Lapidarium

LAPIDARIUM is a book containing three plays that address the dark matter within humanity in the early 21st century: torture, terror, and suicide. In the social play "Realm of Death," the political process is depicted, which has led from 9/11, the Islamist terrorist attack, to the systematic torture of war prisoners in the U.S. camps of Guantánamo and Abu Ghraib. The extreme failure of democratic governance in the leading state of the Western world, the USA, exemplifies political theory. The family play "Barrack" follows the trajectory of love, from infatuation to the creation of a child, leading to the constraints of the small neo-bourgeois family, the dullness, the violence within, in the basement of the house, violence as a politically declared act, culminating in the murders committed by the NSU, also in relation to the actions of the RAF. The energies at play here in Germany that bring this forth: the fundamental structures of kinship. The self-portrait piece "LAPIDARIUM": a diary of the last days, old age, friendship, death. Death appears to the self, the dying, the dead, and alongside the present, the earlier years, a reckoning, in southern Bavaria, May and November 2023, for Franz Xaver Kroetz. How do we want to die, how do we live? A design for an anthropology with pragmatic intent.