There is a very popular trend in so called avantgarde theater which is reenactment. It is meant to show power structures, make guilt, shame, the forces of history more palpable. But what if reenactment becomes politics? Does this have the same enlightening effect? Or is it like history eating itself and with it the sense of what politics can do, can achieve? I failed, yesterday, to convince Sam that there is a good reason not to vote in this year*s Bundestagswahl which takes place September 22, next Sunday. The only time he seemed to follow me was when I said the word protest. Oh, it is protest, he said. No, no, I said, because it seemed like this would be just a reenactment of some older reason not to vote which would have devalued all arguments I could possibly bring up for my very constructive, I thought, approach to abstain from casting my ballot. On our way to the restaurant we had seen this gigantic posters trying to make people vote for Angela Merkel. Not one, but two, side by side, at the one end of a not so large square in the Mitte district of Berlin. I had never seen that, two posters side by side. It made my dizzy. The double Merkel. What did it mean? It had a strange hypnotic effect that at the same time made me want to vomit. For physical reasons. It was like an allergic reaction to political iconography gone wrong, terribly wrong, a long time ago. It was this double exposure to the chancellor of sleepwalkers that made me feel that way. And now Mei asks if I have read the back and forth between Obama and Putin in the New York Times – as a matter of fact I have not, even though of course I feel like I did, because this is the way news works these days. You feel you have understood the Syria conflict, you feel you know Putin*s ploy, you feel you get Obama*s hesitation. Is this what happened? Or was it just a reenactment of the diplomacy of doom and failure that was last performed during the Cold War and now as then only serves the powers that be, not the people anywhere?