Anyone interested in why the far-right AfD is currently achieving unprecedented success in East Germany cannot overlook Lukas Rietzschel's "The Exemplary Life of Samuel W." The "theater piece made up of interview sequences," as the subtitle states, consists of edited snippets from over 100 conversations that the author conducted between January and September 2022; a few of them are entirely fictional: "It can't be precisely assigned anymore, unfortunately," he says. Not a big disaster. Rietzschel has stirred vigorously in the primordial soup of opinions, memories, projections, hopes, and experiences in Saxony: a journey through the mood in the eastern province 35 years after the reunification. ~ Franz Wille

A commissioned work of the Gerhart-Hauptmann-Theater Görlitz-Zittau