Fraulein von Barnhelm and his maid Franziska have just arrived in Berlin.

You haven't started anything yet, but have already done something, unwittingly and unwittingly.

In the inn they occupied the room of a good officer who stayed there for months without causing offense.

The landlord has assigned the peaceful warrior to new quarters with the absolute power of disposition of the entrepreneur, in courteous obedience to the market forces, because the young lady from Saxony has the reputation of being a rich heir, while the major from Courland is behind with the rent.

Patrick Bahners

Features correspondent in Cologne and responsible for “humanities”.

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In Lessing's comedy "Minna von Barnhelm or the luck of the soldiers", not much more happens than that the initial exchange of rooms turns out to be a mistake of fate that needs to be corrected.

The major is Minna's seemingly lost, in truth just a befitting taciturn fiancé, and the two are destined to move into an apartment together until the end of their days.

The viewer quickly realizes that this goal is not opposed by external forces.

The uncle, the king and the landlord all compete to be gracious masters.

Why then does it take three and a quarter hours (including a break) to finish the play in Andreas Kriegenburg's production at the Düsseldorfer Schauspielhaus?

One word gives the other.

Mental entanglements

As Georg Lukács noted in 1963, the whole structure of the comedy is determined by an intellectualistic dialogue. The entanglements in the piece are of an intellectual nature, and development takes place on the path of language criticism, in dialogue upon dialogue. In the first scene of the second act, this technique of self-exploration of the material reaches a point at which it can no longer be pursued. A word no longer gives another, but only produces its echo. On the morning after their first night in the temporary domicile, the two young women have time to kill, and Franziska, who is in paid service with Minna but was brought up together with her, has fun, a rather everyday,Almost carelessly casual compliment for an appropriate contribution to the conversation not to be left standing without asking. “You made a very good comment on that. - Did? Do you do what comes to mind? "

Lea Ruckpauls Franziska gets the maximum effect of astonishment out of the mere repetition of words, pretends to be dumbfounded in the most enchanting way. She fakes astonishment at a conceivable conventional phrase, the simplest activity word that marks statements as linguistic acts and assigns authorship. If Franziska had an idea that was marked very well, she would not have had anything to do with it. The happy word must have been something spontaneous, a child of suddenness.

Ironically, in the moral-psychological dispute, the sententious résumé of which she praised Minna, Franziska had taken the view that one should not be too quick to trust the movements of the heart. By emphatically taking the word "make" at its word, Lea Ruckpaul radically puts the power of what has been made up for discussion. And she speaks from the heart of her director, who locates the drama returning from war in a bourgeois beyond power. With a barricade made of stacked chairs, Kriegenburg keeps people at bay from the violence associated with the Prussian state. The former sergeant Werner, who still dreams of the adventurous fortunes of war, satisfies this longing here as a newspaper reader. Florian Lange keeps watch on the Spree, depicts comfort as the end of civilization.

In 1783, Johann Jacob Engel cited the quoted dialogue between Minna and Franziska as a model of a comedy scene in his “The Beginning of a Theory of Poetry”, in which “the conversation seems to be led by the imagination” so that the characters gradually reveal themselves. Kriegenburg's undivided interest is in this development of characters in the nuances of a social reality that is entirely linguistically produced, but only made momentarily. The laconic non-verbal expression that Wolfgang Michalek's Tellheim copied from the public sphere of professional probation is out of place in private life, where benevolence is not condescension. Perhaps he will shake off the gesture of tolerance. Because Minna Wündrich gives a Minna von Barnhelm, as Lukács described her:She embodies "the grace of reasonable insight as the most irresistible power of the advancing life".