"Promise?" Digital program booklet

An empty apartment, broken into by the police. Behind a door sealed airtight with duct tape, the dead body of an old woman. Flashback: Anne and Georges are an elderly couple in the midst of life. Beyond their 80s, they enjoy a fulfilled retirement in a spacious apartment in an old building; concert visits and meetings with friends characterize their everyday life - until Anne suddenly suffers a stroke. At first, her husband begins to take care of her sacrificially. Both try to come to terms with the new situation. Increasingly, however, the couple isolates themselves from the outside world. As her condition worsens, Anne confronts her husband with the wish to die. For Georges, all fragile certainties begin to falter.

Michael Haneke dissects the last year of a married couple in rigid shots, with a cold gaze, and asks how to cope with the suffering of a loved one. With his characteristic cool impartiality, he portrays his characters, allowing us to experience them without explaining them. He himself knows no more about his characters than the script, Haneke once said about love. And so he examines how illness and the need for care break into a bourgeois family, and confronts us viewers with an end of life between love and violence, between murder and euthanasia.

Austrian director Michael Haneke, born in Munich in 1942, is considered one of the most important auteur filmmakers in Europe. As film theorist Georg Seeßlen wrote, “inner glaciation - the illiteracy of feelings” runs through his cinematic oeuvre, and consequently the question of how violence seethes beneath the façade of bourgeois existences. Many of his works, such as Funny Games (1997), Caché (2005), and The White Ribbon (2009), were global successes. Since his first feature film, 1989’s The Seventh Continent, in which an entire family collectively takes its own life, Haneke has been interested in how people react when confronted with the desire for suicide help. “Love” takes as its point of departure a personal experience of Haneke’s, who was asked by his aunt for help with suicide but refused. Twenty years later, Haneke had his parents’ apartment recreated as a film set to direct what is surely his most intimate film, Liebe, which earned him five nominations and an Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film in 2013.

How do we as a society deal with old age, vulnerability, dying and death? Obviously, this question has gained virulence in recent years. In several European countries, legislation on passive euthanasia and assisted suicide is in flux and is being heard in the highest courts. Should it be permissible for people who no longer wish to live to receive assistance in dying? In European countries such as Switzerland and the Netherlands, this is possible under certain conditions - in Germany, the issue of euthanasia and assisted suicide is highly controversial, not least in view of history. In 2020, the Federal Constitutional Court lifted the ban on assisted suicide. Since then, the Bundestag has been obliged to enact a new legal regulation. It was not until July 2023 that the German Bundestag debated two bills - but none received a majority. In this respect, Haneke’s film, like our premiere, aims at the center of an ethical debate that we as a society are currently having to conduct.

This co-production by the Salzburg Festival and the Münchner Kammerspiele marks the first time in Austria that a film by Michael Haneke has been adapted for the theater stage. Karin Henkel, one of the most renowned directors of German-language theater and best known in Salzburg for Richard the Kid & the King (2021), among others, develops a very free approach to Haneke’s masterpiece and consistently refrains from a realistic portrayal of the claustrophobic chamber play.

Rather, with a large ensemble of actors* and amateurs, Henkel searches for sensual translations for the permanent overload of care. For this production, she decisively chooses her own perspective on the film, which is so masterful in itself, and finds a very sensually surreal translation by telling the story entirely from the subjective perspective of the husband, who is increasingly overwhelmed by the care situation. In this way, she allows us a glimpse into George’s world of memories and thus, despite all the bitterness of the subject, dares not least to take a tragicomic look at a society in a state of nursing emergency.

André Jung returns to the Kammerspiele for the role of George. As Anne, this will not feature a single actress. There is Katharina Bach, an actress of the age at which Anne and George might have met, there is dancer Joel Small, there is a little girl and there is - and this is a special trick of Karin Henkel’s staging: a group of laymen, a choir, who appear again and again, quasi as a symbol of the excessive demands and the increasingly shifted perception of George.

The people we have invited to collaborate on this special project are all people who have already been confronted with the question of self-determined dying in their biographies, either themselves or with regard to close relatives. Their deeply touching stories flow into this theater evening, which asks in poetic pictures, for a self-determined handling of illness and death.

Tobias Schuster

By Michael de Ridder

The most severe, especially hopeless, illness can put a person’s ability and willingness to suffer under extreme strain and ultimately wear him down and overtax him. His illness and suffering have maneuvered him into an unbearable and hopeless situation that demands an end that no longer seems reasonable to him as a natural one to wait for. Even the best social support and the offers and possibilities of comprehensive palliative medical and/or hospice care are then unable to revise the decision of a seriously ill person to bring about the end of his suffering himself. A second factor is that some seriously ill patients do not want palliative medical or hospice care; they want to decide for themselves the time, place and circumstances of the end of their lives. And they are entitled to do so, provided they are able to make a responsible decision, have been informed and educated about all alternative options for alleviating suffering and symptoms, and their will to die proves to be sustainable. The hopelessness of suffering in hopeless illness or the most severe disability is in some cases further aggravated by the fact that medicine in recent decades, in addition to all its achievements, has also produced frightening and cruel modes of existence into which people would never have fallen without it, because they would have died a natural death beforehand. These include, for example, patients who are dependent on more or less permanent intensive medical treatment: People with the most severe neurological impairments, such as ventilated patients with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, or ALS for short […], high paraplegia or those with so-called locked-in syndrome, who are unable to move even one muscle while retaining their being. In the face of such extreme states of suffering, which are paradoxically the result of well-intentioned therapeutic interventions, to claim to be the “advocate of life” alone is cheap and, in my opinion, not very responsible, because it not only does not do justice to the suffering of a patient who wishes or even demands help to end this state; in my view, it is even inhumane. When confronted with a patient’s wish for assisted suicide, physicians must be convinced of the authenticity of the patient’s suffering, but it is not their place to evaluate it.

Since 2020, the Bundestag has been obliged to re-regulate how we deal with self-determined dying. Insights into the debate.

ZDF Aspekte followed several productions at major theater festivals during the summer. A report on the making of “Liebe (Amour)”.