Fabian oder Der Gang vor die Hunde

In the organizer's words:

by Erich Kästner

Adapted for the stage by Mirja Biel and Dinah Wiedemann

Here you can find the trailer.

Berlin at the end of the 1920s. The city is boiling. The nights flare up feverishly. In the middle of it all is Dr. Jakob Fabian: a self-proclaimed moralist and melancholic. By day he works as an advertising copywriter, by night he throws himself into the sinful underworld. Although the young democracy of the Weimar Republic is crumbling and the number of unemployed is rising, he is only interested in pleasure. He encounters figures who, with their extreme right-wing views, assert themselves in the fragile fabric of the world, but remains unable to look the reality of the day in the eye. Suddenly he meets Cornelia and falls in love: a glimmer of hope. But his life soon takes a dramatic turn: he becomes unemployed and Cornelia leaves him for her career. With each passing day, the political climate darkens, any utopia seems futile and the future remains hidden in the dark of night. Fabian has lost his way in the labyrinth of the big city and lost his ideals. The downward spiral gathers speed and pulls him into the abyss.

Mirja Biel's directorial work is characterized by atmospherically dense images. With her precise eye, she brings to the fore precisely the political mechanisms from Kästner's material that are currently threatening us.

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