«Café Müller»’s Nocturne. A Reading

This paper analyses the phraseologies, poetical aims and themes of Pina Bausch’s Café Müller (1978), trying to underline, on the one hand, the multiple links between its poetics and the forms of anachronism in the German culture of the sixties-seventies, mainly in relation to the memory of the Second World War and of the predominating currents of Ausdruckstanz, to justify, on the other, on a structural basis (through the analysis of some groundbreaking proceedings like repetition, desynchronisation, allegory) the fame of the piece as a masterwork of contemporary Tanztheater and as a paradigm of the so-called “silent dramaturgy”.