{"id":3931,"date":"2024-09-18T15:19:15","date_gmt":"2024-09-18T13:19:15","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/localhost\/retablo\/?post_type=avada_portfolio&p=3931"},"modified":"2024-12-27T12:26:04","modified_gmt":"2024-12-27T11:26:04","slug":"morte-nella-notte-di-natale","status":"publish","type":"avada_portfolio","link":"https:\/\/retablo.org\/eng\/portfolio\/morte-nella-notte-di-natale\/","title":{"rendered":"DEATH ON CHRISTMAS NIGHT"},"content":{"rendered":"
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DEATH ON CHRISTMAS NIGHT<\/h2><\/div>

by Franz Xaver Kroetz<\/h2><\/div>
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Let us start with the fact that everything would seem easy. The author composes a piece set in Munich in the late 1980s-in Reganian times, before the Berlin Wall came down-that seems to be written today and situated in any of our European cities. It is about the economy, the crisis of the economy, immigration, galloping unemployment, fears: it is Christmas Eve, there is a middle-aged couple, he loses his job, he is very frightened and angry, he feels his dignity has been violated, he feels he has become unneeded, replaceable; she tries to maintain, instead, her esteem for herself and her surroundings. She tries to maintain a sense of concreteness seemingly devoid of impetus, tries to live -- remaining her own master -- within the perimeter of the limits that economic and social narrowness impose on her. The same limits that have become distressing for him, leading him to steal a high-value bracelet from a shopping mall as a gift to her. The economy steals his work and he steals from the economy.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

When a young Turkish migrant couple-nowadays we would say illegal immigrants-with no residence permit rings the door, looking for a guesthouse for foreign workers, he refuses to open it and threatens to report them to the police.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

But the wife realizes that the young foreigner, like the madonna on Christmas Eve, is about to give birth and forces her husband to let them into the house, where the girl, helped by the landlady, gives birth in the kitchen.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

But upon cutting the umbilical cord, the baby is in danger of bleeding to death. The foreign couple refuses to go to the hospital for fear of being identified and deported from Germany. The wife would like to take them in at least for the night while the husband resists.<\/span><\/p>\n

At yet another quarrel the foreign couple flees the house, meeting a fatal tragic fate.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>

<\/i><\/i><\/span>NOTES<\/span><\/a><\/h3><\/div>
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It would all seem easy, if not obvious. It is the most topical issue that can be addressed today. The contrast between \u201cclosed ports\u201d and \u201copen ports.\u201d However, what emerges from this dramaturgy is an unprecedented point of view: the disintegration of the value fabric all within the \u201cold\u201d European couple. The shattering of an ancient complicity. The incongruity of the justificatory positions that the unemployed old man gradually assumes. The cultural isolation within one's own context of belonging.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

A condition of ethical suffering even before material suffering. \u201cI horrify myself,\u201d says the husband. \u201cI don't,\u201d replies the wife.<\/span><\/p>\n

The tragic fate the foreign couple faces is no worse than that to which the European couple is destined.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

In order to isolate this dramaturgical element, a staging was created that does not include the actual presence of the foreigners, but only an evocation of them. The native couple addresses the immigrant deuteragonists as if they were there, in front of them, when in fact they are only the fruit of a thought, a prejudice, a judgment; primarily about themselves. They are the ones who allow the European couple to look at themselves in a metaphorical mirror. They are the mirror shadow that haunts them.<\/span><\/p>\n

The real antagonism is all inside the house, all around the Christmas tree that the couple are intent on decorating; all around their identity crisis, their loss of individual and collective meaning; all around the sense of foreignness with which gradually permeates the scenic enclosure in which this core micro-society is enclosed.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div><\/div><\/div><\/div><\/div>

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Credits<\/h3><\/div>