The play entitled Heldenplatz99 is interesting for many reasons. This is due to the title and date of its appearance, fifty years after the historic annexation of Austria by Germany under Hitler, and because it was performed in the only German-language national theater in the capital Vienna, at the Burgtheater. The constellation of its appearance, form and content means it constitutes a chief and state mission of a rare sort in our timescape. This artistic sacrifice could only end fatally. An ascesis that has ventured far, as already the novel entitled Extinction100 hitherto hardly recognized, has expressed the heritage of all that has been and is, forever, as a clairvoyant gesture, cynical contempt, a penetrating monologue of desperate rage and resignation, of tragic art, in contemptuous repetitions up to its end, on the highest level of grieving tragedy.
The director101 of this Heldenplatz himself narrates the author’s defeatist utterances on the theater of others. On authors, directorial practice, theatrical routine? Unfortunately, the speaker was not questioned further. Here the person praised because of misunderstood or false attention would have said to them what is to be said, and was cut off. A productive critique about which the friend speaking and manager and director indeed said that, in that case, he could not have continued to work.