"Seek out everything that is buried, with both hands in front of your face." On the poetic-dramaturgical connection of dream and trauma in Marcel Beyer's opera libretto "Earthquake. Dreams" based on Heinrich von Kleist's novella "The Earthquake in Chile"

In order to bring Kleist's ,,earthquake" narrative to the opera stage, Marcel Beyer condenses it into a nightmare / dream sequence in which the external plot appears predominantly fragmentary and in the light of inner states. Based on Kleist's depiction of the earthquake as a violent phenomenon of shifting, Beyer's libretto (2018) shifts the perspective of the plot into the lyrical-associative and a-logical dreamlike so as to trace and uncover the traumatic experiences of the characters, which remain in their consciousness merely as traces. Beyer's productive reception of Kleist is characterised by a ,poetics of the blank space', which represents the aesthetic essence of Beyer's own poetic writing.