A travel group sets out on a journey in search of a new beginning, among them Marieluise Fleißer, Alexandra Kollontai, Bertolt Brecht, and Ovid. Soon, their euphoric and bookish enactments of past utopias are challenged by the group dynamics that unfold along the stations of their revolutionary trajectory to the promised lands of pleasure. When one comrade’s heart falls ill — is it because of homesickness or due to unanswered romantic feelings towards the leader of the group? – the once clear directionality of their voyage threatens to dissolve. At the summit of collective despair, an ominous mountain demon appears and reveals an unforeseen path, less virtuous but therefore lucrative. Čto delat’, what is to be done?

Tanikō or The Valley-Hurling is a Japanese nō-play written by Pseudo-Zenchiku around the fifteenth century and set in the ascetic mountain world of the Yamabushi that was actually adapted by Bertolt Brecht. He became acquainted with the material in the late 1920s in a version heavily edited by the English Orientalist Arthur Waley and translated into German by Elisabeth Hauptmann. Developed as a school opera together with Kurt Weill, it is one of his first didactic pieces in which the political consciousness of the audience as well as of the performative participants was to be trained for the communist project.

tanikō (cold love) proposes a version of the play that departs from the historical constellation of a temporary collaboration and love affair between two writers with radical different poetics: Marieluise Fleißer and Bertolt Brecht. Their personal and aesthetic incompatibilities are investigated as symptoms of the potential violence that accompanies the project of modern emancipatory strategies and utopian projects. Fleißer’s auto-fictional text Avantgarde, a document of antimodern resentments provoked by the traumatic experience of Brecht’s paternalistic management of her debut as a published and played author in the 1920s, is projected onto the dramatic constellation of an impossible amorous relationship between teacher and pupil within the psychic topography of a journey to the mountains.

Inverting the historical distribution of roles (there: Brecht editing Fleißer; here: Fleißer editing Brecht), the piece borrows the perspective of Fleißer’s poetics in order to offer phantasmic accounts of the irresolved problems and libidinal economies that informed their encounter: What would a ‚Lehrstück‘ (didactic play) look like that takes into account the vulnerabilities and sensibilities of its agents and yet allows for the imagination of emancipatory modes of interpersonal relations (Beziehungsweisen)?

Einem Gerücht zufolge hat Marieluise (‚Aloysia’) Fleißer das japanische Nō-Stück tanikō adaptiert. Im Unterschied zu Brechts Bearbeitungen des Stoffes in den Lehrstücken Der Jasager/Der Neinsager hätten die Teilnehmer*innen an Fleißers revolutionärer Expedition wahrscheinlich gezögert, ob sie zwischen rotem Berg und braunem Tal auf dem richtigen Weg wandeln. Vielleicht hätte ihre Unentschiedenheit ihnen jedoch zur Entdeckung einer anderen, tastenderen Avantgarde verholfen, die mit den widersprüchlichen Impulsen revolutionären Begehrens umzugehen versucht.