Perfection

Urban open spaces—themselves remnants of a turbulent history—were discovered as temporary galleries, party venues, and affordable housing, and over time transformed into interchangeable surfaces and objects of speculation with freshly painted facades. This applied not only to vacant properties but also to their residents and visitors, who were allowed to temporarily enhance the value of derelict buildings with their cultural capital.

At the center of Vincenzo Latronico’s novel *The Perfections*, nominated for the Booker Prize last year, are Anna and Tom. They came here from southern Europe in the mid-2000s to escape the confines of their homeland. Drawn to digitally generated designs that promise self-realization and an idealized form of contemporaneity, they must increasingly come to terms with the fact that such images dissolve precisely when they begin to become reality.

The city becomes a setting for loneliness and transcendental homelessness: freedom and self-realization seem within reach at any moment. At the same time, the characters have lost any meaningful connection between the individual, the world, and history. In Anna and Tom’s lived experience, past, present, and future blur together. Just as do the “East” and “West” of Berlin.

Were the promises of tailor-made life plans centered on individuality merely the beginning of an adaptation to a new uniformity?

Three years after Anna and Tom, in 2007, Munich-born director Anta Recke also moved to Berlin to live there and graduate from high school. Today she is one of the most distinctive voices in contemporary German-language theater, known for her vivid visual worlds and bold conceptual staging.

For her production *Perfection*, Recke collaborated with set designer and visual artist Marta Dyachenko to create an arena in which the lines of sight of all those present can move freely. As a counterpoint to carefully curated Instagram realities, the theater emerges as a place of gathering where what is being stared at naturally stares back.

The Prater on Kastanienallee itself—with its history as a former popular theater and as the subject of a real estate dispute—becomes a meta-set design for the production of *Perfection*, creating its own layer of meaning. The Prater was closed for ten years due to renovations. Now it has been completely renovated, a reconstruction and museum piece of a bygone world. It is 2026, and the Volksbühne is now returning to this building steeped in memories. Who is still there? Who has long since left? Who will come? And with regard to Berlin and Germany as a whole: Who is still allowed to come, today and in the future?