On
Beginning.
And How We Can’t Stop

As I write this text, the person with whom I have spent most of my life has fallen ill and was taken to hospital for an operation. Since then, everything has been up in the air. An entire life. I sit on a chair and wait for her to open her eyes and to see me.

On the monitor, the heart rates flow in beautiful linearity and rise rapidly at the usual pace. I am amazed at how much confidence this moving graphic conveys. Compared to the push messages that whiz into my mobile phone on a single afternoon in January 2025, the regular beeping of the device, whose tone has been carefully adjusted, is reassuring. It remains steady at the pulse of a single life.

I cannot imagine any of the powerful, rich or right-wing extremists who are currently jockeying for position, nor those brandishing chainsaws, being particularly helpful in an operating theatre. Instead, it was people who worked together with the utmost precision to restore my mother’s life, all those who continue to watch over it. Nothing can be taken for granted, least of all goodness.

The year that has just begun is finding it difficult to remain a new beginning. Already, the old ghosts are rearing their heads once again with their unpredictability. They want to destroy so much of what was once built with so much collective effort. So much that was once carefully thought out by so many is to be swept off the table.

So many downfalls. Real ones and those conjured up and invoked for strategic reasons. For the voters’ favour. They are taking shape in reality – but how real they will become remains to be seen. So many accusations. And so many falsely accused.

Amidst all the depressing news, one story stood out: people are showing signs that they are alive. And that they want to stay that way.

When I was asked to comment on my own artistic position in the face of the political crises, I agreed. Because it enables a sharpening of focus in the face of a present time in which so much and so many are in distress, including us.

I thought it would be easier.

What can match the forces raging on a grand scale?
My assumption is that we cannot remain silent.

And yet the political situation is one that easily tempts us to remain silent.
Or even to consciously refrain. To refrain from entering the abstract field of chessboard logic, which knows only two sides, but not the interwoven field of life in which people live. So many of them are helpless and unprotected, caught in the middle.

In an abstract language that either already is – or is understood as – political rhetoric, used as a tool by those who know exactly what they want from it. In the face of a language that is under observation and threatens to sacrifice those who undermine this chessboard logic, who cling to life, for those who are threatened. If we stand by their side – and this is the only place I see us – then, as Zadie Smith writes, it can only be in a language that can be expanded or narrowed depending on the situation. To the person who is currently under threat. To the people who are currently under threat. In a language that can extend to both sides.

“Practicing our ethics in the real world involves a constant testing of them, a recognition that our zones of ethical interest have no fixed boundaries and may need to widen and shrink moment by moment as the situation demands.”¹

We move amid languages that are hostile. Languages so self-explanatory that understanding seems impossible, as does a shared view of the current reality and its needs. How can we communicate when so much is denied? How can we protect a damaged Earth when, the more frequently natural disasters destroy it, the more vehemently its endangerment is denied? How can we defend democracy when it is being democratically voted out by many?

Much is in limbo. In times of uncertainty and insecurity. In which solutions that do not exist are often sought on a grand scale. Solutions that contradict each other. In a time when much is only just beginning to take shape. Often also without solutions.

Perhaps, as Hannah Arendt describes it, “the light of the public sphere is too bright, too little inclined towards the hidden: […] because the overly bright light of the public destroys the hiddenness that the life of mortals, like all living things, needs precisely for its very existence.”²  

I notice how language refuses to serve me, proclaiming solutions, explanations, judgements that only end up back in the realm of reproaches and accusations. And this too on a grand scale. How do I want to speak, what do I want to “design”, what world, what people do I take as my basis?

I have never particularly believed in dystopias; they are too close to the calculated apocalyptic fantasies of the far right, who generally situate their thinking on the edge of the abyss in order to determine who is guilty and cast themselves as saviours. I do not particularly believe in the pessimistic gesture of standing with folded arms and lamenting the failure of others. Nor do I believe in accusations, especially when they fail to address the other side. I believe in reality and I want to counter its bad reputation. As a visionary, I force myself to take reality seriously, to examine it and penetrate its depths. I explore it and find so much that contradicts its swan song: good, beautiful, delicate and fragile things – precious precisely because they are delicate and fragile.

It is important to find a language that brings movement and life into play where other languages kill. Just as it is always a matter of finding a different language. A language other than one of doom. A language of being alive. A language that marks a beginning. Comparable to the beginning that life always offers us – again and again.

The beginning of life is a complete and genuine new start, as Hannah Arendt describes it in “The Human Condition.” It is solely through birth, through the naked arrival in this world, that the new human being is a beginning. The beginning is contained in action, in proceeding, in speaking, and in the possibilities that this brings with it.

“The fact that human beings are capable of acting in the sense of making a new beginning can therefore only mean that they elude all predictability and calculability, that in this one case even the improbable has a certain probability, and that what is ‘rational’, that is, in the sense of being calculable, is simply not to be expected, but can nevertheless be hoped for.”³

The fact that they can set new things in motion, that they can act, that they can deviate, all this characterises a freedom that is given anew to every human being again and again. It is a freedom that Hannah Arendt describes in the smallest possible field. In the smallest possible, she makes the greatest possible.

“The creation of a human being as someone coincides with the creation of freedom.”⁴

The freedom contained in the beginning does not mean a free world into which a newcomer is born. The experience of the destruction and murder of people and worlds is its background; the banality with which it happened. As if it were a simple gesture and not the most difficult, Hannah Arendt identifies the moment on a map of manifold destruction when freedom arises, arises again and again, and does not deviate – from the individual human being and the beginning that is inherent in this individual.

It is not an autonomous existence. Nor are we the authors of our history. But we begin it. With what we set in motion. And here, we are the ones responsible. We are responsible for our actions, for our decisions. For the language we use.

For me, as a writer, entering into language means nothing other than setting beginnings. Turning over every stone and airing the work of language, questioning existing narratives and, above all, their narratives, which, unasked, assign meanings and declare other things meaningless.

This is the only way other stories can emerge. It sometimes means opting for the daring, the unknown, the unfamiliar, even for the experiment.

It is about nothing less than making a start and not escaping from the world in the process. Not losing sight of it.

Finding another language is only possible if you have precise knowledge of the conditions that seek to prevent it.

The beginning can be set at any time, even right in the middle. As if for a brief moment, the whole story, the constraints of language, could – or rather must – be forgotten. One cannot help but stand in the middle, create a gap, or use the one already there and expand it. And shine the light of a completely different story into it.

For the world is – and always has been – established.

All along – and it was always already there. With its history of unequal opportunities. Language was formed; divisions were made. And there have always been those who were not asked, who were not wanted, who were not to be heard, who remained unasked and unseen.

The iron rules, the unspoken laws: they were not established in accordance with democratic rules of play. On the contrary, maintaining and obeying them required that this be done silently. Only language that questioned them, that called them out, brought about liberation. A beginning.

We believe in logic until someone convinces us of its dubiousness.

The logic of war, which dominates most ancient tragedies and consequently our cultural self-image, is a case in point. It is obvious that we have long written a dramatic plot based on absolutely irresolvable conflicts. We love it and its abysmal nature. What drives us? Another possibility is the longing that Céline Sciamma recently presented as the starting point for a story. In her lectures, she argues against the homogenisation of the imagination, against a conflict that strives for a single dramatic climax.⁵

Unfamiliar thoughts give rise to unfamiliar stories, which are only unfamiliar as long as they have not been told. By which I mean to say that the unfamiliar has just as much validity as the familiar.

Until Ursula Le Guin brought the bag into play in her essay “The Carrier-Bag Theory of Fiction,”⁶ I believed that the first tool that humans, now walking upright, took into their hands was a weapon. Carrying became meaningful, as did caring. Would we have survived at all? Would anything have survived if violence alone had determined our fate? Was it not much more trust – and love? Taking this as a starting point, completely different narratives can be explored.

Human violence is dominant. Really? Yes. Indeed.

It begins with belittlement, humiliation and subjugation, continues with beatings and often ends in murder. For a long time, it was customary for men to elevate themselves above women and children, and in some cases it still is. However, its legitimacy has been withdrawn.

Violence towards animals is still considered entirely natural.

It begins before killing – even before the killing, the pretence is formulated that there had never been a relationship. Yet this was actually the foundation. When they agreed to share a home, daily routines, physical contact and a common language – a mutual agreement was reached between humans and animals.

When we consider the animals’ perspective, just observe how they look at us, it becomes clear that they trust us. They trust us and do not quickly lose that trust.

They remind us of ourselves, of those who, just like them, are living beings capable of love, care and comfort. They know us. They know who we are. They remind us of our shared origins. Those who believe only in violent punishment and not in the possibility of mutual taming in the sense of becoming familiar with one another overlook this and continue to ignore it. Perhaps they lack the ability to recognise the tenderness of a young cat stumbling out of its nest, blinking at the sunlight for the first time, still half-blind yet already familiar with the world, with the hand reaching out to it. Its confidence, surrounded by so much unpredictability.

Those who only see violence will not be able to contribute much to ending violence. Instead, they will simply follow its course. To quote Hannah Arendt again: “In a dissolving society which blindly follows the natural course of ruin, catastrophe can be foreseen. […] Only salvation, not ruin, comes unexpectedly, for salvation and not ruin, depends upon the liberty and will of men.”⁷

I wonder if this is the right time to write about animals. In view of the old and new regimes of oppression against women, in view of these wars, in view of this widespread destructive rage. Unfortunately, however, it is not an entirely different, separable issue. The violence that becomes commonplace through war is similar to the violence habitually inflicted on animals. There are connections, such as ruthlessness. It has the same origins and causes for humans as it does for animals.

I also wonder whether animal ethics exists at all. Or is it just a terminological distraction? After all, it is always about our actions, about human actions towards other living beings. Other living beings have the same right to exist as we do and the same right to develop their lives. The way we think and talk about them is inextricably linked to the way we treat them, with existential consequences for them.

Only thinking that is free from preconceptions enables us to explore living beings that are no longer thought of as soulless and non-sentient, to discover their intelligence and social abilities, and in doing so to encounter the most amazing skills and talents. Greater knowledge of animals leads to greater respect and esteem — that is the hope — and sometimes it can even save their lives. Even the most modern technologies, which are advanced enough to understand the often highly sophisticated intelligence of other beings, can help. Technologies that have so often curtailed their lives.

I am thinking of animal experiments, to which neuromedicine in particular owes most of its findings. And I, too – here and now, my mother’s life. At least acknowledging the merits of animals helps to provide the means to replace them in laboratories. We are also at the beginning of this process.

According to Martha Nussbaum, we are living in a time of “great awakening: to our kinship with a world of remarkable intelligent creatures and to real accountability for our treatment of them,” as the philosopher writes in her book Justice for Animals.⁸

Finally, I also ask myself: Should we coordinate the timing of the topics we address – (which address us anyway) – with the time we are currently dealing with? This would mean moving away from the state of civilisational progress, giving in to the wind blowing against us, turning away. To make a start means to constantly correct errors, to shift categorical errors that, like the forces of plate tectonics, determine our perception – and thus the reality of the world.

The separation of subject and object, of a rational mind and an “irrational” body, of human and animal, of woman and man, of nature and culture. Degradations, with painful consequences. Language is full of errors, some of which are deliberately perpetuated; people benefit from their errors. It is the source of our ingrained lack of compassion; it continues to generate profit.

Making a new beginning means constantly finding a language detached from conditions that are often violent. It means finding and creating other realities, based on a more comprehensive and open-minded knowledge. It means work, it means drilling through rock slabs with precision instruments, work that is constantly being done in science, research, art and literature. And then it is there, a new insight, coming as a matter of course, and yet completely new. A beginning.

We are not alone, and we do not write into an empty world, but into a resonance space. We also have an agreement with the readers and with an audience.

There is also the question as to who we are addressing when we write. If not those who read us, then those who are there, who have come to the theatre. They, too, are counting on beginnings – and thus on us. They are counting on something being set in motion that does not simply follow the law of gravity. They are counting on us, on the critical intervention of literature. On theatre and its ongoing negotiation of an individual among other individuals – in the midst of a mob, in the midst of a community. What becomes recognisable as a community or a mob is revealed in the here and now of a stage, in speech, in action.

A simple sentence with deliberate naiveté questions the self-certainty of the given. “What if my state is not humane?”

This is the question posed by one of the “illegal helpers” in the play of the same name (Illegale Helfer, 2016), which portrays people who dedicate their time, energy and imagination to assisting refugees in areas where the state either refuses to help or punishes those who do. Some act in secret, risking the loss of their jobs or even imprisonment. Others also appear publicly as activists, denouncing human rights violations, enduring defamation, fines and prison sentences, and having to develop a thick skin. Their stories are as varied as they are moving. Encountering their humanity, which came across as very modest and knew nothing of identity politics, has changed my life.

The Alternative for Germany (AfD), a right-wing populist and national-conservative party, wanted to prevent it. They sent a letter to all newspaper editors in Germany, claiming that the play celebrated “lawbreakers” and demanding that its production be cancelled. Police protection had to be arranged for the premiere. After the second performance, a discussion with me, the author, was announced. I waited in the foyer. The dramaturge whispered in my ear that an AfD delegation was sitting in the audience. I waited and waited. When the performance ended, the audience rose to their feet and applauded for twenty minutes. This standing ovation was in honour of both the play and the theatre. The audience was defending the theatre as a public place where important issues are discussed. They defended their theatre. The AfD delegation left silently.

I would like to conclude with the first word spoken by a little girl under the starry sky. Night after night, her refugee aid worker brought her from the room where she had been hidden with her parents since birth to the church asylum’s courtyard so that she could catch a glimpse of the outside world. It was here that she began to speak; and here was someone who remembered what her first word was: “moon”.

Translation: Gérard A. Goodrow. The German audio version of this text was spoken by Maxi Obexer.