Max Mayer

«Agnes Bernauer», first performed in the GDR in 1977, starts like a stop-motion fairy tale: after the death of her mother, Agnes is sent out to work by her bankrupt father. But she is unable to believe that she will find a profession that «gives her pleasure», and decides to marry money. Her rise in society happens quickly: Agnes becomes pregnant and takes Albrecht as a husband: a squeamish only child and mother’s boy who is pampered in the golden cage of the Werdenfels’ family business.

«Danton’s Death», written by the 22-year-old Georg Büchner in a mere five weeks in 1835 following extensive research, is based on historical sources and documents from the French Revolution, whose maxims of «liberty, equality and fraternity» shaped our understanding of modern European democracies. However, Büchner does not tell of the triumphant beginnings, the storming of the Bastille as part of a popular uprising that continues to be celebrated today, focusing instead on a few days towards the end of the Jacobins’ so-called reign of terror in the spring of 1794.

It takes the physical pain of cancer to break through Fritz Zorn’s protective shell of a cultivated «insensitivity of the soul». It is not until he is in danger of dying that his resistance awakens against not being allowed to live: «I am young and rich and educated: and I am unhappy, neurotic and alone.» With these words the Swiss author Fritz Zorn opens his reckoning with this background, family and education. However: his contemplation of death is a contemplation of freedom. The art of dying liberates the individual from all subjugation and compulsion and by accepting one’s own finality it offers the possibility of seeing oneself as part of an overarching process of transformation.

Hamsun’s trilogy tells the story of a man who feels he has been overlooked by the elites that set the tone and cheated of social recognition. The philosopher Ivar Kareno evolves from a 30-year-old radical and anti-liberal writer on the fringes of poverty into a 40-year-old private tutor to the two sons of a businessman in a distant coastal region. Here Kareno sits brooding in his writing tower, while an infectious fever descends on people, arriving from the North, the businessman Otermann is driven mad by his wealth and a strange man wanders between the houses, rumoured to be justice. Ten years later, the 50-year-old Kareno is still hoping for a major turning point in his life. And he will indeed reach a milestone where he must decide whether he will remain true to the radical ideas of his youth or to pursue a career that is more measured politically.   

«Mitläufer» (Fellow Travellers) is a historical exploration of the contradictory biographies of those whose close contacts with the Nazi party helped them to reach the top echelons of the theatre. In this research project, the Residenztheater, one of the oldest German theatres, examines a dark chapter in its own history.

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.