110. “The Last People”

Drama by Wolfgang Kirchbach
Performance of the "Verein für historisch-moderne Fesispiele" at the Neues Theater, Berlin

Wolfgang Kirchbach has dramatized the fate of the "last human couple" in the form of a poet's dream and had this dream drama performed on 19 February as part of the "historical-modern festival" series. A lot seems to be allowed in dreams; and when someone appears and tells us: "I dreamt this", he disarms us to a certain extent. We are quite helpless in the face of what the Lord gives us in our sleep. But after all, we want to be able to believe in a poet's dream. We want to have a sense that there is a human necessity to dream in this way. And that someone can dream about the universe in the way Wolfgang Kirchbach pretends to have dreamed, we never believe. Modern science teaches us that the world will gradually freeze over and bury all existence in eternal rest. Kirchbach shows us the time before this glaciation. Sirens, nymphs, fauns, Proteus, Pan and similar mythical creatures live in this time. The fact that humans once lived is initially unknown to them. Then the last man appears. He comes from an Eskimo. The mythical creatures want to destroy him. For what is to become of them when man establishes a new kingdom? They live without restraint, without morality and law. Man could only destroy this life. - It is completely pointless to describe the battles between the mythical creatures of nature and man, as Kirchbach does. Suffice it to say that the last man believes himself to be the first, because he sees no beings of his kind around him. Strangely enough, the last woman is also still there. Love develops between the two. Man feels the joy of life. He wants to defeat the gods of nature and establish a new kingdom. The woman also forces the great Pan into the magic circle of her love. He puts on human clothes to please her. She spurns him. He dies of a broken heart. And with the death of the great Pan, the end of the world is sealed. Even the last man dies last. And that is because Proteus takes away his belief that he is the first of his race and shows him that no new life can arise from the womb of man.

After all, Wolfgang Kirchbach can dream like that. That is his business. Our hearts remain as icy as the end of the world he depicts throughout the whole process. Everything sounds hollow. We do not have the feeling that here a poet has solved a task that he has experienced in his deepest depths. We are only dealing with a man who has a completely external relationship to the great questions which he draws into the circle of his art. Everything is done with levers and screws. Not for a moment does inner warmth flow from the poet to us. It is quite possible in dreams, for example, that fauns nine hundred billion years old do not know what a bootjack is, which they dig out of the ruins of the world at the end of existence; it is also possible in dreams that within the desolate time that precedes the end of the world, a well-formed human couple still emerges. But we smile at such a dream when we remember it after a good night's sleep. Wolfgang Kirchbach, however, records it and seems to believe that we could dream along with him. No, we only smile there too. And then comes the anger, the perhaps unreasonable anger that Wolfgang Kirchbach has brought it upon himself to show us what the Lord taught him in his sleep about the end of the world. Poets should live through their Faust problem while awake. They may then have no excuse for their fantastic improbabilities, but they will remain artistically honest. And being artistically honest means above all: keeping quiet about things you have nothing to say about.