinner" is a novel about the Pope. The poets of modernity that have been forgotten by God, on the other hand, don't believe that divine sparks of inspiration distinguish artists from non-artists. Thus Paul Valéry writes that anyone who contents himself with the "pathetically passive" role of a medium must either admit that art is pure coincidence or that it originates in a kind of supernatural communication. Both hypotheses, according to Valery, turn the artist into "either an urn in which millions of chips are dumped," or a speaking table inhabited by a spirit. "One does not create verse with ideas," is his refusal of spiritualism, "but with words."

Likewise Gottfried Benn refused to attribute his creative talents to the heavenly fires. Seers, writes Benn "is the name we give to people who are not able to assign words to the world, to the extent that they comprehend it." The self-confidence expressed in such lines is what enables artists like Gottfried Benn to use their unflinching faith in form to find an appropriate expression for their ideas that "carries them," makes them "autochthonal". It was post-modernity that shook this faith in Logos; the sovereign author is replaced by a deconstructive style that is supposed to create democracy by means of quotations and montage. And because Western logocentrism is said to be a masculine gesture of power, it's no coincidence that Elfriede Jelinek is, with her so-called "text surfaces," the loudest defender of this non-hierarchical literature.

She too understands herself to be a medium, but not a medium of exclusive, semi-divine wisdom but rather a medium of real voices that she modernises and combines – after Valery, more of an urn than a speaking table. And she is consistent enough to understand her theatre texts not as untouchable artwork but rather as the spoken material of a theatre evening in which the director takes on the role of the co-author, wanting to continue to write and re-write the text in his own style. Because his discourse cannot be repressed according to the terms of participative art, Jelinek the de-constructivist submits herself to deconstruction by others.

Director Nicolas Stemann is the most radical and brilliant in his application of this logic to her texts. Jelinek says of him – the mother murderer as model son – that she "triggers" his staging fantasy, just as one triggers a weapon. Stemann's staging of Jelinek's RAF play "Ulrike Maria Stuart" (more) was recently invited to the Theatertagen in Mülheim which wouldn't be a problem were it not for the fact that this renowned festival of contemporary theatre is, unlike the Theatertreffen in Berlin, a competition of plays and not of stagings – that's how it's put in its charter. In his premiere, Stemann only used a few dislocated passages of the original text because Elfriede Jelinek had not given permission for its publication – wanting judgement only to be passed on them in the theatre. The audience in Mülheim probably didn't notice, but on what basis it was supposed to choose its prize winner remains a secret of the selection jury.

In Mülheim, nobody really understood the choice of the dramatist prize. The Verlag der Autoren (author's publishing house) protested against the honouring of the theatre collective Rimini Protokoll for their staging of "Karl Marx: Das Kapital, Erster Band" (Karl Marx' "Capital", volume one) which was "doubtless an excellent production with intelligent direction and a new theatre form (...) but something was distinctly missing from this year's prize: a dramatist." The most recent decision shows the Theatertage to have lost its uniqueness.

Like in all of their productions, Rimini Protokoll sends non-actors onto the stage who are experts on the matter at hand and who report of their experiences. Casting and compilation are half of the dramaturgy in this form of documentary theatre, the staging is the other half. The current boom of documentary forms in theatre through this "writing with scissors" – as Oliver Reese, designated director of Schauspiel Frankfurt puts it - is rooted not only in the philosophical scepticism of language as is the case with Elfriede Jelinek, but also in the wish for directness and authenticity.

Increasingly, productions turn the stage over to the audience. They pass microphones through the rows and transform themselves into any number of things: public forums for truth-protocols, pirated copies and notations. In this way theatre becomes a content-merger, a provider, a heat reservoir and an old-fashioned radio. Director Philip Tiedemann has taken this trend to its extreme, and parodied it at the same time. At the beginning of this season, for instance, he turned a passing joke into an evening of theatre by staging the Hamburg telephone book. After all, no other play has as many characters as this work in three volumes, Tiedemann says: "A text about Hamburg, if you like - written by Hamburg residents - like a satellite image, a view from a plane." This is collective authorship taken to the limit: everyone's a part of it, theatre from the perspective of Google Earth.

It's more or less the same with Rene Pollesch's card index plays. True, Pollesch doesn't have to spend his time quarrelling with authors or their publishers, as he is author and director in one. And yet he too has also had one of his plays prohibited from being performed by another director, even if each play is just a reworking of its predecessor, now re-written and developed. Admittedly, this does a lot to boost his theatrical output, yet it also brings the charge of self-plagiarism down upon him. The same charge was also recently heard by Jürgen Gosch, levelled at him by critic Till Briegleb who believed he saw in Gosch's Hanover production of "As You Like It" a remake of one staged four years earlier in Hamburg. This undesired deja-vu is also a reflection of the competitive situation in the theatre. To generate market value, a director must become a sort of original genius. With his artistic signature, he sharpens his trademark. But at the same time his welcome recognition value runs against the demand for continual innovation, which also belongs to the market.

Anyone who has seen through this dilemma, however, can make selected use of it by taking it to the limit. Even dramatists like Roland Schimmelpfennig and Albert Ostermaier, who seem relatively conventional with their solid plays, unambiguous roles and clear dialogues, counter expectations by consciously amassing more motifs than they can exploit. With this associative overkill they throw a wrench in the works, bedevilling their plays' reception so to speak from inside out. It's as if the author and the director had exchanged roles. For like their documentarist colleagues, the "poets" among contemporary dramatists also see themselves as a medium, with all the aforementioned contradictions which this view of themselves entails, all part and parcel of the concept of genius.

Ultimately, in a society characterised by the division of labour, the artist could only assert his autonomy by understanding himself as the mouthpiece of his muse, and so also as heteronomous. That is the birth trauma of the modern artist. Until today he has not managed to get over it, and instead simply changed his doctor. It's not a god, but the Hamburg telephone book that lets him express his sufferings. And instead of church bells, only mobile phones ring for the "chosen one."

*

The article was originally published in German in the Süddeutsche Zeitung on June 22, 2007.

Christopher Schmidt is a theatre critic for the Süddeutsche Zeitung.

Translation: nb, jab.

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