The Nuremberg painting student Wolfgang Herrndorf was a very unhappy person.

He quarreled with the academy, his professor, his own art, which nobody around him wanted to understand and which, with its old-master technique, seemed like a reactionary provocation to the present of the 1980s.

Having become a writer, Herrndorf twenty years later made a story out of motifs from this desolate time, "The Soldier's Path".

Martin Brüggemann (director) and Lukas Schmelmer (dramaturgy) have now adapted it as a youth play for the Frankfurt Schauspiel: A one-hour, funny, but increasingly text-heavy production in which Alicia Bischoff and Miguel Klein Medina make the characters of the story speak, they act on a reduced, divided stage,

Tobias Ruether

Editor in the feuilleton of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Sunday newspaper in Berlin.

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It tells the story of a nameless Nuremberg painting student who, during the entrance exam at the academy, meets another applicant, Franco Cosic, a Spaniard with Croatian roots (or not), who walks through the day as unsuspecting as he is euphoric about all the charms of the world - and whose artistic projects looked “like the Christmas bazaar of the Bodelschwingsche institutions.

It was hard not to burst into tears.”

Formative phase of life

When Miguel Klein Medina slips into the character of Franco (with a wig), Alicia Bischoff speaks the narrator, the next moment they both speak him again, one with ironic superiority as if from a cabaret stage, the other with more body, more heart .

In this way they break down the text into its parts of punchline and knowledge.

Two chance friends who go through a formative phase in their lives together until they separate again: "The Soldier's Path" opened the short story collection "Diesseits des Van Allen-Gürtels", which Herrndorf published in 2007, three years before his masterpiece " Tschick”, three years before his cancer diagnosis.

In August 2013, the terminally ill Herrndorf took his own life.

Before his death, however, he was still able to experience the success of his novel "Tschick" as a play: for a short time, Herrndorf was the most-performed author on German stages (2nd place: Shakespeare).

sentimentality and coldness

What made the novel "Tschick" about two teenagers

on the road

so seductive and perfect as a youth play for all ages also appears in "The Soldier's Way": Herrndorf's sense of timing, his flawless prose, in which sentimentality and coldness alternate elegantly , and above all: His forever youthful opposition to the mendacious falsehood and moral corruption of the adult world.

And as in "Tschick", the narrator is a close observer of his educational institution.

A young person who somehow does, but then prefers not to belong to the society of other people – and who breaks down what he sees into punchlines and insights.

The fact that Bischoff and Klein Medina share this voice in the Frankfurt adaptation cleverly implements the Herrndorfian sound.

Who is always both at the same time: sentimental and devoid of illusions.

Warm and cold.

In the middle and from far away.

Go now, feel!!!

The production puts the emphasis on the riddle of a friendship between a weirdo and his chronicler - and on the absurd desire for artistic education: Once Alicia Bischoff, slipped into the role of the professor, yells at the narrator through a megaphone, asking what he is delivering "Absolute shit," he must feel more: "Feel!!!" she yells into the device.

Since the piece is aimed at a younger audience, this accent is understandable.

At its core, Herrndorf's story is about what an "artist" actually is.

What a picture he gives while giving pictures.

Questions that Herrndorf himself occupied with throughout his life.

Of course, because they're about conformity, poses, and stubbornness, they're also interesting for teenagers.

The autobiographical elements, however, and Herrndorf's self-torture, who at some point no longer wanted to be a painter but only wanted to be a writer and also hints at the reasons for this in this story, are pushed into the background.

That is consistent in terms of dramaturgy, but also a bit of a shame.

Something is missing, but it doesn't matter: the audience in the sold-out box of the Frankfurter Schauspiel is enthusiastic.