Berlin’s Summer of Theatre

Berlin is probably the German-speaking city with the most performing artists and theatre festivals in Europe. Unlike their pompous siblings in Bayreuth (Richard Wagner Opera Festival) and in Salzburg (Salzburg Festival), Austria, where the rich European elites meet in the summer and tickets are not affordable for ordinary people, Berlin festivals are more easily accessible to people of all classes, genders, and ethnic, cultural, and social backgrounds. This should not surprise anyone, because Berlin is a melting pot of literary, theatre, music, and arts talents from all over the world. It was in Berlin that the new critical discourses in the German cultural landscape were first negotiated, which are still missing in festivals beyond Berlin. Since the mid-1990s, the capital has been the place where important actors of the cultural, science, and political fields regularly come together and negotiate main discourses as well as their future relevance and impact, starting with the 1995 United Nations Climate Conference in Berlin. In 1999, the whole German government was moved from the former capital Bonn to the new political capital in Berlin, and the KfW Development Bank began inviting all major players of culture, science, media, and business of the so called “Berlin Republic” to its Fachgespräche zur Globalisierung (Expert Talks on Globalization). Political and other foundations started their cooperations with cultural and science institutions, many festivals started at this time, and a completely new infrastructure of exchange and discourse emerged in Berlin.

A completely new humus has emerged and been deposited over the old ideological layers of the once divided city. The discourse has given Berlin a new, friendly, creative face.

If you look at it honestly, Berlin has become the European discourse capital in the last ten to fifteen years. Largely due to the influx of international people, a completely new humus has emerged and been deposited over the old ideological layers of the once divided city. The discourse has given Berlin a new, friendly, creative face.

The months of May to August in Berlin are filled with festivals of all kinds. The Berlin Theatertreffen kicks off across the city in May, followed by the Festival of New Drama (att) at the Deutsches Theater in June, and later come the small and large summer festivals in the parks. Finally the summer ends with the “Dance in August” Festival, a meeting of the best new international dance companies and their role models with new choreographies every night.

Theatertreffen is the most important theatre festival in the German-speaking world. It happens every May, and it is to the German-speaking theatre world what Festival d’Avignon is to international theatremakers.

A team of seven jurors, all of them renowned theatre critics and journalists, looked at 690 new theatre productions in the 2023/24 season and made a shortlist of the 46 most interesting productions. In a further selection round, the jurors then decided on the top ten best productions, which are all shown several times to all the spectators, including theatre people, and international guests who take these impressions back to their home countries. Tickets for all productions are readily available in advance. Unfortunately, there is still some inaccessibility: seats for wheelchair users are rather rare in Berlin. Berlin theatres are simply lagging behind European access standards used in Scandinavian countries, France, and the United Kingdom, and this kind of inclusion still doesn’t happen in most German theatres.

This year's ten productions came from nine theatres in three countries: Austria, Switzerland, and Germany. Represented are city theatre productions, such as a production from the Nuremberg State Theater; regular festival productions, such as from the Salzburg Festival; but also productions from the most important theatres and directors, such as Laios directed by Karin Beier and Bucket List by Yael Ronen at the Schaubühne Berlin, which were very well received by the audience. In my eyes two productions deserved the crown: Macbeth by Johan Simons and Middle Earth by Nikolas Stemann. Macbeth in particular stood out, not only because the classic text, centuries after it was written, tells a story like no other contemporary text about the unlawful seizure of power, the creation of toxic spaces, and the fear and anger of the powerless. But also, the directing concept made the play a celebration of first-class acting. Director Johan Simons divided the roles of a fifteen-person cast between three actors, who play different roles from scene to scene. Jens Harzer, who played the protagonist, is probably the best German-speaking actor of his generation and is made for Shakespeare's tragedies. As one of the most concise and precise actors on the country's largest theatre stages, he plays Macbeth like a modern-day opportunist and strategist grabbing for power. This resonated because there are so many of those opportunists in today's world in the top positions of politics, business, and culture.

Another important production came from the small alternative theatre house Jena, whose ensemble has just five actors—much less compared to Zürich, Hamburg, or others with over thirty engaged actors on a two-year basis. The Theaterhaus in the small Thuringian city Jena worked together with the Dutch actor/director team Wunderbaum. (Wunderbaum got its name from the small trees that hang from the rear-view mirror in many German and Dutch cars to spread a pleasant smell in the car. It is a sign of philistine lifestyle.) They created a piece based on the last major theatre scandal in Germany. A year ago, the chief choreographer of the Hannover Ballet, Mario Göcke, smeared the face of a critic with his dog's excrement to take revenge for the critic's bad reviews of his choreography over the last decades. For this he was fired in Hannover, Germany, but only a few months later he was given a new chance as ballet director at the much larger ballet in Basel, Switzerland. This incident inspired the Dutch director Walter Bart and Wunderbaum to create a real theatrical spectacle. Six actors on a vast stage discuss their difficulty to develop a drama about this situation; instead they read and dramatize the huge email thread they created for this production and do this with wit, intensity, and intelligence. For this, they stepped out of the shadow of the big city theatres and won the German Federal Theater Prize—the biggest German prize for a theatrical production.

A very different festival took place in June at the German Theater Berlin, which was much more open and radical in its approach to new topics in theatre such as queerness and the freedom to live a diverse life, the hard lives of the unprotected (like the temporary workers at Tesla, the parcel delivery people in Berlin, among others), domestic violence, and war. Leonie Böhm brought the premiere of Blutstück, adapted from Kim de l’Horizons Blutbuch (Book of Blood) from Schauspielhaus Zürich to Berlin, including the playwright as one of the actors. It is about the gender transformation of a queer person and all its problems, hardships, and pitfalls. Director Leonie Böhm uses the Swiss novel Blutbuch as a starting point for discussion with her ensemble, using it as a guide to answer questions about origins and the future. She wants to break the silence about experiences, memories, wishes, and gaps, especially when they are shaped by shame or pain. The more intensely people listen to their own body memory, the more they come across lives inherited over many generations that have flowed into them through stories, rituals, and narratives. We are the result of many, many lives and hundreds of stories. Does this mean we have more responsibility to represent these collective identities, and how do we really deal with this inheritance? How can we change things when we are connected to everything and yet also want to detach ourselves from it? In Blutstück, the author Kim also appears on stage and explains how her novel served more as a metatext of the discussion rather than as a classic dramatic text.

Another remarkable production was Elke Weinreich’s Request for Maximum Removal of Violence, written by Felicitas Zeller. Four women have left domestic violence behind and gone to the women's shelter. But problems await them here too: How are they supposed to finance their lives there? Who will help with the never-ending applications and the precise terminology of German bureaucracy? Who recognizes their pitfalls? Who guarantees that they will not be found again? Perhaps going back to the men who treat them badly is the best option for a little bit of happiness in life? Felicia Zeller puts unique, artificial language into the mouths of the characters. Vocabulary, melody, and structure arise from the characters' biographies as well as from the friction between their poetic search for small happiness in life and the real constraints that keep slowing them down.

The festival showed productions of fourteen contemporary texts by playwrights from all over the world, selected by the festival team. The works of the female authors were particularly outstanding. There was Ix (IphigenieX) written by Ewe Benbenek and directed by Claudia Bossard. The Polish playwright Ewe Benbenek created a drama about the moment when the ancient goddess Diana kidnapped King Agamemmnon’s daughter Iphigenie to the small Greek island Tauris to save her live. The divine abduction happened in the moment when Agamemnon wanted to sacrifice his daughter to Zeus. In his patriarchal view, a daughter must be sacrificed for some good weather conditions in order to finally be able to go to the long-awaited war. In Benbenek's drama, Iphigenie becomes a character who remains stuck in Tauris and who “speaks powerfully against the literary and theatrical tradition that has established her. (...) Iphigenia becomes a springboard from which the new text leaps off into a different narrative, into a different language.” 

Another great play is by Patty Kim Hamilton: And the Sky Above Us Is Its Own Country, which was also staged by the strong talent Sara Kurze. This play is about identification and “belonging, the concept of home and one's own self-image after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989.” Philipp, a young composer who grew up in the West, is looking for the home of his father, who came from Saxony-Anhalt, an East German region, and his mother, who originally came from North Korea. Philipp searches for traces of his family in his small home village and meets many new people who tell him stories that have something to do with him. At the same time, he encounters the madness of a fascist party that is gaining more and more influence and keeps showing its xenophobic face, which also affects him, and he feels how little he is actually wanted there.

This is the connection of German theatre—it is almost always political, and it reflects the world we are inhabiting and what we want to preserve for the future faster and better than any other art.

Like most other dramas, this show is about the world we live in, our daily fear and struggle for survival, our sadness and happiness. It is a timely drama, especially against the backdrop of elections in three eastern German states—Thuringia, Saxony, and Brandenburg—which will decide the future of democracy in the east of the country in September. It is about our strong fear that a German state will ever be a fascist state again. This is what connects German theatre: it is almost always political, and it reflects the world we are inhabiting and what we want to preserve for the future faster and better than any other art.

Nevertheless, these developments are already in danger again. Similar to New York in the 1980s and 1990s, the creative districts are being vehemently gentrified. The Eastern districts of Berlin that were once occupied and revitalized by artists are now being bought up by wealthy investors who are creating living space for high earners from the media, politics, and business sectors. They are driving the creative class into other districts, until their hunger for new neighborhoods begins again. And the city officials look on and do nothing to stop the increasing rents and the hunger of investors in order to protect the creative class and other people living in precarious conditions while the neighborhoods are becoming more and more expensive and unaffordable. If things continue this way, we may lose the creative Berlin we have grown to appreciate and love so much over the last more than twenty years. I am always grateful for summers filled with brilliant theatre while we still have them.