Katja Jung

«And often the outward signs of ascent only become apparent once the decline has begun again.» In his 1901 novel, subtitled «The Decline of a Family», Thomas Mann uses precise characterisation and an ironic style to describe the incipient structural collapse of the grande bourgeoisie. Mann drew his inspiration for «Buddenbrooks» from the story of his own family in Lübeck and people of the city where he was living at the time: Munich. Mann shows the potential complexity of relations between North and South Germany with considerable humour in the relationship between Tony Buddenbrook and the Munich hop-trader Alois Permaneder.

During the global economic crisis of the 1920s, a young woman tries out self-realization and yet ends up in a restrictive marriage, confronted with misogyny and male bonding as well as the rise of National Socialism. Elsa-Sophie Jach adapts Marieluise Fleisser's only novel for the stage.

A prince of fashion and a fairy-tale king. A bird of paradise and a cult figure. A Munich original and a philanthropist. During the course of his lifetime, Rudolph Moshammer was given countless of these nicknames and soubriquets. Everyone recognized him as an eccentric with his dog Daisy on his arm, a talk show guest and man of society. Like his role model, Bavaria’s fairy-tale king Ludwig II, he loved glamour, opulence, and excess. In his appearances as an actor and in advertisements, as a singer in the preliminary round for the Eurovision Song Contest and with books like «Mama und ich» (Mama and Me), he became a cult figure and his fashion boutique «Carnaval de Venise» in Maximilianstraße became a cult address and place of pilgrimage for Mosi fans.

The director Elsa-Sophie Jach, who recently made her debut at the Residenztheater with her production of Herbert Achternbusch’s «Heart of Glass», brings the outrageous love poetry of «Europe’s first poet» to new life. Known for a directing style characterised by precise language and strong visuals, she hunts down the forgotten remains of Sappho’s poems, condenses them into a chorus and, on a tour through the literary canon together with the Munich techno live band SLATEC, she exposes the systematic erasure of the female voice, its silencing and the need for it to empower itself.

What do we need to make theatre? Does theatre have a tangible impact on our lives?

Based on a reading of Bertolt Brecht's 77-part «A Short Organum for the Theatre», the South Korean director Kyung-Sung Lee and the ensemble of the Residenztheater explore the current crises in Korea, Germany and the world, playfully testing whether Brecht could still help us to understand the world better today.

In her new work, the director Claudia Bauer, who has been invited to the Berlin Theatertreffen four times and is renowned for her work with fast and furious acting ensembles, now tackles someone who typifies Munich, the brilliant comedian Karl Valentin. In her usual, opulent stage language she will devise a homage to the Bavarian whose anarchic approach to language led the critic Alfred Kerr to invent the term «Wortzerklauberer», someone who steals words and tears them to pieces.