“The Sweet Scent Doesn’t Come from Roses,” titled “The Corpse Opera”

With the cheeky irreverence of youth and a healthy dose of talent, they poured their frustration with the system into their hearts and had no idea what a timeless hit they had created. A student song opera based on this was first performed internally in Schöneweide in the spring of 1989, then publicly for the first time at the Babylon cinema in January 1990, and from the summer of 1990 at the Deutsches Theater.

The television recording now being shown at the Theater im Delphi, *Der süße Duft kommt nicht von Rosen* (The Sweet Scent Does Not Come from Roses), known as *Leichenoper*, was one of the last productions of GDR television and was broadcast on October 8, October 1990—three days after the Unification Treaty came into effect. A historical document of the fall of the Berlin Wall.

The story of the Rohmayer couple, who one morning find the mayor’s corpse in their bedroom, became a satire on power, morality, and the temptations of opportunism.

With humor and subversive songs, Daniel Morgenroth (lyrics), Christoph Schambach (music), and Peter Dehler (director) posed the question: How far will a person go to satisfy their hunger for power? Film screening followed by a panel discussion with eyewitnesses Christoph Schambach (composer, conductor) and Thorsten Merten (actor, lead actor in the film) as well as experts Johanna Stapelfeldt (cultural studies scholar) and Matthias Brenner (actor, director).

IN GERMAN