How decisive such a tiny dash in a letter can be: An “l” then becomes a “t”, and the watercolor that the children discovered in their father’s attic, which has just passed away, is no longer from “A.

Hiller” signed.

They think it was painted by Adolf Hitler of all people.

And now?

The dramatist Marius von Mayenburg loves such experimental arrangements with entanglements in the German past.

His latest coup is called "Nachtland" and is a comedy about Nazis, anti-Semitism, guilt, the art world and unexpected differences in relationships.

As his own director, von Mayenburg has now staged the premiere in the Berlin Schaubühne, emphasizing the banal rather than the comic, the average, not the extremes.

The stage is clean

Almost like in a didactic play, the text, in which the characters often address the audience directly with narrative and explanation, is prepared without much action or movement.

The stage designer Nina Wetzel had a brown flokati carpet laid over the walls and floor and kept the stage swept clean except for a patterned swivel chair, because the lease has already been terminated.

As Nicola and Philipp, Genija Rykova and Moritz Gottwald are the irritable, bickering siblings who don't know how to deal with the ominous watercolor: keep, sell, destroy, donate to a museum?

Where does it even come from?

Were there Nazis in the family that always acted so decently?

A fairly right-wing expert assesses the picture as genuine, among other things because all the details have been worked out with great love.

"Love is typically Hitler?" asks Judith, Philipp's Jewish wife, in amazement.

As an expert on Hitler art, Julia Schubert later said of her: "You can't tell by looking at her."

Marius von Mayenburg's intelligent, witty discourse on everyday anti-Semitism – from the middle-class and from the left, well-intentioned or deliberately humiliating – increases ever more shrillly.

Nicola is annoyed by Judith, who "sees Hitler everywhere" and picks apart every "criticism of Israel", while Philipp is proud to be married to a Jewess as a German.

Damir Avdic as Fabian, Nicolas Mann, is a clumsy in every way, promptly cutting and poisoning himself when he unframes the watercolor.

No one has a friendly word for the other, everyone knows everything better.

In terms of type, they could be a quarreling community of heirs in a classic tabloid comedy if it weren't for the reference to the Nazi era and its contaminated legacy.

On the one hand this grotesque balancing act is laughable, on the other hand it is deeply shocking.

Accordingly, in famous videos, Sébastien Dupouey paraphrased the postcard idylls that Hitler created as an unsuccessful painter in Vienna.

Concepts such as homeland, nature and landscape are questioned on a visual level and further spaces for thinking and debating are opened up.

The German music, especially by Richard Wagner, which is subcutaneously mixed into the films, is also problematic.

In between, the performers join in the pilgrims' choir from "Tannhäuser" or Schumann's Heine setting "In the beginning I almost wanted to lose my heart".

The picture taken from the attic can never be seen, instead the harmoniously playing ensemble stares into the hall with concentration when they talk about

Anti-Semitism, as the dubious buyer of the picture explains at the end, appears everywhere throughout intellectual and art history, in Luther, Kant and Marx, in Voltaire, Goethe, Wilde, Dostoyevsky, the Mann brothers, Céline, TS Eliot and countless others .

And if you don't radically separate the works of art from their creators, "we'll throw the whole West out of the window".

There's something to it, but what?

As an author, Marius von Mayenburg becomes more and more extravagant and unmotivated, as a director he is content with light-handed, non-binding arrangements.

During the almost two-hour performance, all the actors are almost constantly on the stage, sitting and standing around, but despite all the interesting reflections, they mostly seem underemployed: Lots of theory, little theatre!