Wide Format with Irina Lesovaya

24 March 2007, 14:50; duration: 26 minutes.
Premiere on the stage of the theatre "Near the Stanislavsky House": The Russian-German Soldier's Phrasebook, directed by Aglaja Romanovskaya.

In 2005 a book by an unknown author became a bestseller in Germany. It was called A Woman in Berlin: diary entries from April to June 1945. It is the confession of a thirty-year-old German woman who considered herself half prisoner and half free. She lived among Soviet soldiers; some were enemies, some became friends. One day she was given a Russian-German phrase book published in 1943 especially for Soviet soldiers who had to communicate with prisoners or found themselves on enemy territory. Two languages superimposed on military action produced a linguistic monstrosity: individual phrases from that booklet could provoke laughter, bewilderment and horror at the same time. The woman quoted this captured source in her diary.

Two years ago this documentary history of the Second World War attracted the attention of director Aglaja Romanovskaya, who has long lived and worked in France. She discovered that in 1941 a similar German-Russian phrase book had been published in Germany specifically for Wehrmacht soldiers. Then the wartime notes of a Soviet officer - twenty-three-year-old Lieutenant Vladimir Gelfand - came into her hands.

In the director's conception, the personal became public. Romanovskaya created a performance based on these wartime documents and called it The Russian-German Soldier's Phrasebook.

Maria Krasyuk reports on the meeting of two worlds on stage:

For two years Aglaja Romanovskaya and Elena Kharlamova have been reading the wartime diaries of a Soviet soldier and a German woman. The voices of 1945 do not allow a final full stop to be placed. The Berlin premiere has already taken place, but the text continues to change.

"Where is the direction of the main strike planned?"
"Toward city N."
"...This, in that case. It is because, weil, wenn man das von da druben hort..."

Mixing Russian and German in this way, the international company developed its own language. The military phrase books suggested the intonation.

"When I opened the phrase book, it was obvious that it was a dialogue, because there are questions and possible answers. I thought: how wonderful, how interesting - it is a means of dialogue. But is dialogue possible? And about what?" (Aglaja Romanovskaya)

The theme of "Victor and Victims" widened the boundaries. The skeletons in history's cupboard began a game of meanings. The actors, meanwhile, tried to make what was alien understandable.

"We worked for a very long time and very painstakingly to make sure we did not start from some idea of historical guilt or retribution. As soon as someone says, 'But you did this,' the natural response is, 'You yourselves are to blame,' and the door slams shut and there is no dialogue." (Elena Kharlamova)

The dialogue is begun by sounds. Whispers and shouts merge Russian and German speech into a single stream. Just as the actors tune a violin and a guitar, the director adjusts the phonetic rhythms.

"Now you are talking about the prison, and that is right, because tyurma [prison] ends in an 'a' and carries the sound. But pochta [post office] goes downward - pochta - and it falls..." (A. Romanovskaya)

Romanovskaya draws the mise-en-scene with the text. Visual selections help when words are powerless to express a feeling.

"We have this game with the hands, and in principle everything has already been said in that game." (Anessa Nefedova, actress)

Training before the performance: the actors must catch a sound and throw it to a partner. On stage they send the languages into battle against linguistic conventions. The word "leader" becomes Fuhrer in German, and a German woman's admission, "I am the Fuhrer's daughter," drives the action onward.

"Words and linguistic space can actually get in the way of understanding one another. After all, what is a phrase book? 'Halt! Who goes there?' - 'Geh voran!' But here people meet, a space arises between them, and what will happen in that space, and what will happen to these words...?" (Fyodor Stepanov, actor)

The word constrains the tongue, so it is taken by storm. A tried-and-tested weapon is used: images that everyone can understand. Even the Gothic cathedral with a residential house pressed against it on the street beside the theatre becomes part of the scenery. The actors invite history onto the stage, but history already surrounds them. There is one battlefield, and one life shared by all.