Trommeln
in der Nacht

Off to political activism, or rather to safety: to the big white bed.

When Andreas Kragler returns home after years in captivity following the First World War, he finds the world at least as changed and scarred as he is. While the victors of the war are enjoying life with cherry brandy, armed uprisings are raging in Berlin. The war has left a power vacuum that is now being fiercely contested. Kragler is driven to his fiancée Anna, who has waited four years. But what use is love in theory? The times call for pragmatism: Kragler finds his beloved pregnant and newly engaged to the wealthy businessman Murk. Losing faith in justice, Kragler throws himself into the street fighting.

In times when wars are both close to us again and have become part of our everyday lives, Brecht's play once again becomes a poetic and political outcry. In these crisis-ridden times, can we still believe that the world can be changed? How much are we prepared to give for it? Or is it also a political gesture to withdraw from action and into a seemingly intact, bourgeois world?