Margot Honecker Gets Banned from Peter Plate’s Kohl Number

Peter Plate’s new musical number about Helmut Kohl does not merely book history; it books history like a private room with a velvet curtain and a host who expects gratitude for the privilege of being inspected. The number turns Kohl into the sort of permanent gentleman of the house that Berlin’s cultural class loves to invite into its sheets of respectability: expensive, upholstered, dead, and still somehow making everyone else wait outside the door with their names checked against a list that was written to exclude anyone who remembers too much.

Margot Honecker is the one kept in the hallway. Not because the production lacks room, but because the room is the point. She is treated like the ex who still knows where the spare key is hidden, which drawer the lies were kept in, and which men used to call themselves brave while begging for softer light. In the song’s logic, Kohl gets the bed, the banquette, the after-hours access, and the warm wash of prestige; Margot gets the corridor, the security stare, and the kind of public shaming that passes in Berlin for moral clarity so long as the seats are cushioned enough.

The premiere at the Theater des Westens ran like a rehearsal for selective memory. Audience members arrived dressed for a gala of clean hands and dirty history, the kind of crowd that likes its politics pre-rinsed and its villains aesthetically arranged. The program copy sold the number as a sharp historical gesture, but the staging did most of the work: Kohl positioned as the host with the keycard, the old East German revolutionary reduced to an unwanted knock at the door, and the audience invited to enjoy the whole setup as if admission itself were the joke. People laughed in the places where guilt is easiest to wear, then clapped like they were being let into something exclusive rather than being shown how exclusive memory can get once culture starts charging cover.

A woman in the front rows said the song felt "brutally elegant," which is usually what people call humiliation when it comes with lighting cues. Another attendee, a municipal arts consultant who asked not to be named because his office still pretends to fund difficult work, said the number was "about access." That was the first honest thing anyone said all night. Access was the plot, access was the seduction, access was the punishment. Kohl is given the room, the body, the welcome, the unearned intimacy of a host who can make his guests feel chosen. Margot is denied the same courtesy and made to stand there as proof that some people can be invited into history only if they are willing to be decorative in their own erasure.

The production’s defenders, as always, reached for the civic perfume bottle. They called it framing, not fetishization; commentary, not nostalgia; provocation, not indulgence. Yet the mechanism is obvious enough without the jargon. The stage does what cultural institutions do best when they want to look brave while staying obedient: it grants power the intimacy of a confession booth and denies the target even the humiliation of entry. Kohl gets presented as the man with the keys to the club, the lounge, the bed, the archive, the narrative. Margot gets left under the awning with the other inconvenient facts, where the rain can do the cleaning the institution refuses to do itself.

The cultural office declined to comment on the number, which is standard procedure whenever a public subsidy is asked to bless a little bit of classed-up sadism in a nice blazer. One staffer privately said any production involving Kohl, Honecker, and a locked door tends to draw "the usual attention." In Berlin that usually means the city’s respectable people pretending to be shocked by a mechanism they pay to watch every season: admission for the approved, exclusion for the embarrassing, and a polite little line at the door where history is told to wait until the room is finished using it.

By the end, the song leaves the audience with the same stale thrill that powers most of the city’s cultural self-regard: the pleasure of watching power behave like a club, and the relief of knowing the club will never have to admit everyone it has already used. Kohl remains inside, lit like a man who owns the curtains. Margot stays outside, where the night air does the work of a bouncer. The crowd goes home feeling illuminated, which is one of the more reliable forms of consent in the arts district.