78 Do I Dream ... or Do My Dreams Dream Me? - Radioessay

Topography on a Theme by Aribert Reimann and Ludwig Wittgenstein - Do I Dream ... or do My Dreams Dream Me?

(in German only)

Actually, I had only asked Aribert Reimann to show me his apartment. When I visited him for the first time, I had noticed that he must have been living in it for a long time (actually for more than 50 years), because layers of memories, sediments of past times and epochs had accumulated in it. Aribert Reimann complied with my request, and with his stories spun a web from object to object, from piece of furniture to piece of furniture, wandering crisscross through his life and the lives of his ancestors, his relatives, friends, students, telling about his compositions, the happy and sorrowful moments of their creation. All this not in chronological order, but in the simultaneity of his living and working rooms, from there to there, as if he moved in a landscape in which we crossed his former paths again and again.

After Sebastian Rausch and I had transcribed all the sound bites and sorted through all the photos and video recordings, I came across one of Ludwig Wittgenstein's later texts, his "Philosophical Investigations", whose narrative or argumentation structures resembled Aribert Reimann's narrative style to a tee. Rather a wandering through a landscape in which each thing is determined by its context rather than being defined out of itself, in which the images and characters change immediately depending on where I shift the plane of focus. Wittgenstein's text, which also reflects on music over wide passages, read like a commentary on Reimann's stories.

Already during the reading I began to push both texts into each other, and a kind of inner dialogue of only one person emerged, who moves through the landscape of her apartment, through the landscape of her language, her music, fears, doubts, analyses - only occasionally a third voice appears, which sometimes here and sometimes there describes the place, asks questions, or perhaps also makes a comment, and otherwise drifts along in the stream of thoughts, and in the end disappears somewhere in the depth of the picture.

This text for three speaking voices has been produced at SWR as a one-hour "musical essay", with Hans-Peter Bögel, Sebastian Mirow and me - editor is Lydia Jeschke. The title is: Do I dream or do my dreams dream me? - A topography based on motifs by Aribert Reimann and Ludwig Wittgenstein.

The 22-minute film version uses the sound of the radio production, except that occasionally Aribert Reimann appears as a fourth voice. This film was made for the SWR2 website and is shown at the Deutsche Oper Berlin in an installation designed by Tabea Rossol.

Faksimile Manuskript

Exposé

Radiosendung SWR

Kritik Süddeutsche Zeitung

This production can be ordered as a CD at the price of 12,80 € from inpetto filmproduktion. Please write a mail to: bestellungen@inpetto-filmproduktion.de

Cast & Crew

Director
Uli Aumüller
Main Cast
Hans-Peter Bögel, Sebastian Mirow
Editorial Jounalist
Lydia Jeschke