The Teleportation Accident Read Online Free PDF Page A

present day. I really think it’s the present day that needs our attention.’
    ‘By accident, Herr Rackenham, you’ve led me to one of the great themes of the New Expressionist theatre,’ said Loeser. And he explained Equivalence. Yes, whenever one began a play or a novel, there was a choice to be made: whether to plot your Zeppelin’s course for present-day Berlin, or seventeenth- century Paris, or a future London, or some other destination entirely. But the choice meant nothing. Consider Germany under the Weimar Republic in 1931. Thirteen years since its inception, five years since its acknowledged zenith, two years since there was last any good coke: a culture old enough, in other words, that journalists were already beginning to judge it in retrospect, as history. And they were calling it a Golden Age, an unprecedented flourishing. But if you were part of it – and even if you were only part of its decline, like Loeser – you couldn’t help but say to yourself: all these thousands of young people, all in a few nearby neighbourhoods, all calling themselves artists, as Rackenham had said. And all this spare time. And all these openings and all these premières and all these parties. And all this talk and talk and talk and drink and talk. For nearly fifteen years. All of this. And what had it produced for which anyone would really swap a bad bottle of Riesling in eight decades’ time? A few plays, a few paintings, a few piano concertos – most of which, anyway, went quite unnoticed by the boys and girls who made such a fuss about being at the heart of it all. If that was a Golden Age then an astute investor might consider selling off his bullion before the rate fell any further. There had been so many Golden Ages now, and Loeser was confident that they had all been the same, and always would be. Compare the Venice of the late Renaissance, where Lavicini came of age, to the Berlin of Weimar, or compare the Berlin of Weimar to whatever city would turn out to be most fashionable in 2012, and you would find the same empty people going to the same empty parties and making the same empty comments about the same empty efforts, with just a few spasms of worthwhile art going on at the naked extremities. Nothing ever changed. That was Equivalence. Plot a course for another country, another age, and the best you could hope for was that you would circumnavigate the globe by accident, and arrive at the opposite coast of your own homeland, mooring your Zeppelin trepidatiously in this rich mud to find a tribe you did not recognise speaking a language you could not understand. If Loeser could ever get his Teleportation Device working, then in future productions it might sling actors not just through space but through time.
    ‘Equivalence is all very well,’ said Rackenham. ‘But political conditions, at least, must change. And for a revolutionary dramatist that must mean something.’
    ‘Good grief, don’t talk to me about politics,’ said Loeser. ‘In the thirteen years since the war there have been how many governments, Anton?’
    ‘Fifteen?’ guessed Achleitner. ‘Seventeen?’
    ‘Exactly. And we’re supposed to keep biting our nails as we wait for the next arbitrary plot development? Politics is pigshit. Hindenburg and MacDonald and Louis XIV, they’re just men. I will bet you anything you like that . . . Anton, you still read the newspapers: name somebody who’s making a lot of noise at the moment.’
    ‘Hitler.’
    ‘I will bet you anything you like – sorry, Hitler? Do you mean Adele’s father?’
    ‘No relation.’
    ‘Right. As I was saying, I will bet you anything you like that this other Hitler, whoever he is, will never make one bit of difference to my life.’
    ‘Careful, Egon,’ said Achleitner. ‘That’s the sort of remark that people quote in their memoirs later on as a delicious example of historical irony.’
    ‘What about the Inflation?’ said Rackenham. ‘That was politics’ fault.