Guest of the ilb 2007
Albert Ostermaier was born in Munich in 1967. He has produced
an extensive body of work, ranging from poetry to plays. »Out of the
poems arose dramatic poems, from the dramatic poems arose plays, from
the plays poems with dialogue and dramatic situations.« Ostermaier has
become one of the German playwrights whose works are performed most
often. He rose to fame with the performance of »Zwischen zwei Feuern.
Tollertopographie« (1993; t: Between two fires: Toller topography). He
was then appointed the first »theatre poet« at the National Theatre in
Mannheim since Schiller, and in 1999/2000 held the same post at the
Bavarian State Theatre for which he composed »The Making Of. [B-movie]«
for the 100th anniversary of Brecht’s birth. Since 2003 he has been
in-house writer at Vienna’s Burgtheater where his works have been
staged mainly by Andrea Breth. Recently the premiere
of »Ersatzbank« (t: Subsitutes' bench) was staged at the Salzburg
Festival and »Schwarze Minuten« (t: Black minutes) at the Mannheim
National Theatre for the opening of the Schiller Festival.
Ostermaier’s lyrical sound ranges from the unfathomable quality in his
early work to demonstrative modernity. Rhythmic syntax without
punctuation is charged with a plethora of allusions and references, and
levels of meaning are superimposed in ways that overwhelm patterns of
perception so that familiar structures of interpretation
become apparent and questionable. »There is an intricately composed
babble of voices, a radio traffic of thoughts between a history of
ideas and an attitude towards life, without place or being. It’s no
coincidence that this osmosis-based writing is determined by a
metaphorics of flow and slide, of diffusions, and occasionally the
liquidisation of culture washes away the texts themselves«, wrote
Christopher Schmidt. Most recently Ostermaier published a volume of
poems and reportages about football, »Der Torwart ist immer dort, wo es
weh tut« (2006; t: The goalkeeper is always there where it hurts), a
volume of poetry, »Polar« (2006), inspired by French film in the
sixties and seventies, and a collection of love poems entitled »Für den
Anfang der Nacht« (2007; t: For the onset of night). Many of his works
have been made into radio plays and audio texts for which Ostermaier
closely collaborated with the musicians and composers Hans Platzgumer,
Saam Schlamminger and Bert Wrede. His work has been translated into
over twenty languages and his plays have been performed all over the
world, in cities such as Los Angeles, New York, Athens, Santiago, Kiev
and Tehran. Ostermaier has been awarded the Ernst Toller Prize, the
Ernst Hoferich Prize and the Kleist Prize, among others.
In 2001 the author was a writer in residence at New York University and
in 2007 held a lectureship in poetry at Wiesbaden Polytechnic. After
managing the Poetry Workshop and Theatre Festival in Bayreuth (1990)
and acting as artistic director of the Landsberg Poetry Festival
»Poetry at the Lech« (2000), since 2006 Ostermaier has been responsible
for the international Brecht Festival abc–AugsburgBrechtConnected.
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