THE JOURNEY. A Trip
Die Reise. Ein Trip
based on the novel by Bernward Vesper
 
In August 1969, Bernward Vesper, son of the National-Socialist poet Will Vesper and temporary fiancé of Gudrun Ensslin, co-founder of the German left-wing underground movement Red Army Fraction (RAF), told his publisher about a book project he was planning: According to his bold announcement, the first version of the text would describe a 24-hour LSD trip. At the same time it would also contain "notes from momentary perception" and reflections on the author's biography, and would subsequently be edited with the help of tape recordings and further drug trips "until a final form is achieved."
 
That final version never saw the light of day. In May 1971, Vesper, who by his own account was "gradually freaking out," took his own life in a psychiatric institution. It was not until six years later that the large fragment appeared under the title «Die Reise» («The Trip») in a version edited by Jörg Schröder. During the ground-shaking German autumn of 1977, after the deaths of Gudrun Ensslin, Ulrike Meinhof and Andreas Baader in the prison of Stuttgart-Stammheim, it suddenly attracted enormous attention, not least as an important contemporary document of the 1968 movement.
 
What is called—probably also for lack of a more appropriate term for Vesper's genre-breaking text volume— "novel essay" is not a novel, not an essay, not an autobiography, not a chronicle, not a diary, not a confession. However, this megalomaniac "play of random electric currents on my cerebral cortex" must be considered Literature without a doubt. The first-person narrator named "Bernward Vesper" is a highly unreliable one, his radically subjective, non-linear narrative oscillating between a wide variety of levels. This highly contradictory and complex character, who actually undertakes a variety of quite different journeys in the text—across Europe, on a drug trip, into the unconscious, into the German soul, theory, childhood, to himself, to death—hardly fits into a single, coherent self. "Who am I?" the narrative seems to ask incessantly, "and if so—how many?". This I, this text, this "trip" are pure dynamite. Or, as Vesper would put it: ENERGY = EXPERIENCE - HATE2.
 
What can Vesper's abysmal bestseller, one of the most radical texts of the 20th century, tell us today—50 years after the founding of the RAF? In this co-production, the THEATRE NATIONAL DU LUXEMBOURG and the Viennese performance collective tangent.COLLABORATIONS set out on a trip with Vesper's "novel essay" and make this monster of a text experienceable with three performers in a multimedia stage performance. Because:
 
"Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.“ 
(George Santayana).
 
Language: German
Subtitles: English, Greek

Watch the video greeting here.