Be it prose, radio play, drama or hypertext – the texts of the writer Kathrin Röggla, born in Salzburg in 1971, always revolve around what we tersely refer to as the “present”. The novels Niemand lacht rückwärts (1995), Abrauschen (1997) and Irres Wetter (2000) already made clear that there is hardly any other writer at the moment who is so close to the “here and now”, who develops such a vehement sense of time in her language, and who knows exactly how to translate this sense of time “musically”, experimentally and with great reflection. The fact that the literary roots of her texts are in the Austrian avant-garde is evident. They are linguistically critical, linguistically analytical and linguistically playful - and thus highly political. This is also made clear in the fake reports piece in which Röggla, based on the 9-11 disaster, looks into the question as to how we produce reality with the aid of the patterns and conceptions that we have of reality, and how this reality hits back on us. It is about how a “politics of anxiety evolves” (Röggla), it is about the functionalisation of anxieties, be it the invocation of National Security or a “new world order”.

Text: Kathrin Röggla
Director: Tina Lanik
Set design: Barbara Aigner
Costumes: Barbara Aigner
Actors: Erwin Ebenbauer, Christian Kainradl, Raimund Merker, Volker Schmidt, Günther Wiederschwinger, Leopold von Verschuer

Mediathek