A new production of "The Hamletmachine" is opening at the Deutsches Theater on the same evening that an exhibition is opening at the Galerie Krammig & Pepper. The play is by your late husband, the exhibition is yours. Which one will you be attending?

The exhibition starts today, but the opening was yesterday. So I'm able to go to both events. If they'd really been on the same day, then of course I'd have gone to my own private view.

Why is your exhibition called "Wir Werden Helden" ("We Shall Be Heroes")?

It deals with puberty, and with children and young people who are just entering that period of their lives. For me they're heroes, because in our youth-obssessed society so much is expected from them, and because they have to deal with so much pressure from outside. And because they have no idea of how beautiful they are. No doubt the concept of the hero also has to do with other parameters which they're perhaps still unable fulfil; that's why I've chosen the future tense for the title. They've just started out.

When did you become interested in heroes?

I think I always have been. It's impossible to read the Nibelungen saga or the Greek myths without becoming fascinated by heroes. Ajax, rather than Odysseus, was my favourite: this is where I am, this is who I am, I don't need intrigues. The world today is still full of heroes. When you walk through a multiplex cinema you see posters hanging on the walls that show nothing but heroes.

Heiner Müller described drama as a form of conspiracy of the dead. Is your art a form of conspiracy of heroes?

If I were to describe what I do, I would say that for me it's about overcoming the self. About the longing to become part of something bigger. And about disengaging from it again with the same vehemence. That is the tense relationship in which I find myself.

Is this a practical application of a phrase such as "solidarity is the tenderness of peoples"?

For art to be true, it must have subjects that are to a certain degree be utopian, and open to the new-and in this I find the category of the beautiful inherently useful. It is natural for us to need something like well-being and harmony, and both of them do us good. I think we should not constantly be denying this and leaving them to the fashion magazines. Moments of great aesthetic power always, and quite naturally, have to do with transience and violence. You cannot depict anything, and certainly not beauty, for yourself alone.

You have described your view of the world as "mythologically coloured". How long have you had this unusual perspective?

I think I always have. Because I never wanted to live exclusively in the time in which I was born. World history opened up a larger space for me, and liberated me by enabling me to integrate the trivial individual biographical facts of my life into a broader historical constellation. The fundamental condition of my life has been an inner anxiety and fear. It is only later that I've realised that this fear leaves me when I'm around people who have a great deal to tell me. When I'm surrounded by interesting people I can deal with the fear better. Obviously the fear emerges when there is no thinking going on. Things were also better when I was reading plays, or a novel like The Sorrows of Young Werther. Though I didn't really like Plenzdorf's New Sorrows of Young W. I read Werther outside school, because I was interested in the original-in class they only gave us the updated version.

You met Heiner Müller at the Frankfurt Book Fair in 1990, were married to him from 1992 to 1995, and had a daughter, Anna, by him. Was it this passionate interest in myth and history that you first found you had in common?

I wouldn't like to compare my work with Müller's, but of course there were connections, such as the desire to pursue a subject on both a biographical and historical level and to bring both together in a form that was as unassailable as possible. In Müller's work this approach was evident not only in his plays, but also in the productions he directed. In the end it was always a kind of sculpture that emerged, whether it was the text or the action on stage.

Where would you be today if you hadn't married Müller?

God knows! I don't ask myself those kinds of questions. In principle I take the view that if you keep yourself open you will meet the right person at the right time.

Last year you showed a large video installation at the Valhalla in Regensburg, which included texts by Inge and Heiner Müller. Will you be continuing to work with his plays?

If everything works out, I'm going to be showing a video installation based on Anatomie Titus Fall of Rome Ein Shakespearekommentar at the Akademie der Künste in autumn 2008. So you see, I have no intention of letting him go. For me it's about a feeling of freedom: when I feel like working with Müller's texts, then that's what I do-and when not, then not. I don't really give a damn what other people have to say about it.

Can you give us some idea of what Mayer's video commentary on Müller's Shakespeare commentary will be like?

I am going to set up three screens in the Akademie der Künste, like a winged altar, for which I'm developing a visual choreography independently of the content, but wholly concentrated on history. The view it takes is somewhat inspired by cubism: different facets of the same object are presented at the same time. The aim is to present a kind of via dolorosa through modernity, a collapse of jurisdiction as an inversion of the Orestia. The crucial figures are not the Furies, but angry young men. The actors will be young people. There will also be a commentary with quite a young narrator, my daughter as it happens, and quite an old one, who will hopefully be Jeanne Moreau. Everything starts from a reflection on the question: what was Rome? What did the Roman empire once mean, and which country has assumed its function today? I'm trying to show two different periods-now and then-by drawing parallels between them. The film will be set in Egypt, China, Africa and Europe.

(...) At the precise moment when heaven and earth unite above the mighty river upon the broad plain - as if attempting to evoke the colours of the Danube School - a play of light begins at the foot of the Valhalla, Ludwig I's temple to the great men and women of German history. Ulrich Matthes enters before the still darkened screen(note) and reads - or rather speaks - Hoelderlin's unfinished lyric poem "Der Ister". Then the three-part screen , which seems to float above the river in the night, flashes into life: frail figures appear, often moving extremely slowly - young men in glittering corsages, young women in shiny, tight-fitting dresses. They seem to choose their own parts: some grope their way like old men and women to the strains of Wagner's "Lohengrin", others crouch like dogs over their bowls, intoning, in a yelping pack, "Death is a Mistake" - the title of the installation and lines from a poem by Heiner Mueller. (...) Between them, the artist paces about a space lined with blue and white lozenges, like a Ludwig II of Bavaria, his coat open to reveal female breasts - breasts left with nothing to suckle (a lost utopia); or like the dark mistress of a place of pilgrimage, whose beautiful body might equally stand for the pathos of a nude by Guido Reni as the for spent passion of a fashion victim. (...)

Unpacking pain: Brigitte Maria Mayer shows her video installation "Death is a Mistake" at the Valhalla in Regensburg

(...) The Baroque shapes her work - not so much Baroque opulence, but a consciousness of the transience of life, a Baroque Memento Mori. (...) When you look back, the columns of Valhalla are illuminated green and red, and become a strange foreign body, ready at any time simply to lift off and disappear.

In the cycle of becoming: Brigitte Maria Mayer's installation in Frankfurt

An unusual installation is on show at Frankfurt's Literaturhaus: Brigitte Maria Mayer has taken over its upper storey with her work "Death is a Mistake". To say that she has created a memorial to her late husband is in no way to deny her own abilities as an artist. For the playwright Heiner Mueller, who died on 30 December 1995, has become a fertile source of material for her, from which she draws strength and energy.
The central room on the upper storey of the classical building on Schoene Aussicht still shows traces of having once been a library. But the deep niches in the high walls are empty. Instead, a single installation now dominates the space, which resembles an enormous book. It takes the form of a triptych, whose centre is occupied by a photograph of Mueller: the portrait shows the writer, slightly blurred and in profile, caught in apparent flight from the visible world; it gives a sense of entelechy, of an escaping soul. In Mayer's book Death is an Mistake (Frankfurt Allgemeine Zeitung, 19 October, 2005), from which parts of this exhibition are taken, there is a note next to this picture written by the dying man, entitled 'Conversation with the Cardiologist': "The doctor shows me the film HERE IT IS / YOU CAN SEE FOR YOURSELF / now you know where God lives / DEATH IS BIG life a trap / three steps and the sphinx shows its claws / a brief existence between one void and another." But the work speaks eloquently enough without these words. For, like the wings of an altarpiece, two screens flank Mueller's face, which are printed with enlarged Polaroids and which challenge death by showing life at its beginning: the artist pregnant with their daughter, votive folds of the emerging triad. Mayer borrows here from the forms of the Old Masters; the shadowy colours of the Polaroids emphasise this gesture.
In the passageway to the right of the hall cascades of handwritten sheets are falling from the walls, and files of papers form arches like the scrolls of a Baroque church. The writer's body has withdrawn into writing itself, which fills the room; whether handwritten or typed, it becomes a kind of ornament, which supposedly expresses far less meaning than the beauty of a single word or epigram. Near the outer edge of one of the fragments is written, "hope is a joke" - which has at least managed to survive, even though we are only able to laugh at it later. Mayer is constantly pulling the rug from under the viewer, confronting us with puzzles we cannot solve. Mystery - including the mystery of revolution - is her true element, not political statement.
For her, political agitation means aesthetic rebellion. Her subjects include the Eumenides, the Furies and the goddesses of revenge, who make their graceful appearance in the third room. Her three-part video installation "Models of the Federal Republic of Germany. Revolution and Beauty" is a chilly declaration of love for luxuriant bodies, Wagnerian pathos and general recalcitrance. Revolutionary sap flows black, red and gold - the colours of the German flag - from the mouths of very young women, who switch between brisk parade marching and a kind of dog-like crawling. Words and sounds accompany the unfolding of a dream play, whose first performance was held - at the artist's own insistence - at Valhalla.
It is not the artist's personal life that matters in this encounter, but that most public of all intimacies: the cycle of becoming, being and decaying. At the opening, Mayer read out Mueller's poem "Lines on the dead Tristan": "Lie down and dream your last sleep / Beneath the lover's fatal coat / For I must return to the moonless day / That burns my heart like golden straw." Who comes off better in the end? The surviving lover, who now must now face their own decline alone? Or the dead one, who has at least loved? The women remain: Medusa is in temporarily on hold.

"The return of colour threatens resurrection, / I told you not / to come back the dead are / dead. / Death is a mistake."" These words by Heiner Mueller appear on the frontispiece of this particular book of pictures. Who is speaking them? What do they mean? Who are they speaking of?
Heiner Mueller died on 30 December, 1995. Brigitte Maria Mayer, his wife and the mother of their daughter, has collected into one volume photographs and sketches, fragments of writing and poems from the last five years of his life, the period she spent together with him. There might have been little enough to say about this had it merely amounted to paying pious tribute to the last century's playwright of the two Germanies and his tortuous and angry verse, or involved nothing more than the construction of his own myth by his widow.
But the fact is this is marvellous book, and it is a gift. For it goes beyond the normal bounds of an individual's private life to achieve a general relevance, a truth in images and texts of love and dying, of strength and death. It is enacted in different settings, a unfolding drama of unfamiliar sights, of a clear and open gaze. It is played out without tears, and with absolute devotion - "there remains unconditional love" writes Mayer in her short foreword - together with the strength conferred by this pure, secure feeling. It begins with the "travel directions" that the sixty-one-year-old playwright wrote for her on a piece of note paper; Mayer, born in 1965 in Regensburg, a performance artist and photographer, moved in with Mueller to his Lichtenburg flat in 1990 - intimacy, bodies, smiles. There is a handwritten poem by him, which he calls "Liebeserklaerung (Declaration of Love)": it is tenderly laconic to the core; there is nothing indiscreet in it.
There follows an open-eyed farewell. For the most part, the photographs are by his wife, and she goes taking them right to the end: of her husband, of him with their daughter, of herself, pregnant, in moments of solitude, together with their child. When Mueller finishes some notes written on "Berliner Ensemble" paper - "My child looks at me through your eyes / How long is it spared the world / If I am the woman + you are the man" - then he is recognising and describing the situation. Most of the pictures in this book are Polaroids. They are the most sensitive of all photographs; for their colour is under threat of extinction. It withdraws from them, until they become more like the reflection of the memory they were supposed to preserve when they were taken. But that doesn't matter; for love remains.

Germany's great dramatist died ten years ago. Brigitte Maria Mayer has now brought out some moving pictures of love and death.

Late in life Heiner Mueller wrote a thoughtful, bitter poem in which he made a sudden and unexpected connection between an offence he suffered as a child and his revulsion for the present. A childhood memory became a life-long source of horror. Even in retrospect, the "evil cousin who broke my toy behind her back" appears as a monstrous threat to the aging poet. A vulnerable and trusting child, he had made the mistake of not hiding his toy from his cousin: "SHOW ME and I showed it to her and she took it / and I heard a cracking between her chubby fingers / saw her never to be forgotten smile."
The most important German-speaking playwright of the twentieth century since Brecht is here staging a moment of shock, a trauma whose repercussions will be felt throughout his later life. The ego learns to arm itself with masks of coolness. "Even today / With the sound of cracking in my ears the never to be forgotten smile before my eyes / I speak badly of what I love." It is at this point that this apparently private discourse becomes a political position. The poem, published in 1992, three years after the collapse of the East German state, formulates a strategy of how to deal with the world following the breakdown of an ideological frame of reference. Utopian longings have become as fragile as the beloved toy had once been. The poet can only protect his old dreams by hiding them. As a result, he "speaks badly of what I love" in his game with the media. With reunification, the "evil cousin" has won. "Now she is sitting in front of me and I know nothing / Horror has grown cold flesh and fat / the everyday cries of children the refuse of the species". That is how Mueller sees the Federal Republic. The most it can expect from him - now suffering from writer's block - is sarcasm. The public Mueller is a suit of armour composed of witticisms, cynicism and quotations.
We get an intimate picture of a love affair between a young woman and an older man. And snapshots of moments from the progression of a terrible death from cancer. In 1990, at the age of sixty-one, Heiner Mueller met the twenty-five-year-old Brigitte Maria Mayer. Shortly afterwards she moved in with him to his East German penthouse bunker on Erich-Kurz-Strasse in Lichtenburg. The couple married two years later; in November 1992 their daughter Anna was born, and the family moved into an old factory building in Berlin's Kreuzberg district. Mueller was at the height of his fame, having become a public figure as President of the Academy, intendant of the Berliner Ensemble and long-time resident of the Paris Bar. Mayer comes across as an independently-minded outsider to this world, an artist who takes uncompromising photos and has nothing to do with the theatre, Mueller's following, or the media circus that surrounds him. Mueller's fame strengthens his armour with coolness and distance. "When I read the critics I see myself as a monument being pissed on by dogs", Mueller scrawls in the margin of a newspaper. "But I'm still alive. I'm not a monument."
A favourite game between Mayer and Mueller was to take pictures of each other with a Polaroid camera - in bed, naked in front of a mirror, at a desk, still half-asleep in a hotel room in Venice. In her book, Mayer assembles these private Polaroids into series and picture sequences, preserving the lost moment. The discrepancy between Mueller in his private and vulnerable moments, and the harsh sarcasm of his public persona could scarcely be greater. The picture of the writer in a bathrobe with his month-old daughter in his arms is particularly touching: German literature's prophet of doom in a moment of happiness. Gerhard Richter painted pictures based on similar Polaroids of his wife - images that both preserved an intimacy and protected her through the act of painting.
In her book, Mayer produces this protective quality through montage. "In your grey eyes / my childhood grows my death / dies", Mueller noted in his poem "For Brigitte" of December 1990. Later he will write with the same gratitude, only with more sadness and helplessness: "How can I tell you that I want to live with you / given my death that's already scheduled / Awaiting me with open arms / I love you and shall never forget / When you first gazed / at my greedy hands / in my greedy eyes." At this point Mueller already knows that he is suffering from throat cancer. The couple continue to record their life together in Polaroids. Mayer photographs Mueller as a loving father and as a dying man. A sequence of pictures shows Mueller in his hospital bed following an operation, emaciated and exhausted. These are utterly unsentimental photographs, laconic and sober like Mueller's prose. For it may be that being laconic is the only possible way of dealing with grief. The writer who wrote so much about death gazes stoically at the camera. In one of the last pictures we see Mueller on the day of his death. His gaze is sceptical and alert.

For three and a half years, the photographer Brigitte Maria Mayer's Berlin studio was immersed in a ghostly blue light, so that with a little technical assistance it looked as if the room might open, as it were, onto infinity. The studio became a place outside time: a zero point from which creation could begin again - as great world theatre. For this photographer has never been interested in cautious experimentation. Rather, in her sympathetic engagement with Christian and Classical iconography, she has dramatised certain fundamental human emotions that provide the stuff of all great myths. Wall-sized pictures show naked women embracing each other in poses that float bizarrely between mortal fear and relief. One shows the battle of the Amazons and their Queen Penthesilea; another a descent from the Cross in a maelstrom of emotions ranging between ecstasy and horror. Elsewhere there are the agonies of the Flood and the fall of the rebel angels, in which hundreds of male bodies vanish like phantoms into swirling mist. These are moments that are stored in all our visual memories, but Mayer finds enough that is new in them to pose questions rather than provide answers. The Konrad Adenauer Foundation in Berlin is now showing the series of photographs for the first time in its entirety. It fits almost seamlessly into the rest of the artist's oeuvre.
Originally a photography student under Floris Neusuess at the Gesamthochschule in Kassel, Mayer (born 1965) soon transferred to the performance art course under Harry Kramer. Since then she has worked at the point of intersection between these two disciplines, by composing tableaux vivants. In the beginning she was her own model, striking aggressively erotic poses in small black and white photographs as the "Perfect Sister". Later she and a group of actors produced works based on famous Renaissance, Baroque and Neo-Classical paintings: Marat dying in the bathtub from an overdose of heroin; Socrates sick with Aids; and neo-Nazis performing the oath of the Horatii. Though meticulously composed, these pictures always express a playful inventiveness. Their element of shock, which inheres in every living picture and also constitutes the essence of photography, seems to have been very much a secondary consideration for Mayer when she transferred these fascinating moments to the realm of the imagination.
As it happens, it was in a commissioned work that she was most fully able to realise this line of development - at a performance of the Oberammergau Passion Plays which Mayer photographed in 2000. Instead of merely documenting the production, she and the actors staged scenes from the story of the Passion in accordance with how she felt they ought to be performed, which ranged from powerful moments of dialogue to elaborate crowd scenes. Later chronologically arranged in a book, the sequence of pictures was constantly being interrupted by tableaux vivants from the Old Testament which had had been used both to cover scene changes during the performance and to reveal parallels between the two books of the Bible.
The Berlin exhibition makes it clear that for a long time Mayer's own works have performed an analogous function. They are interruptions in the passage of life and at the same time attempts to incorporate her own biography into a greater scheme. Her life is certainly not short of dramatic material. She lost her father when she was very young, and later her husband and the father of her daughter. It is not only in the Family Outing cycle that she seeks to exorcise these experiences: she also deals with her relationship with her mother in a demonic picture of a gigantic female body above a chaos of smashed wood, or with her brother, whom she shows as a small boy kneeling before a broken mobile. Indeed, one suddenly imagines one might discover in all her pictures the representation of one's own traumatic experiences.
Only superficially interested in aesthetic experimentation, Mayer's art seeks to convey what most of the visual media seems to have lost sight of: certainty in a chaotic world.

The Berlin photographer presents "Flight and Expulsion" with Romantic coolness

"And the Lord rained upon Sodom and Gomorrah brimstone and fire from the Lord out of heaven; and he overthrew those cities, and all the plain, and all the inhabitants of the cities, and that which grew upon the ground. But his wife looked back from behind him, and she became a pillar of salt." Is this couple fleeing a divine punishment, as described by Moses in the Bible? Are they an Adam and Eve, leaving behind a Paradise destroyed by their own guilt? Was New York before September 11, 2001 a sort of Garden of Eden? And why do Adam and Eve look like fashion models from a Versace catalogue? It is precisely because this symbolically charged image evokes such contradictory associations that Brigitte Maria Mayer's photomontage "9/11" has succeeded in creating a precise image of an uncertain world. Now the Konrad Adenauer Foundation is dedicating an exhibition to the thirty-eight-year-old artist. A large-scale print of "9/11" was actually to have adorned the exterior of the building where the exhibition is taking place. But a test showed that it would have left behind marks on the façade. So, at least for the time being, the exhibition must do without this sensational exterior sign.
The exhibition's title, "Flight and Expulsion", appears in the foyer and the rotunda of Thomas van den Valentyn's building. The expulsion scene from "9/11" fits this theme, but isn't actually part of the cycle that Mayer has produced for the show. "9/11" began as a commission for the Meininger Theater, although the theatre initially balked at accepting such a provocative work. The centrepiece of the show is a series of pictures showing pale bodies against a blue background. In "Petitioners / Before the Palace" we see half a dozen people, bent double and exhausted, who seem to be dragging themselves towards the viewer, their faces turned to the ground. These fleeing figures stand and lie before us, naked and vulnerable. We come across photos and television pictures of refugees from Africa, the Caucasus or from the Second World War every day. But through her detached, artificial staging, Mayer allows us to see victims of persecution in a new way: their bodies, elegantly posed beneath the light, seem to shine out of the blue of the room. Despite their weakness, they radiate both a strange sublimity and a Romantic coolness.
"I'm not concerned with representing reality", says this slim, delicate woman. This, as the cultural commentator Hans-Joerg Clement has pointed out, is an extremely unfashionable position to be taking these days. Anyone who visited Documenta 11 last year will have noticed the degree to which documentary techniques have come to dominate contemporary photography, and how many artists were working with journalistic methods. Mayer is concerned with dramatising her works, and to this end makes use of stylistic elements from a great variety of different periods. Thus in an earlier photograph she makes reference to Jacques-Louis David's Neo-Classical painting "The Death of Marat", albeit in slightly altered form: her Marat has died of a heroin overdose in the bath.
Mayer borrowed the poses for the models in some of her most recent works from nineteenth century Italian funerary sculpture. But there is another, more powerful influence: "My work is most strongly shaped by the Baroque," says Mayer. This comes from growing up in Catholic Regensburg: as a child, the artist, who now lives in Berlin, was deeply impressed by the splendour of Bavarian churches. "Baroque churches, like Baroque paintings, are laid out like theatre stages", says Mayer. "They are spaces for studies of the world. They interest me more than life studies.".
Mayer is not only known for her photographic work. She has also been recognised as a committed executor of the literary estate of her late husband, the playwright Heiner Mueller, who died in 1995. She commemorates him with a quotation of his on the façade of the Adenauer Foundation. Anyone walking along the Tiergartenstrasse from the Kulturforum suddenly comes upon this cruciform - and disconcerting - line of text "My flesh your hunger".

No one has yet raised the question of whether it is still possible to make images since the September 11 attacks; least of all whether it is still possible for art. Though this claim might have been made fifty years ago, today we have got used to the idea that painting, photography and sculpture no longer need be primarily dedicated to ideals of beauty, and that art sets itself other goals than that of achieving harmony.
Nevertheless, it is true that so far no artist has succeeded in interpreting the destruction of the World Trade Center in such a way that might henceforth have formed our perception of those terrible events. Instead it has become very clear that artists have started treating with tact and circumspection a subject they ought to be approaching provocatively - such as describing the terror attacks, as Karlheinz Stockhausen did, as a vast and demonic work of art. Though perhaps it was also the case that visual art found itself at a loss in the face of this catastrophe, given that the countless films and photographs documenting it apparently possessed sufficient symbolic power by themselves, which seemed in need of no greater emphasising.
From the moment when the first of the two airliners flew into one of the twin towers, the consequences of the suicidal air attacks were more or less recorded second by second: from the red and yellow flash of flame from the upper storeys, to the silver filigree ribs of the steel skeleton, which rose from the rubble of Ground Zero like the silhouette of a Gothic cathedral. There are photographs of which we can scarcely now say whether they were burned into our memory in the space of that moment, or whether they rather stirred memories we had long borne within us from the entertainment industry's nightmarish orgies of destruction - which were later monstrously enacted in reality. Certainly one of the event's most shocking aspects was that one's first reaction to the images from the television broadcasts was to treat them as fiction. And perhaps this was why so many photographers tried to exorcise the trauma through the catharsis of representing horror.
Two years after the attacks on the World Trade Center, the Berlin artist Brigitte Maria Mayer has chosen another approach. Instead of trying to liberate us from the trauma, she is concerned with sowing confusion.
Although she uses photography, her pictures speak of a distrust of the instantaneous image, and with it of the universal relevance of the moment. This is why she arranges her material, some of which she finds and some of which she takes herself, on a computerised tableau, where the situation can yield to its associations. She plays.
It is complicated kind of playing, for, in a perverted visual logic, an attack by fundamentalist, militant Islam fits only too readily into Christian iconography, and thus invites comparison with the great Biblical acts of punishment, from the destruction of the Tower of Babel, to the downfall of Sodom and the Apocalypse of St John.
For over the last ten years, Mayer, who describes her photographic compositions as "little plays", has been concerned with themes of loneliness, pain and above all death. To this end, she has staged amid the gloomy scenery of her Berlin studio shockingly precise adaptations of paintings from the past, above all from the period of Neo-Classicism - such as Jacques-Louis David's body of Marat in the bathtub, or the death of Socrates among a group of young men. Only in her pictures these historical figures fall victim to very contemporary misfortunes: one to an overdose of heroin, the other to the effects of Aids.
In her picture "9/11", she makes reference to the rigid, suffering poses of Adam and Eve as the Renaissance artist Masaccio painted them in the early fifteenth century for the Church of Santa Maria del Carmine in Florence. They are shown racked with pain, and in despair at their expulsion from Paradise. While in her earlier works Mayer sought convincingly to represent the dignity of death, here she is concerned with the shame of survival.
It is also about the loss of innocence, which has come here to Manhattan of all places, the city that has to put up with clichés ranging from the power of the globalised capitalist system to American imperialism. What at first reminded us of Sodom, becomes, once it forms a backdrop to the mother and father of humanity, a lost Eden, over which the smoke of the explosion spreads like a shroud.
Precisely because the visual metaphors in "9/11" don't allow themselves to be straightforwardly interpreted, referring to political or historical dimensions behind the legend of the Fall, to the distinction between victim and aggressor, to knowledge and guilt, the picture is based on fears that extend far beyond the horrific morning of 11 September. It leaves the viewer with an oppressive feeling of finality. And there is no comfort in the realisation that the expulsion from Paradise is, in the final analysis, the beginning of history.