Die Somnambule oder Des Staatskanzlers Tod
(The Somnambulist or The State Chancellor's Death)
As the state chancellor of Prussia, Karl August von Hardenberg was one of the most respected men of his time. He was also interested in animal magnetism – a fashionable healing practice at the time. In 1816, Hardenberg met a young woman in the half-light of a medical practice, the would-be patient Friederike Hähnel, who was subjected to the strange healing practice through magnetic hypnosis, and fell in love with her. In his novel, Günter de Bruyn tells the story of this unusual love, and also catapults us back into the volatile environment of the entire era. It is a story about power struggles and affairs, romance and restoration. Above all, however, it is about the last eventful years in the life of a statesman who arranged a marriage of convenience with another for his lover, increasingly lost his power as a political reformer and succumbed to the fashion of magnetism with a mix of fascination and esotericism. In his skilful descriptions of this rich kaleidoscope of relationships, de Bruyn even goes as far as to touch on psychoanalysis, whose predecessor the artificially created somnambulism appears to have been. A masterpiece of historical storytelling.
The actor Manfred Zapatka manages to convincingly portray what motivates his characters, and to thereby provide an insight into their inner logic. Zapatka has worked with important theatre directors, including Claus Peymann and Thomas Langhoff; he was one of Dieter Dorn‘s protagonists at the Münchner Kammerspiele theatre for over twenty years, and later a permanent cast member at the Residenztheater in Munich. He has appeared in films by Frank Beyer, Heinrich Breloer, Romuald Karmakar and Dieter Wedel.
