For the nameless narrator from Dostoyevsky's cellar hole, the hallowed modern age with its great promises of democracy, emancipation and progress means one thing above all: suffering. The boundless life in the big city, the claim to freedom, and the preciousness of one's own life plan - namely, to be able to live exactly as one wants to - seem, in the end, to be very much at odds with one's own world of experience. Instead, he remains isolated, alone, and thrown back on himself, aggrieved. But is there such a thing as "free will"?
Image gallery
Berliner Ensemble
Is it even possible to "live according to one's own imagination"? Or is that in the end only something for the "happy few" in a world that has long since been calculated and sold? The gulf between a society's moral claim and the deep grievance of those who do not feel considered by it leads straight into an ominous sensibility that can seemingly be met only with difficulty other than anger, indignation and self-abasement. In a reckoning and approach alike that is self-empowerment and profession of faith, Dostoevsky's protagonist attempts to find himself and back to the community.
Considered one of the first existentialist writings, Fyodor Dostoyevsky's novel Notes from the Cellar Hole was published in 1864 and found admiration from Friedrich Nietzsche as well as Albert Camus. In his "psychological study," the author, who had just been released from prison in Siberia, plagued by epileptic seizures and heavily indebted to his gambling addiction, explores no lesser questions than those concerning human freedom and the search for community.
(Program in German)
Additional information
THE INVISIBLE MOST THINGS IN LIFE ARE ORGANIZED INTO SYSTEMS—be they political systems and forms of government, economic systems, customs and language, myths and beliefs, or ways of organizing knowledge. People create systems to make nature, the environment, and every form of social interaction manageable. They offer protection against the void—against the meaninglessness and cruelty of the world.One problem this poses, however, is that systems always also imply power. They do make the world accessible, but almost never completely and never for everyone. The people who—rarely voluntarily—find themselves outside these systems are the ones at the center of Dostoevsky’s work: the invisible ones, who are not rich, smart, young, or progressive enough. These people are not welcome, and they rarely appear in literature. The danger posed by the invisible ones is that they reveal that systems are man-made and therefore changeable; they are both vulnerable and threatening in equal measure. These invisible ones show that there is something outside the system, and that is because systems are not natural. And if the world is changeable, that also means that we, who live within the systems, are responsible for them and must find a way to deal with what lies outside. The totality of systems levels humanity—this is evident in Dostoevsky in those who do not appear within them, who stand on the margins or on the brink of the abyss and do not know what to do next. For in them, human existence is revealed—as painful and endangered, yet free. For humans have a choice—albeit not an easy one. Dostoevsky insists that the freedom of humans, who see themselves lost between the two poles of the world—faith and knowledge—lies in the will. Where faith exhorts humans to moral humility and knowledge proves to humans that they are nothing more than a series of molecular causal chains, we can will freedom and are thus responsible. The world is a system teetering on the brink—and it is up to us to shape it. •Johannes Nölting
WITH Oliver KraushaarDIRECTOR Max LindemannSET DESIGN Katja PechCOSTUMES Anneke GoertzLIGHTING Arnaud PoumaratDRAMATURGY/ADAPTATION Johannes Nölting
WITH Oliver KraushaarDIRECTOR Max LindemannSET DESIGN Katja PechCOSTUMES Anneke GoertzLIGHTING Arnaud PoumaratDRAMATURGY/ADAPTATION Johannes Nölting
Participating artists
von Fjodor M. Dostojewski (Autor/in)
Oliver Kraushaar
Max Lindemann
Katja Pech
Anneke Goertz
Johannes Nölting
Dates
April 2026
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