Above the idyllic Almetal stands Germany's most famous triangular castle: the Wewelsburg. Behind its picturesque shape lies, in its 900-year history, also that part as a training facility of the SS, which today finds its processing in the memorial and commemorative site Wewelsburg 1933–45. The festival takes up the theme of the subsequently starting special exhibition “The Paderborn Land in the Weimar Republic” and ventures with Theresia Enzensberger in her debut novel “Blueprint” into the golden 1920s right in the Weimar Bauhaus. There, between grand visions and avant-garde aesthetics, conservative value and societal concepts are brewing. The novel tells of the breakout of a young architecture student from this unexpected corset and thereby reflects the upheavals and contradictions of this turbulent time.

Musically, violinist Franziska Hölscher and pianist Jacob Leuschner transport the audience into the past as they reinterpret works by Ravel and Beethoven in the spirit of this decade. In the second part, they musically transition into the darkest phase of German history.

Accompanied by works of German exile composers, the award-winning actor Florian Lukas, known among others from the television series "Weissensee," reads excerpts from Erich Kästner's "The Blue Book." Created between 1941 and 1945, the diary serves as a memorial against forgetting, silence, and the denial of memory of the horrors of National Socialism. Kästner extensively documented the crimes and inhumanities of his time, as well as the experiences of everyday life and bureaucracy under fascist rule. This kaleidoscopic insight into the self-proclaimed Third Reich represents both a fascinating literary testimony of the time and a necessary memento in light of the 80th anniversary of the German capitulation.