Jugend ohne Gott

In the organizer's words:

Play based on the novel by Ödön von Horváth

While reading the class tests, a teacher is confronted with a racist remark that contradicts his humanist convictions. He marks it and is confronted not only by the pupil's father, but by his entire class: they ask for his suspension and accuse him of having an anti-state attitude. The teacher and his pupils, the youth who are being playfully prepared for the next war by the ruling regime, become increasingly estranged from each other. But then one of the pupils is murdered during the camp - and the search for the murderer begins...

The 1937 novel Jugend ohne Gott (Youth without God) made the Austro-Hungarian playwright Ödön von Horváth internationally famous and was quickly regarded as the novel of the hour outside Germany. It was just as quickly banned in Germany. Horváth not only depicts a brutalized and radicalized youth who have internalized the ideas of National Socialism, but also a deeply insecure teacher who has increasingly lost her values under the pressure of everyday life and conformity. But in Horvàth's case, this is just the beginning of the struggle to find out what it means to remain human in polarized times.

In his second work after Gelbes Gold,director Tobias Schilling continues the political questioning of the present and also allows young people from Kassel to have their say in extensive video interviews. So what makes the young generation "tick"? What drives them? What are their thoughts, fears and wishes for the future?

Horváth's clear-sighted portrait of young people from the 1930s thus becomes a contrasting foil to our own time in order to address questions about the shift to the right and radicalization in a historically sound manner.