Between Stalin and Coca-Cola: Postsocialist Geopolitics and Utopian Ambivalence at Castorf’s Volksbühne

This article examines Frank Castorf’s engagement with East-West geopolitics at the Volksbühne, especially in light of the subsequent Russian invasion of Ukraine. In the 1990s, Castorf’s productions focused primarily on postsocialism through an Ost-oriented lens. As NATO expanded eastward, Russia and the work of nineteenth-century novelist Fyodor Dostoevsky became a conceptual space for Castorf to explore the discontents of Western liberal democracies and to sustain a utopian ambivalence or openness. His interpretations of Dostoevsky, starting with Dämonen (1999/2000) and culminating in Die Brüder Karamasow (2015), however, reveal significant shifts in his reception of Russia. In Dämonen, Castorf projected onto Russia a combative, carnivalesque vitality that resisted the perceived consensus and conformism of Western liberal democracies. In Karamasow, the Russia that emerges is more violent, nationalistic, and authoritarian. Here, however, Castorf marks Russian Orthodoxy as the source of its otherness and hence as a terrain where existential questions of morality, politics, and religion remain open. Fully embracing these contradictions, Castorf treats contemporary Russia as a response to the postsocialist condition that takes us beyond the antipodes of Stalin and Coca-Cola.