KaDeWe

KaDeWe, a drama written by a Polish dramatist and director Helmut Kajzar, is based on the adaptation of a text entitled “Next Part (KaDeWe); an opera libretto” which Kajzar created in the 1970’s during one of his frequent visits to West Berlin. It is a combination of raw images of the city and scenes from the author’s own imagination connected with love, art, the world of media etc. He presents KaDeWe, the largest department store of Europe at that time, as a metaphor of the dark, yet appealing, side of the world. This supermarket offering a sex shop, a brothel, and an art gallery, all in one place, allows the author-hero or the reader/viewer to observe a myriad of peculiar characters and objects. Among other things, it is an initiation journey. The hero of KaDeWe is you – the Stranger in the pulsating city. You are an anonymous person wandering around strange places like public toilets, railway stations, underpasses, airports, intersections; roaming around the parking lots of big cities, looking in car windows from time to time, entering shopping malls, night clubs, and suspect places revealing surreal images of possible pleasure, television paradises combined into unreal fantasies. Those are your non-places, spaces devoid of identity where you merge with a mass of anonymous people. Their loneliness is multiplied by a million – is a gesture still the same if you repeat it a million times? You, the Stranger, have the queen Mab and Mr Eden for companions. Their personalities are variable, impossible to grasp, reflecting the existences that the Stranger meets. Their presence becomes an unbearable part of the space, multiplying the images, indulging in voyeurism, and enduring the difference between life and artificiality. Who does the Stranger become at the end of the journey? What is the sense of his agony in the glow of spotlights, in the instantaneous television transmission?