Berlin Alexanderplatz

Live! That’s what Franz Biberkopf wants to do. Set free, but with no idea where to go, he staggers through a big city that is devouring him. He crashes into sexual adventures, petty crime and gets dangerously close to the diabolic gangster Reinhold. His entanglement in violence and power struggles doesn’t just cost him his arm: his lover, the prostitute Mieze, is murdered. In his classic big city novel BERLIN ALEXANDERPLATZ, Alfred Döblin throws Biberkopf into the seething streets of Berlin in the Twenties. Using expressive language and collages of everything from advertising slogans to Biblical verses, Döblin finds a literary equivalent of the increasingly complex society between the two world wars. The audience experiences a society’s inability to cope in times of radical change and sensory overload. With a large-scale ensemble, director Hermann Schmidt-Rahmer produces spectacular poetic images to explore what happens when the tools are missing to meaningfully piece together the fragments of our perception. What questionable worldviews and actions might they lead to? And how can we justify unscrupulousness, servility and violence to ourselves? Biberkopf, carried away by his own megalomania, self-pity and the bright lights of the city, adopts a flippant attitude of defiance to every misfortune – until death opens his eyes.