Carolin Conrad

Heinrich Mann’s perceptive bildungsroman published in 1914 «The Loyal Subject» is a wickedly humorous portrait of the Wilhelmine Empire and its self-congratulatory middle classes with their nationalistic fantasies of being a great power. Mann’s protagonist Diederich Hessling is a spineless opportunist with no moral courage. He only forgets his insecurities at the stammtisch, working himself up to give great nationalistic speeches. However, Mann does not present Hessling as a joke – he is a complex but ultimately warped personality with a blind faith in authority.

Robert Icke has congenially translated Arthur Schnitzler's play «Professor Bernhardi» into the present day. The doctor Ruth Wolff not only comes into conflict with her colleagues and the maxims of the Catholic Church, but also into a media shitstorm. The «Times» of London celebrated «The Doctor» as an «open-heart operation on our present day, which gets more complicated the deeper you cut».

One night a stranger named K. enters a village guest house. He is told that no one is allowed to stay in the village without permission from the authorities in the castle just outside it. K. identifies himself as a surveyor who has been hired by the castle only to be informed three days later that no surveyor is required and it is not even certain that one was ever sent for. For reasons that are unclear and against his wishes, K. is given the job of school caretaker, even though he also receives a letter from the castle confirming that his work as a surveyor was entirely satisfactory. While the castle administration operates in a dubious manner and the decisions of its officials appear arbitrary, the veracity of K.’s incoherent statements is equally subject to doubt.

The «freedom to act» forms the core of Jean-Paul Sartre's philosophical thinking. What this freedom means for the individual is exemplified in «The Flies» - Sartre's rewriting of Aeschylus' second part of the «Oresteia». Should Orest, who has returned home from exile, take revenge for the murder of his father Agamemnon? And if so, what price is he prepared to pay?

Asiimwe Deborah Kawe's play tells the story of the life's work of an undocumented immigrant. Like so many others, the nurse Achen, the author's main character, contributes with her labour and as a taxpayer to the prosperity of a country that has decided to expel her overnight.

When Goethe set «Götz von Berlichingen» down on paper in 1771 in a true writing frenzy, the 22-year-old writer was still a complete unknown. This came to an abrupt end with the publication of «Götz», as suddenly the young poet was being talked about everywhere. Goethe’s early work is a powerful stage epic with over fifty locations, several plots running in parallel and a huge cast of characters. What is more: Goethe dispensed with all the customary conventions that 18^th century drama had been using up to that point.

The French frigate «Medusa» is shipwrecked two days' voyage from its destination. For author and director Alexander Eisenach, the events that follow symbolise a society in which the values of communal coexistence have lost their validity.

Jovana Reisinger’s novel follows nine women from early spring to the summer of an unspecified year not far from the present. All of them live in or around Munich and they are all named after women’s magazines. They live and fail representatively, each of them alone and yet collectively, by the images and ideals of what it means to be a woman.