“Germans spoke it's a cultural language / its an old old cultural language. German literature is cultural literature / a very big cultural literature. ”

A highly decorated history professor and an artist of international renown meet and fraternize: They praise the German-Austrian cultural history, revive each other's knowledge, and agree that they represent the intellectual life in the best possible way - after all, they have both already received a Nobel Prize. Even the appearance of a pregnant woman in an emergency situation may distract at best for a short time: the urge for validity and the joy of elitist judgment is too important. But the longer the hymns on humanity, tradition, and handicraft continue, the more threateningly their ivory tower begins to sway ...
Ernst Jandl's one-act play DIE HUMANISTEN (premiered in Graz in 1976) is typical of his work: highly musical and bitterly angry, it reckons with legacy social burdens, full of clarity, subtlety, and wit. And of course, as with all Jandl texts, language and speaking itself play the main role: language becomes a living actor; through its alienation and mutilation, it enables new realities.
Whether in his scattered dramatic texts or in his sprawling lyrical work - in Jandl's diverging, freely floating language structures, the world can finally be represented as one * encounters it again and again: as an expressive stringing together of sensory impressions, as a fragmentary experience of society, as a deceptive wandering between melancholy and comedy.
The director Claudia Bauer, who has been invited to the Berlin Theatertreffen several times, stages this very language by Ernst Jandl in her very first Viennese work. Bauer, known for her visually strong theater evenings, turns her powerful music theater, somewhere between wild spoken opera and Jacques Tati grotesque - with a composition by Peer Baierlein that was created for the production and gives the unmistakable Jandl sound new dimensions.