FAUST GRETCHEN

In the organizer's words:

"My peace is gone " - one of the sentences that remains when you think back to the treasure trove of quotes from Goethe's Faust. A quote that reflects the dilemma of Margaret, known as Gretchen. The well-to-do scholar Dr. Heinrich Faust, on the other hand, is in a crisis of meaning; rejuvenated by his alliance with Mephisto, he is driven on and on to world-shattering adventures and, incidentally, is attracted by the "eternal feminine ". Heinrich is torn and seeks the noise of the world. And Gretchen?

Goethe followed the real-life case of the child murderess Susanna Margaretha Brandt (1771) in Frankfurt, at the same time writing his Urfaust, which now adds the Gretchen tragedy to the traditional Faust story. Set somewhere between a social situation and a tragic love story, it tells the real, fatal and hopeless fate of a young woman of the time. It is not only Faust and his desire, but also the enormous circumstances of the time that bring Gretchen down. Women like Gretchen were mostly uneducated, ignorant, dependent and threatened by poverty and misery.

What traces does Faust's forward momentum leave in the life of Gretchen, who lives in middle-class yet poor circumstances? What chance did she have in life and would social advancement have been possible at all? A young woman caught between desire, self-assertion and social coercion on the one hand and citizens on the other, who believe they know Gretchen's story and retell it from their perspective. Emilia Reichenbach was nominated for the Gustav Rühle Prize in 2022 for her role as Gretchen.

"It's time we set out to give Gretchen back her dignity in 2021," says Bert Zander, director and video artist. His previous works at the interface between video art and theater have been shown at the Volksbühne Berlin, the Thalia Theater Hamburg and the Burgtheater Vienna, among others. In 2020, he realized Camus' The Plague as a theatrical miniseries for 3sat / ZDF.