Restless Wandering

In Christopher Rüping’s latest theatre production, a daughter encounters her father. She has many questions for him but finds no answers: her father has forgotten where he comes from and who he is. In an autumn in which a great forgetting is spreading through Germany, the production takes this encounter as a starting point for exploring the disorientation of the present: the end of shared narratives, but also the possible utopias that might emerge in their wake. Christopher Rüping and his ensemble listen closely to German history. Drawing on German Romanticism and on the wars and ruins of the past, they explore that most German of seasons – and the dizziness of our own time.

Nowhere do more leaves fall from the trees than in German Romanticism. “On the trees, withered and weary, / the last of the leaves still hang; / one by one they flutter down / and cover the forest path,” writes the poet Nikolaus Lenau. In Novalis, Chamisso, Eichendorff and Brentano, too, whatever the autumn forest releases from its branches falls, sinks, circles and drifts in the “first winter wind”. The tumbling leaf fascinated the German poets. For them, it became an image of transition and an enduring metaphor for the restlessness that takes hold of the autumn wanderer in that most German of seasons. Even Rilke famously imagined the German melancholic “restlessly wandering as the leaves are driven”.

The restlessness Rilke ascribes to his wanderer is not so far removed from the mood of autumn 2026. “Whoever's homeless now, will build no shelter; who lives alone will live indefinitely so.” If the polls are to be believed, there is a particular sense of impending doom in the air this autumn. A party that openly campaigns with Nazi slogans is the strongest political force at federal level and could soon govern one of Germany’s federal states. The AfD exploits uncertainty, presents transformation as a threat and promises order amid chaos. In a world that many people experience as being in a state of crisis, the far right profits from a fear that has accompanied modernity from the beginning.

And this pervasive disorientation can also be understood quite literally. Routine data from doctors’ practices and health insurers show a sharp rise in diagnoses of dizziness in recent years. Many people live with a sense of spinning, tipping or moving when nothing is moving. Yet this dizziness is more than a medical diagnosis. What we encounter as a physiological disturbance – swaying as we look into the depths, vertigo, the loss of balance – is also the symptom of a deeper experience connected to the disappearance of familiar coordinates. We grow restless “as the leaves are driven”.

The French writer and artist Camille de Toledo recently devoted an entire book to the history of vertige – vertigo, or dizziness. For him, dizziness is not simply another discomfort of our time, nor a passing weakness of modern consciousness. Toledo sees it as a fundamental experience in which our present recognises itself. Dizziness is no accident, no temporary slip on the path of progress, but a sign that the world itself has begun to sway. Old certainties no longer hold. The idea of the human being as a sovereign subject that separates, orders and controls has lost its self-evidence.

Dizziness has two faces. Looking into the abyss can be enticing, but it can also terrify us. Dizziness can mean the loss of orientation, the fear of losing control, dissolution – but it can also mean an experience of boundlessness, the fascination of the abyss and an encounter with the infinite. It is a feeling of vastness, of timelessness, of belonging to something larger than any individual form. Yet this vastness is not only consoling. It also contains restlessness and threat: where the self expands, it always risks disappearing.

Many of the Romantics were familiar with this ambivalence. Caspar David Friedrich, for example – a celebrated master today, but regarded in his own time as a gloomy and melancholic figure on the margins of the art world – painted in the knowledge that surrendering oneself to the boundless could tip over into the disappearance of the subject. His paintings are visions of nature in which tiny human figures gaze into suddenly opening skies or unimaginable depths. They are paintings of dizziness and dissolution, of vastness and restlessness. They also bear witness to a surrender of the self that drove Friedrich to attempt suicide while still young and kept him throughout his life on the boundary between self-loss and a sense of being unleashed.

Caspar David Friedrich’s dizziness is deceptive. It can appear as ecstasy, as absorption into an all-encompassing unity, as solace. At the same time, it can be experienced as dissolution, as a loss of orientation, as a sinking into indeterminacy. Dizziness marks the transition between the two – the point at which the subject is no longer certain where it begins and where it ends.

Visitors to the Berlin Academy Exhibition of 1810 reacted with confusion and dismay when they encountered the two paintings by Caspar David Friedrich exhibited there. They mocked them. Only one visitor fell silent before The Abbey in the Oakwood and The Monk by the Sea: the fifteen-year-old Crown Prince Friedrich Wilhelm. He had lost his mother only a few months earlier. His eyes were still red from crying. He therefore asked his father, the King of Prussia, to buy him both paintings. The grief he recognised in them was his own.

Another viewer saw less solace and more menace: Heinrich von Kleist. Looking at The Monk by the Sea, he wrote that it was “as if one’s eyelids had been cut away”. This was Kleist’s expression for the restlessness he saw in the painting. He recognised the other side of dizziness: instead of solace, he saw dissolution, the loss of all bearings, the altarpiece of modernity. The painting lay there “like the Apocalypse”, Kleist wrote, ambiguously. What he recognised in the image was a hopelessness that would draw him towards the abyss himself. A few months later – in the autumn of 1811 – sitting beside the water like the monk, he brought the turmoil in his head to an end with a gunshot to the mouth.

A different frame of reference, a similar diagnosis: in a recently established artistic research network called On Dizziness, an international group of visual artists is investigating dizziness. Here, too, the phenomenon becomes a way of thinking about a present that throws us off balance spatially, socially, emotionally and politically. To give this era a name, the group has coined the term Iliggocene. Iliggos is Greek for “whirl, vortex, dizziness”; Iliggocene describes the “Age of Dizziness” in which we live.

For the founders of the On Dizziness project, dizziness is not merely a symptom but a language. It describes a world in motion. A body thrown off balance becomes an expression of an age in which the ground itself is giving way. But here, too, dizziness is not only a loss; it can also create an opening. When we lose our balance, we become dependent on other bodies and on social structures. Orientation, then, is not something we achieve autonomously, but always a collective practice.

This is what makes dizziness so political: rather than pointing towards autonomy and sovereignty, it reveals dependence and the ways in which we are connected to one another. When certainties collapse, relationships become visible. In moments of instability, other forms of seeing, speaking and making art can emerge. Dizziness becomes an in-between space – fragile, unstable and full of possibilities.

Historically, every era has responded differently to dizziness and to the threat it represents. What in pre-modern contexts could be understood as an approach to the absolute is increasingly interpreted in modernity as a psychological, even pathological experience. In 1786, Marcus Herz – physician, philosopher and close associate of Immanuel Kant – published his Essay on Dizziness, a 300-page treatise in which he defined the psycho-physical phenomenon of dizziness as a “state of confusion” in which “the soul finds itself because of the excessively rapid succession of ideas”.

From the second half of the nineteenth century onwards, researchers began investigating the organ of balance in the inner ear. With the discovery of what became known as the vestibular system, dizziness could be described in medical terms. And yet the feeling of uncertainty keeps returning. Periods of security give way to ages of uncertainty, each taking new forms under the changing conditions of a world that repeatedly pushes beyond its own boundaries, only to fall back from dizziness into periods of stasis.

In one such Stunde Null – the “zero hour” of autumn 1946 – a young Swedish writer travels through Germany. In his home country, Stig Dagerman is a rising literary star; writing for the daily newspaper Expressen, he visits Berlin, Hamburg and the Ruhr region: cities and regions marked by misery, hunger and ruins. Dagerman calls the literary travelogue into which he weaves his political analysis German Autumn. It rains incessantly, the autumn leaves fall – and the young Swede, who only a few years later would be overcome by his own darkness, moves through a country that is foreign to him, precariously poised between an ending and a beginning. His journey also circles around a question: is this country ready for freedom? Or will it stumble and fall?

Exactly eighty years have passed since the autumn of 1946. The Germans Dagerman encountered among the ruins that autumn will soon no longer be here, or are already gone. And yet the questions have remained and have once again become acutely present. Is this country ready for freedom? The autumn wanderer of 2026 lives with a sense of fragmentation, with the experience of crisis, at the endpoint of shared narratives. At the same time, there is a search for connection and a longing for solace. Theatre may be one place to look for both – and autumn a good time to do so.

According to the calendar, autumn begins on 23 September and ends in late December. Like dizziness, it has a dark face, but also a golden one. “Autumn makes the world transparent,” Karl Krolow writes in his Biography of Autumn. It is a season of shedding, in which things “lose their solidity” and are set in motion. Autumn means “the clarity of high pressure, a serene time made of luminous dust in flight, lifted from the surface of light”. Autumn is an affirmation that everything remains connected to everything else. Autumn is the luminous passage from one state to another.

Autumn offers both: a possible ending and the possibility of transformation. Form and coherence begin to shift. This is what makes Rilke’s wanderer restless. Rest-less: the absence of rest. Restlessness as the very thing Donna Haraway, in her famous book Staying with the Trouble, declares to be a central task for modern human beings.

Haraway’s book is a plea to make room for decentring. In the terms of this essay, staying with the trouble means staying with dizziness: not pathologising it, but understanding it as the condition for another way of inhabiting the present. Autumn and dizziness mark the breaking apart of a great separation. Modern human beings have long imagined themselves as an isolated centre, as a self that must assert itself against the world. Dizziness begins where this separation becomes porous and another kind of knowledge appears in the cracks that open up: the knowledge that we do not stand outside the world, above it or apart from it.

Dizziness forces us towards this realisation. Then it becomes apparent that the present is inseparably bound to the past, and that the lives of others are not separate from our own. Everything is intertwined. Everything responds to everything else. Across time and across autumns. What we experience in the swirling leaves, in restlessness and dizziness, is the feeling of this entanglement.