Birgit Haas

Postmodernism Unmasked: Rainald Goetz’s Festung and Albert Ostermaier’s The Making of B-Movie

Since the 1970s, the pastiche has become the most popular theatrical form in Germany. In the 1990s, the postmodern wave gradually petered out, and became the object of critical analysis, not only by means of literary criticsm, but also through the plays themselves. In 1993, Rainald Goetz published his trilogy Fortress (Festung), a harsh criticism of the media, which is composed of a multitude of plays within the play, thus exposing the absurdity of the postmodern TV culture. In his play The Making of B-Movie (1999), Albert Ostermaier picks up on postmodernism by pre- senting the making of the would-be writer Brom and his ghost-writer Silber as a play against the backdrop of a kitsch movie. This chapter will examine the structure of both plays, analysing the different approaches to postmodernism in a consumerist society.

Introduction The term ‘postmodernist drama’, which Barbara Kruger labelled ‘that va- porous buzzword’, remains highly contentious.1 Despite their reserve towards postmodern plays, however, researchers agree that postmodern drama has developed its own set of conventions: the elision of fiction and auto- biography, performer and subject, the monologue, and the emphasis on the body as an expression of structural subjugation. Radical postmodern plays are largely devoid of most of the features by which drama has traditionally been recognised – dialogue, plot, character.2 In this sense, Goetz’s play, Fortress, can be regarded as a typically postmodern drama which promotes Baudrillard’s claim that the media imitation of ‘reality’ (simulacrum) has completely replaced the real. He focuses on the detrimental effect of the media society, dramatising the dominance of the mass media in postmodern culture. Fortress heralds the dissolution of neatly separated catagories, such

1 Remote Control: Power, Cultures and the World of Appearances (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1993), p. 4. 2 See Patrice Pavis, Theatre at the Crossroads of Culture, trans. by Loren Kruger (London: Routledge, 1992), p. 59. Pavis’s definition of a postmodern theatre was that postmodern dra- ma denies the ‘existence of rules and regulations governing dialogue, character, dramatic structure, etc.’, the banishment of the narrative as well as ‘conversational dialogue from the stage as a relic of dramaturgy based on conflict and exchange’. 268 Birgit Haas as genres, since it is not strictly speaking dramatic. As a result, the plays within the play Fortress are multiplied like an infinite number of Russian dolls, although this metaphor is not quite correct, since the pieces do not fit neatly into one an-other. By contrast, Ostermaier’s The Making of B-Movie merely quotes the ‘anti-features’ of postmodern art within the framework of a dialogically structured narrative action. Through his more traditional approach, Oster- maier examines the creative process of playwriting. He happily marries Brecht and Bogart in order to expose the mechanisms behind the scenes of mass culture. The play can be seen as a ‘drama about drama’.3 However, it fits neither of Richard Hornby’s structuralist categories, because Ostermaier blurs the boundaries between the so-called ‘inset’ type, where the inner play is secondary, and the ‘framed’ type, where the inner play is primary and the outer play merely a framing device. Speaking of a postmodern play in terms of a playtext might seem para- doxical at first, since the finalised, written version of a script contradicts the infinite openness of the postmodern text. Viewed against the backdrop of fluxes and Neo-Dada performances of the 1960s and 1970s, the two plays in question do not fall into the category of postmodernism. As far as the formal aspects are concerned, both examples can rather be seen as a return to mo- dernism. It is therefore the aim of this chapter to show the various ways in which Ostermaier and Goetz refer to postmodernism, bearing in mind that neither author subscribes to postmodernism as such; clearly, they retain the concept of authorship, as well as the concept of a basic ‘narrative’, i.e. the critique of postmodern performance. It must also be noted that both believe in Schiller’s idea of the theatre as a place of enlightenment. However radi- cally dissolved the play-within-the-play structure seems to be, we should bear in mind that, after all, both playwrights adhere to a more conservative vision of theatre. The postmodern context is, therefore, parodied and criticised by means of two plays which follow a modernist pattern. In my argument, I will focus on the conflict lines between modernism and postmodernism. The pivotal point of this essay is the question of how mass culture is represented through the formal structure of a modernist metadrama: despite the ‘blasting’ of the formal structures and the use of montage, the plays do not dissolve the category of the metadrama. Although both examples play with typical post- modern features, such as Kristevan ‘intertextuality’, the message is different;

3 See Richard Hornby, Drama, Metadrama and Perception (Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 1986), p. 33.