A certain Uwe Ebbinghaus, deskman at the German newspaper "Frankfurter Allgemeine", wrote a long article on the case of Gertrud Stockhausen who was killed according to the Nazi euthanasia program. The student Lisa Quernes made an investigation on that topic which was reported already in 2013 (Deutschlandfunk). It is not quite clear why Ebbinghaus came up with the story now. He is quoting Suzanne Stephens and other members of the family; so it seems (?) that his article is approved by them. A possibly new facet of the story is that Stockhausen´s father Simon could have been a child abuser. This was referred to by the family of Gertrud Stockhausen.
We all know about the fact of the murder. However, Ebbinghaus uses this for quite unsavory assaults on Stockhausen´s work. Ebbinghaus states that the killing of the mother character in DONNERSTAG by an injection is an extenuation or a trifle. Unbelievable. I don´t know what he wants: to build a gas chamber on the stage? Documentary realism? Is a lethal injection not horrible enough?
He cryptically suggests that mentioning the accusation of child abuse in the libretto of DONNERSTAG could mean that Stockhausen was abused himself because he could not know this accusation otherwise since the archives of the euthanasia program were closed. He turns this insinuation, however, to a criticism: because Stockhausen named one of his sons Simon, he could be somehow guilty himself.
He tops this by accusing Stockhausen of approving eugenic or racial hygienic thinking; first, because, for LICHT, he uses the Urantia book which contains on very few of its 1000 pages statements on racial purity, and secondly, because the ending of FREITAG can only be interpreted as a purifying killing of distorted composite beings (says Ebbinghaus).
So Ebbinghaus manages to make a victim into an offender. The article seems to me a typical German yearning for guilt and a leftist dialectic routine. So far, so bad. Stockhausen stays to be an anathema to the German cultural mainstream.
The important question is: Does this all mean something for the work?