Der Bau

Play based on Franz Kafka With: Sebastian Adler / Director: Nelly Eichhorn / Duration: 75 min

"I have set up the building and it seems well done."

Franz Kafka wrote his story The Building exactly 100 years ago. In it, he describes the desperate, increasingly paranoid attempts of an animal to protect its self-built burrow from potential dangers. Kafka's narrative fragment, which was published posthumously by Max Brod in 1928, is a physical and psychological metaphor for modern-day impoverishment. The constant imagination of what could happen leads into the realm of phobias, which present themselves in the glaring light between shadow projections and digging in the earth. Every step is immediately questioned. Certainties have to be reconsidered, doubts grow: Is the plant really as safe as we thought? How can this be verified? Is it possible to observe one's own retreat from the outside without drawing the attention of potential enemies? In his imagination, sounds are transformed into a massive proboscis animal that stirs up new fears and promotes paranoia by breathing in and out. The text laconically dissects a field of tension between the need for security and paranoia.