Mathias Monrad Møller's History is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake is premiered as part of the concert alt/voice (Thickets of Love) performed by Sebastian Berweck and Møller himself. The concert radically rethinks the classical art song; the human voice - the oldest instrument of all - meets contemporary technologies and the pressing questions of our time.
Møller's piece is written for voice, keyboard and electronics and examines, through dream protocols and pop culture, how fascist fantasies infiltrate our imagination - and which role models they shape.
In the programme note, the composer writes:
"History is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake juxtaposes real dreams from Nazi Germany, as transcribed by Charlotte Beradt, with the imagined nightmare of the 1975 nazisploitation film Ilsa - She-Wolf of the SS. In the movie, Ilsa, the busty comandante of an imaginary ‘medical camp’, castrates any man who fails to please her inextinguishable desire. Ilsa is a reactionary male fantasy, and in a perverted – yet somewhat funny – way displaying male anxieties about the emancipated woman. The film says more about the backlash to the women's movement of the 1970s than about real Nazism – Ilsa is the threatening woman, the castrating female emancipation – she is literally the ‘feminazi’. Ilsa is the woman controlled by her desire, which is ultimately inferior to male desire, as is shown when copulating with the ever-hard American named Wolf, who literally f–s her to death. She is, in Klaus Theweleit's words, the ‘erotic woman, nature turned upside down’, and in this respect a nightmare the Nazis could have had – except that she herself is portrayed as a Nazi.
The aim of my admittedly provocative juxtaposition of Ilsa with real dreams of non-persecuted women from Nazi Germany is not to level real atrocities with absurd fake ones, nor to support reactionary stances. Rather, I am constructing a dialogue between a fake male nightmare with real female dreams from a living nightmare. To investigate how the erotic, desire and power interact, and how imaginations of fascism can be used to harness ideologies, in good and bad ways. With the title and last sentence of the piece, taken from a passage in Joyce’s Ulysses, in which anti-semitism is discussed, I wish to frame the piece in a broader context of historicity, and to hint at the possibility of nightmares returning once again from the realm of imagination."
The concert programme also includes Simon Steen-Andersen's MONO and works by SØS Gunver Ryberg, Luxa M. Schüttler and Ying Wang.
The concert is broadcast at Deutschlandfunk Kultur on 31 January at 19:05.
Find more details about the concert at Ultraschall Berlin here.
On 19 January the same programme is performed in Kiel as part of the Frequenz_Festival Edition series. Find more information here.