Der Prozess

Nothing is normal here. Although everything in Josef K.'s life is going reasonably smoothly, he is arrested by a mysterious authority on his 30th birthday. There are never any concrete charges - just a confrontation with a system that K. does not understand: a nightmare logic that repeatedly defies his expectations. His everyday life becomes overwrought with legal structures. Disturbing figures talk to him. So K. the man is waiting for a trial. But what trial is he really going through? Is K. - quite naively and nervously - guilty without knowing it? In the end, every realization comes too late, and the verdict is unshakeable: Josef K. is guilty - because he is alive.

Franz Kafka, born in 1883, comes from a Jewish family in Prague. At the time, Prague was part of the Habsburg Empire - numerous nationalities, cultures, languages and political currents existed side by side. Kafka began writing "The Trial" in 1914, in the turmoil of the beginning of the First World War. What world does this work belong to today? Does Kafka's posthumously published novel fragment become a mirror of contemporary constraints and existential conflicts - a question of (individual) responsibility in a contradictory and overwhelming reality?

For the first time, director Michael Thalheimer is staging a novel by Franz Kafka, who died almost 100 years ago on June 3, 1924.

Duration 2h, no intermission

Premiere November 18, 2023, Thalia Theater