Sternstunden der Menschheit (DECISIVE MOMENTS IN HISTORY)

Napoleon meeting his Waterloo, Lenin returning to Russia in secret, Scott narrowly missing discovering the South Pole and the cumbersome process of laying the first telegraph cable across the Atlantic – Stefan Zweig’s historical miniatures illustrate points at which the course of world history changed in one brief moment. And his descriptions include the chaos, accidents and coincidences that led to those moments. The errors, pig-headedness and vanity of his dubious heroes combine to form an unintended portrait of humanity in all its contradictions.

This theatrical version of Zweig’s «decisive moments» is set in the here and now: in a museum depository full of now useless statues and the ruins of two thousand years of European history, the Munich ensemble reconstructs this tangle of haphazard events and lofty plans that went awry. An absurd, circus-like panorama of missing walls, collapsing houses of cards and talking cannonballs. Zweig’s evocations of the supposedly safe world of yesterday, its pioneering spirit and the heroism of its discoverers, poets, thinkers and generals are intercut with the story of his own convoluted escape route through the ravages of world history: forced to leave his home in Salzburg, restlessly searching for a new, safe place to stay, he eventually takes his own life in Brazil.

As always with the theatre of Thom Luz, a resident director at the Residenztheater since 2019, music also plays a leading role. While the sounds of Zweig’s stories pile up on top of each other like shirts in a steamer trunk over the course of the performance, the actors encounter the melodies of the new world – a Brazilian suadade that, for all its melancholy, is never truly sad.