Katzelmacher

They are stuck in the provinces and want to leave. They can’t live with or without each other. They eye each other and tear each other apart. Their boredom, envy and money worries feed their prejudices. Until their aggression is unleashed on Jorgos, who came to Bavaria from Greece as a guest worker. With “Katzelmacher”, Fassbinder portrayed the social and cultural struggles of a suburban neighborhood in Bavaria at the end of the 1960s.

For his productions, Emre Akal and the artist duo Mehmet & Kazim create imaginative artificial worlds in which analog and digital means blur into an illusion of their own. For “Katzelmacher”, he confronts the mechanisms of a desperate and racist society of the late 1960s with its revenants in the present and future. Inspired by Adorno’s studies on the authoritarian character, the production examines a recurring dynamic: people who feel humiliated humiliate others in order to elevate themselves.

In a specially written epilogue, Emre Akal takes a look at the world of Fassbinder’s “Katzelmacher” from a different space and a different time.

“The fact that the issues in ‘Katzelmacher’ are so timeless demonstrates how important it is to constantly continue to address them. Each generation faces their own versions of these social struggles. The question arises: are we capable of creating something new with old tools?”

– Emre Akal, director