Lapidarium

LAPIDARIUM is a book featuring three plays that address the dark matter of humanity in the early 21st century: torture, terror, suicide.

The comedy of manners REALM OF DEATH portrays the political process that led from the 9/11 terror attacks to the systematic torture of prisoners of war in the American detention facilities in Guantánamo Bay and Abu Ghraib. With reference to this extreme instance of the failure of democratic rule in the leading state in the Western world, the USA, we see a prime example of POLITICAL THEORY.

The family play BARACKS follows the course of a love story, leading from the halcyon days of falling in love to a child that creates a mother and a father, followed by the suffocation of life as a neo-bourgeois nuclear family, and then comes boredom, violence on the inside, in the basement, violence declared as a political act, all the way through to the murders committed by the neo-Nazi group the NSU, also with reference to the deeds of the RAF. The forces in Germany that produce this: THE ELEMENTARY STRUCTURES OF RELATION.

The »self play« LAPIDARIUM: self-portrait, diary of last days, age, friendship, death. The self is confronted with death, the dying, the dead, and with the current and earlier years, a reckoning, in the Bavarian south, May and November 2023, for Franz Xaver Kroetz. On the questions of how do we want to die and how we want to live. A sketch of an ANTHROPOLOGY WITH PRAGMATIC INTENTIONS.

»The constant disappearance of moments, bodies, beings spurred Goetz to create his great project. He documents, disavows, and refutes the trickling away of everything – with these 26 things that the combines in continually new ways. Forming spaces in which an eternal present reigns. As a player, the likes of which you won’t find in the German language.« Peter Kümmel, DIE ZEIT

»His writings evince an enduring intellectual youthfulness … Goetz is undeniably one of the most important contemporary German authors, perhaps even the most important of all.« Enno Stahl, Deutschlandfunk Kultur