| Das Fieberspital (The Fever Hospital) |
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Diamanda Galás’s artistic residency as part of Masters in Residence programme Currently, Diamanda Galás is composing a concert-length performance work for electronics, voice, piano and film, based on the poetry of Georg Heym. Its first movement (Das Fieberspital, based on Heym’s poem of the same name) recently premiered as a work in progress at the Dark Mofo festival in Tasmania. The work, including treatments of Heym’s Die Daemonen der Stadt and Das Blinde, is being further developed in residency at the Grotowski Institute in Poland.
Interpretation of a poem Das Fieberspital Georg Heym’s Das Fieberspital (The Fever Hospital) has been received by many as a foreboding, a presaging of the horrific industrialization of maimed and traumatized soldiers returning form the First World War, warehoused like broken robots. The patients of the hospital in Das Fieberspital are in the end stages of yellow fever, and, like all patients considered to have contagious diseases, they are considered lepers, punished by God.With industrialization comes the organizations of all things into sets and subsets. Das Fieberspital gives a well-detailed example of this paradigm. Patients are given numbers, and there is little care except for the changing of their bedding. The room is white, the patients are dressed in white, the beds are white – the image of disinfection. In jarring comparison, the patients have red lines down their faces, their skin is mottled, there is liquid pouring from nasal cavities and mouths; their fevers make them delirious. They howl in terror, they hear the knock upon the door of the men who come to toss the dead into bags and dump them into a boat for delivery to a place unknown. They sit shivering, waiting for death, watching giant spiders directly above them hang their webbing down from their stomachs to those of the patients, as if marking “deceased” upon them. In the meantime, a priest comes around to the most severely ill, trying to convince each to accept the Last Rites. As the Last Rites demands a confession of guilt in exchange for an escape from Hell, the patient is expected to admit his complicity with his own disease. But one patient refuses to be part of the ritual, and in his delirium sees the sacrament held by the priest as one of the large cartilaginous arachnids which was hanging from the ceiling. Instead, as the priest kneels before him, holding the hideous thing, the resistant patient impales him with a sharpened stone he had been saving. A biographical note Georg Heym’s father worked as an assistant in a yellow fever clinic in Berlin, and his son saw what transpired there. His father also was handed the worst job in the city, that of witness to the execution of those considered to be criminals. After years of this job, he suffered several breakdowns and hospitalizations. Heym, who wrote the poem two years before his death, would have been quite young in his experience of the above. Timeline 1871: Industrial Revolution in Germany 1887: Georg Heym born 1890: Industrial Boom 1912: Georg Heym died 1910: Das Fieberspital 1914–1918: World War I |