Lion Feuchtwanger's "Success" is considered one of the most important key novels about Munich and Bavaria, If you want to learn something about the inhabitants of the state of Old Bavaria, you will still fall back on this novel published in 1930, whose subtitle "Three Years of History of a Province" limits the time of the plot to the years 1920 to 1923, the year of the Hitler putsch. Born in Munich, Feuchtwanger provides the panopticon of a society united by the rejection of modernity, even if they inhabit different worlds. In Feuchtwanger's work, they all appear, big-headed people, politicians, lawyers, demimondes, servants, artists and libertines – Dimpfl meets Dümpfl, amalgamated from various real people or invented, around a hundred figures, no psychological deep drilling.

Hannes Hintermeier

Feuilleton correspondent for Bavaria and Austria.

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The Jew Feuchtwanger describes the imminent seizure of power by the NSDAP, but at the same time considers it unimaginable. His book has 860 pages, but it doesn't seem really suitable for dramatization. But such an of strings, such as the one undertaken by the director and future Burgtheater artistic director Stefan Bachmann with dramaturge Barbara Sommer, must probably have its charm, especially since it was also rewritten. Nevertheless, one may ask again and again about the necessity of such "theatricalizations".

As if it were a rock concert

Bachmann is far removed from local colour, he turns Feuchtwanger's mountains of text into a bouillon cube. A hundred-and-fifty-minute, precisely choreographed revue, a danced Singspiel with choral interludes, a declamatory round dance in front of minimal stage design (Olaf Altmann): at the beginning and at the end, a grid of fifteen dark gray rectangles forms a wall in which a cell-like peephole opens only in the middle. The longest time is played on a revolving stage in the glow of tall arc lamps. And fog is constantly pouring out of the ground as if it were a rock concert. The music comes live from the pit, moving between swing, Charleston, Gstanzl, yodeling and "Die Wacht am Rhein".

Fourteen roles are mastered by the top-class ensemble of two women and eight men. The costumes are all Roaring Twenties, the make-up is strong, the language is High German, only the Minister of Justice Klenk (Florian von Manteuffel) comes along with a southern German accent, beer belly, lederhosen and jingling charivari. Two storylines stand side by side: Museum deputy director Martin Krüger (Thiemo Strutzenberger) has exhibited unpleasant pictures, including a naked self-portrait of a woman. In order to get rid of him, he has been charged with perjury, and now he is rotting in prison for three long years and holding woyzeck-like monologues.

"True Germans"

Meanwhile, his lover Johanna Krain (Liliane Amuat) tries to obtain an amnesty for Krüger on a course through the city's society. She is not squeamish and has affairs, but she stays on course, albeit increasingly stunned. Meanwhile, Krüger haunts the backstage as an androgynous beauty in a glitter bikini and feather boa, the gender boundaries were already fluid a hundred years ago. Politically, however, the majority of Munich residents are moving in one direction, namely that of the "True Germans" under the leadership of Rupert Kutzner, which naturally means Hitler and his partisans.