Frankenstein oder: Schmutzige Schöpfung

In the organizer's words:

The scientist Viktor Frankenstein seems to have achieved what mankind has been longing for for ages: to overcome the laws of life and death like a god. One stormy night, he experiments with dead material in his laboratory in Ingolstadt, and a stitched-together heart actually begins to beat. A human-like creature sees the light of day. But for its creator, the creature quickly turns out to be a source of horror. Full of disgust, Frankenstein rejects his nameless monster, which from then on wanders around on its own. In a futile search for belonging and meaning, it finally swears revenge - and so begins a hunt that leads creator and creation to the end of the world and ends in death and despair.

But who is the monster here? Mary Shelley, aged just 18, began work on "Frankenstein" as part of the iconic writing competition on Lake Geneva in the summer of 1816 - a dark summer in which the sun did not even shine during the day due to the climatic consequences of a volcanic eruption in Indonesia. Her novel, published two years later under a pseudonym, is now a modern classic, has been made into many films and is considered the birth of the horror and science fiction genre. In it, the later anarchist deals with fundamental questions about humanity in an increasingly fast-paced modern age and questions human hubris in an age of social alienation and individual forlornness.

In-house director Philipp Arnold and his team use this iconic material to create virtual worlds of possibility, tracing primal human desires and failings. At a time when people are increasingly disappearing behind their own inventions and sheer unregulated technical progress is presenting us with ever more complex problems, one question is increasingly taking center stage: What can people still rely on? And can we still take responsibility for what we create?