Nathan der Weise

In the organizer's words:

Nathan returns from a journey to find his house burnt down. He fears for the life of his Jewish-educated daughter Recha, who was rescued from the flames by the Christian temple ruler. The fact that the templar himself is still alive is nothing short of a miracle: it was only because of his resemblance to the younger brother of the Muslim Sultan Saladin that the latter spared him from execution.

Gotthold Ephraim Lessing sets his dramatic poem about the wise Jew Nathan in Jerusalem at the time of the Crusades. Christian conquerors had repeatedly attempted to capture the city, which at that time was the focal point of all three monotheistic world religions. Lessing depicts Nathan's laborious and often perilous attempt to reach an understanding across all religious and cultural boundaries, based on tolerance and humanism. He deliberately chooses the Jew Nathan as the ambassador of his enlightened thinking, he also gives Saladin the traits of an enlightened ruler and shows religious fanaticism above all in the characters who represent Christianity. It is not only with the famous Ring Parable that the author provides an example of the power of argumentation to counter violence.

In his first production for the Staatsschauspiel Dresden, director Hermann Schmidt-Rahmer works out how endangered Lessing's utopia was and is and how much it costs to preserve it again and again.

You can find a trigger warning about the production here.