Wandervogel

Jan Mocek is multitalented artist and an unmissable presence on the Czech theatre scene that is not to be overlooked. With every project he draws by general audiences and professionals. Mock first featured at Divadelná Nitra in 2022 with an original project Virtual Ritual: together with urban planner Osamu Okamura, YouTuber Athlete, and photographer and gamer Adela Vosičková, he introduced the audience to the parallel world of online video games. Mocek’s production Wandervogel premièred in November 2024, brings, prima facie, a wholly different and distant theme from the present. Yet, the piece that reconstructs events from the 1930s, also speaks of the human desire and need to escape from confining reality into a carefree world of illusions. At the beginning of the performance we watch a group of four innocent and timid young men led by an older man in a black tracksuit (characteristically the Adidas brand), preparing and performing a delightful musical number for us. We laugh, whilst, even unaware of the historical context, we suspect that something is wrong. We intuitively remember cases of abused children in camps and scout troops. The images and scenes that follow heighten our concern. The boys’ games and rough fights of half-naked and later fully stripped young men seem to be in the connection between man and nature and in the spirit of kalokagathia, the ancient Greek ideal of harmony of the physical and mental essence of human being. Still, we involuntarily begin to think of the radicalising, even neo-Nazi and bullying groups of young people that we hear about so often today. Wandervogel project is inspired by the fate of the Sudeten German politician Heinz Ruth (1897–1937), founder of the eponymous club that brought together and raised boys in a Spartan manner, based on male comradery, to achieve physical strength and masculinity. Ruth was later accused of homosexuality – at the time considered a crime – and imprisoned. He hanged himself in his prison cell. His case is told in a book The Devil’s Wall by the British historian Mark Cornwall. Together with archival materials and research by Jan Mocek the book became the basis for the production.