Pershing: The silence after the bang: On theatre-as-research, dramaturgy and the ethics of recollection: Andrea Pagnes in conversation with dramaturg Mirjam Meuser, with a critical and historical introduction by Verena Stenke

This interview, critically introduced by Verena Stenke, brings Andrea Pagnes into conversation with dramaturg Mirjam Meuser about Pershing, a research-based theatre project developed at Theatre Heilbronn that excavates the suppressed memory of the 1985 Pershing II missile accident in Heilbronn and situates it within today’s renewed militarization of Europe. Moving between archival research, embodied testimony, dramaturgical ethics and contemporary geopolitical urgency, the dialogue foregrounds theatre as a civic technology for remembrance and ethical inquiry. Through a close examination of documentary theatre practices, dramaturgical lacunae and the ethics of working with unresolved trauma, Meuser articulates a model of theatre-as-research that resists spectacle and didacticism in favour of restraint, silence and audience co-responsibility. The conversation addresses the dramaturg’s role as an ethical mediator between archive and embodiment, past and present and knowledge and not-knowing, while reflecting on Brechtian and Müllerian legacies without subsuming the work to historical citation. At a moment marked by the anticipated return of long-range missile deployments to German soil, Pershing emerges as a warning rather than a closure: a performative act of witnessing that activates collective memory, complicates simplified geopolitical narratives and reclaims theatre as a space for civic confrontation, ethical listening and political accountability. By aligning dramaturgy with care, responsibility and long-term research, this conversation situates performance not as commentary on history but as an active site where history remains unfinished and ethically demanding.