Demian

A cooperation with Das Beet (Kistnerstraße 54).

Emil Sinclair grows up in a sheltered middle-class home. But even as a child, he feels magically attracted to the forbidden and unconventional. His slightly older schoolmate Max Demian fueled his fascination, leading the way as a shining role model. An intense friendship of enormous attraction develops between the two, which shapes and accompanies Emil from then on. The years begin with a wild search for freedom from the oppressive norms of his parents' world and for himself. Torn between intoxication and meditation, love and desire, pursued and guided by intense dreams, Sinclair goes through a life of extremes. Emotional inner life and the outside world merge. The First World War breaks out and seems to finally give Emil the task he has been searching for so long - until a grenade transports him to the brutal reality of a military hospital.

In his stage adaptation of Hesse's classic, director Kornelius Eich (*1989) looks at Emil Sinclair's story from this end point and examines his development, which began as an idealistic search for renewal and ends in destruction.