The Goethe-Institut Washington, together with Scena Theatre, presents "Spotlight: Berlin," a series of Berlin play workshops featuring selections of the latest and most sensational plays to appear on the Berlin stage. These staged readings will take place on June 3, July 1, and August 26. All play readings will be in English.
The third play featured is Timur Vermes’s
Look Who’s Back (Er ist wieder da).
Adapted from the novel by Timur Vermes for its original run at the Schiller Theater in Berlin (January 5 to 22, 2017) by Axel Schneider. A production of the Altonaer Theater in Hamburg in cooperation with the Theater am Kurfürstendamm.
In 21st-century Berlin, in the chic and upscale neighborhood of Mitte, a man with an unmistakable mustache appears. Adolf Hitler is back in town – without war, without a party, Eva Braun nowhere to be found. In the deepest of peacetime, among thousands of people with migrant backgrounds, and with Angela Merkel as the Chancellor. More than sixty years after his supposed demise, the „Führer“ is stranded in the present, causing great confusion among those around him – and within himself. Clueless as to why he is trapped here, he analyzes the present condition of German society and determines what needs to be done. And he takes it to television, because who knows their way around propaganda better than him?
Look Who’s Back is an unrestrained satire on media that interrogates the boundaries of good taste, or whether they have been abolished altogether.
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Novelist
Timur Vermes was born in 1967 in Nuremberg. His father, a Hungarian activist, had fled from Hungary after the 1956 uprising. Vermes studied history and politics at the University of Erlangen before becoming a journalist. He has also worked as a ghostwriter. His first novel,
Look Who’s Back (
Er ist wieder da) (2011), was an enormous success in Germany.
Director, stage manager, and theater director
Axel Schneider studied philosophy, history, and Germanistics. Since 1990, he has worked in the theater. In 1995, he became director of the Altonaer Theater in his native Hamburg; among his productions are the world premieres of
Place of Birth: Bergen-Belsen,
Look Who’s Back,
Zweimal lebenslänglich (based on Stephen King’s
Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption), and
Ladykillers (57 productions in total). Since 2003, he has been the director of the Harburger Theater and the Hamburger Kammerspiele, and since 2005 for the "Haus im Park" in Bergedorf. In 2015, he was recognized as "Hamburger of the Year" in the culture category.
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