Jugend ohne Gott

A class of teenagers declares war on their teacher. He senses a vast generational divide and believes that the ‘Age of Pisces’ has dawned. His pupils are growing up in a climate of emotional coldness and pressure to achieve. The system tolerates no dissent; it is training them for a struggle in which only the stronger will prevail. The teacher is a cog in this system, but inwardly conflicted – he surveils his students just as they do him. Lost in his own contradictions, he resolves to throw a spanner in the works of deceit and brutalisation. However, it is only after a pupil is murdered at a training camp that he finally finds the strength to speak the truth at the ensuing trial. It costs him his career and his personal life, but he triggers an ‘infection with the truth’. Is there such a thing as a just punishment? Is there anything left for us to believe in?

The author Ödön von Horváth – who, until 1937, found himself caught in a dilemma between resisting the rising tide of Nazism and seeking personal recognition – effectively wrote himself into permanent exile with this novel. The question of truth and the capacity for empathy becomes highly topical in a society where God no longer exists. Horváth termed this ‘the stupefaction of the air’; we call it digital access to the world. In her productions, director Felicitas Brucker translates the plight of individuals trapped by societal mechanisms into powerful, physical imagery.

“When character is no longer tolerated, but only obedience, the truth departs and the lie arrives.” – from “Jugend ohne Gott” (“Youth Without God”)