3–27/OKTOBER
THEATRE / PERFORMANCE / DISCOURSE

»The whole earth trembles. All continents are riven by the same crisis. There is not a single part of the planet...which is not shaken by the cyclone. In old Europe, men disappear, systems break, institutions collapse«.
Benito Mussolini

It is part of history’s irony that one of the founding fathers of fascism described the global extent of the First World War so precisely after the end of the war.  When the First World War officially ended, centuries-old empires disappeared from the map, the German Empire had to relinquish its colonies and was converted to the Weimar Republic after the November Revolution of 1918. In 1918, with the global expansion of the Russian Revolution, the ideological triad of the century— Communism, Fascism, and Liberal Democracy— evolved. These ideologies had been then translated into nationalism and the concept of the nation state. How are these pale fragments of history still relevant to our present? 

100 years after the end of the First World War, the War or Peace – Crossroads Of History 1918/2018 Festival – featuring theatre-makers from Germany, Georgia, Singapore, Tansania, Croatia, France, Slovenia, Argentina, Turkey, Bulgaria, Greece, Switzerland, Israel, Ukraine, Iran and Kurdistan – questions the global archaeology and heritage of this conflict: who can still speak of peace today? 

More than 400 young people from all over the world – invited to the campus by the Federal Agency for Civic Education – are also posing this question to themselves, creating a global memorial and utopia forum for the future. In workshops they deal with the consequences of 1918 and attempt to proactively comprehend the present in its complexity.

The consequences of this war still affect us today: »This blessed advance will not stop until we hit the last nail into the coffin of the Sykes-Picot conspiracy,« DAESH proclaimed in July 2014. On 16 May 1916, the division of the Ottoman Empire after the war was decided with the Sykes- Picot agreement. The demarcations based on this Franco-British agreement are, to this day, partially responsible for the endless conflicts that still haunt the region today. 

Mazlum Nergiz | Festival Curator War or Peace

Campus: Ein Projekt der Bundeszentrale für politische Bildung mit Unterstützung des Maxim Gorki Theaters, gefördert vom Auswärtigen Amt der Bundesrepublik Deutschland | Künstlerisches Programm: eine Kooperation des Maxim Gorki Theaters und der Kulturstiftung des Bundes, unterstützt von der Bundeszentrale für politische Bildung und dem Auswärtigen Amt der Bundesrepublik Deutschland | Weitere Förderer und Partner: Literarisches Colloquium Berlin, Robert Bosch Stiftung