Epoch Theater
At the United Nations General Assembly on September 24, 2026, Nepal’s Prime Minister Balendrah Shah, at 36 the youngest head of state, gave an impassioned speech urging the international community to address the climate crisis that had led to the devastating “Himalayan tsunami” four weeks prior. The “death and destruction of epic proportions”, he said “was a warning to the world” and that “climate change does not recognize borders’. He reminded the global community that Nepal contributes less than 0.1% of global greenhouse emissions, and that the climate catastrophe it experienced now forces “a poor country to borrow money to fix a problem it did not cause.” He called the Himalayas “part of the planet’s life support system” and urged wealthier countries who had contributed the most to the problem of climate change to step up and provide not only support for “relief, rehabilitation, and reconstruction” but also take responsibility and provide reparation to build resilience “to ensure that disaster does not become a permanent condition.”
Heatwaves, wildfires and wildfire smoke, perennial drought, flooding, storm surges, and a looming historic El Niño are real-life reminders that the climate crisis is far from a distant threat. It is here and impacting us all. Despite well-funded efforts to discredit the scientific consensus linking human activity and global warming, it has only strengthened, with more than 99.9% of peer-reviewed studies now affirming that human activity is driving global warming. Yet, according to recent surveys by Yale Program on Climate Change Communications, 65% of Americans rarely or never talk about climate change with their family and friends, and 81% rarely or never hear about it in the news.
Although global warming threatens the essential systems we require to survive on planet earth, it is receiving less attention in 2026 than in years prior. This exhibition of photographs from German theater productions centering on the topic of climate change aims to help change that, because we know that conversations about it are the necessary first step towards awareness, advocacy, and action.
Live theater is far less popular in America than in Germany. Fewer than 10% of Americans regularly attend live stage plays. That figure is significantly higher, around 35-40%, in Germany, where theaters receive public subsidies and most cities and even smaller towns have their standing ensembles. Since Americans can’t easily go there, however, we at the Center for German and European Studies at Brandeis University and the Heinrich Böll Foundation in Washington, D.C. thought it would be nice to bring German theater to you. So we emailed theaters in cities all across Germany and asked them to send us photos of productions related to the climate crisis. We had no idea whether we would hear anything back, so were truly blown away when dozens of theaters responded. Due to space constraints we could only incorporate a small number of these powerful images from twelve productions into our exhibit. Additional images are available at the links in our bibliography, and we wish to express our deepest gratitude to all who responded so generously to our request.
Each image in our exhibition represents a frozen moment in a dramatic story about global warming written by an author or a team of authors, and staged between 2020 and 2024 in different cities across Germany. Though they provide merely a glimpse into the totality of German climate theater productions, they give you a sense of its creative breadth and depth and cosmopolitan outlook. Be that through adaptations from Greek drama like Alexander Eisenach’s Anthropos Antigone or the reimagined Oracle of Delphi in Fink Kleidheu’s Der Nabel der Welt. Where the Eagles Meet or Johan Simon’s version of Spanish-Mexican filmmaker Luis Buñuel’s film Der Würgenengel and other world premieres like Amir Gudarzi’s Wonderwomb or Lothar Kittstein’s 216 Million. From German productions of translations of American playwrights T.C. Boyle’s Blue Skies and Jonathan Safran Foer’s We Are The Weather to Marlene Gmelin and Detlef Schmelz’s collectively performed puppet theater ~°C+ Ein paar Grad plus, die Klimakonferenz. Eine Fabel für unser Klima about a drowning UN Climate Conference in New York City to Simone Sterr’s 99 Schritte zum Meer about the missed chances to rein in climate change despite decades of warnings. There is a lot to see and grapple with.
Our hope is that you will let the production photographs alert you, perhaps haunt you, but most importantly move you to care, because climate theater, as my colleague Tom King writes, is not just about urgent messages. These performances “are also vehicles of transformation, training individuals to rehearse alternative futures in the here-and-now, to engage across their disparate identifications and interests, and to move in a shared direction determined by commitments to solidarity.”
Such solidarity is urgently needed now. The United States, still the highest per-capita emitter, is the only one out of 195 signatories to have withdrawn from the Paris Agreement and the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. Even the oil-rich gulf states are still committed to the process. Recent years have seemingly buried the climate crisis under a whole host of other crises, from global pandemic to war and threats to democracy. While the climate crisis is interconnected with them all, it has one beautiful advantage: well-known and even affordable solutions. We invite you to learn more about them in the back of this catalogue.
“O, for a muse of fire
Now is the winter of our discontent”
- thus opens the prologue to Shakespeare’s Henry V. Written in 1599, it might as well be a line about the climate crisis in 2026. One of the many beauties of theater is its universality. It speaks to us all whenever we are. The most famous German play,Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s (1749-1832) drama ‘Faust’, does so, too. Its “Vorspiel auf dem Theater”, a kind of prelude, opens with a friendly quarrel between an idealist poet, a business-focused producer, and a clown, who argue about the true purpose of theater. While the poet aims to create a sublime work of art, and the clown just wishes to make people laugh, the producer is mainly concerned about the audience and its expectations. He warns “although they aren’t used to the best”, they “have read an awful lot” and are now “sitting there, relaxing in their seats, with raised eyebrows, expecting to be amazed”. Most importantly, he is convinced that people come to the theater above all “to watch…to see”, to be captured by the beauty of the staged experience. Which he poses as the challenge the three of them must meet. Whether or not you are someone who is “used to the best” and whether you read a lot or not – we hope you are ready to be captured!
That theatrical performance has an important role to play in people’s education has a long tradition in German theater history. Already in 1784, Goethe’s poet friend Friedrich Schiller (1759-1805 - you may know him from his ‘Ode to Joy’) had called the theater a “moral institution” and argued that the stage takes up the sword of justice where secular law fails, using fantasy and history to cultivate empathy, virtue, and emotional intelligence in the audience. As Brendan O’Donnell explains below, in the 20th century, Bertolt Brecht took this idea a big step further. Given that Brecht, who fled Germany in 1933 and spent six years in exile in California 1941-47, is perhaps the name most familiarly associated with German theater in the US today, we decided to organize the exhibition around Brechtian concepts.
Although Bertolt Brecht was one of the earliest and most outspoken antifascist critics of Hitler’s National Socialists, and had fled first to Denmark in 1933 and then to the United States in 1941, he eventually returned to Europe following his subpoena by the House Un-American Activities Committee in 1947 to avoid being blacklisted in the US. He settled in East Germany and established the Berliner Ensemble, which is still one of the most prominent German theaters today. Brecht’s life thus mirrors our time in multiple ways as well.
While Brecht’s understanding of theater involved critical thinking to inspire social change, the poet in Goethe’s prelude to Faust was more interested in moving hearts and minds: “That which issues from the heart alone / Will bend the hearts of others to your own”. To achieve this, the producer, you could also call him a “showman”, urges actor and poet to dream big:
“You know, on our German stages,
Everyone tries whatever they like;
So on this day, spare me
Neither the sets nor the machinery.
Make full use of the light of heaven, great and small;
You may lavish the stars;
There is no shortage of water, fire, or rocky cliffs,
Nor of animals and birds.
So, within this cramped wooden theater,
Unfold the entire circle of creation,
And journey with measured haste
From heaven through the world to hell.”
Though Faust does indeed end up in hell at the end of Faust I, Goethe, always ahead of his time, already understood the value of a sequel. In Faust II, the hero ends up in heaven instead, thanks in part to young Gretchen, the girl he had seduced in Faust I, whose spirit intervenes on his behalf. As the Chorus Mysticus concludes: all earthly, transient things are merely symbols of a higher, divine reality, and the “Eternal Feminine” (Das Ewig-Weibliche) leads humanity upward.
Our exhibition of photos from German climate theater productions can’t guarantee you a place in heaven, but as you will see, the productions featured here have spared no effort to inspire you to “move heaven and hell” for a better future. They invite you to deep moral reflection, and urge you to dream big: to not be intimidated by the scale of the problem, but to choose to become part of the scaling up of the solutions instead.
I’d like to close with special thanks to my team, especially Sonja Catano, who coordinated the exhibit from start to finish, and to Carina Domat and Katherine Bulthuis, our student assistants, for their help in the outreach phase. Thanks most especially to Brendan ODonnell for his enthusiastic embrace of this collaboration and to the twelve photographers whose work is featured in the exhibition: Jasmin Schuller (Blue Skies at Deutsches Theater Berlin), Felix Grünschloss (Wir sind das Klima at Badisches Staatstheater Karlsruhe), Marlene Gmelin and Detlef Schmelz (~°C+ Ein paar Grad plus, die Klimakonferenz of the puppet theater PendelMarionetten in Ingelfingen-Hermuthausen) Matthias Jung (216 Millionen at Theater Bonn), Jan Bosch (Wonderwomb and Ilnur Albatros at Hessisches Landestheater Marburg), Mariann Menke (99 Schritte zum Meer of Bremer Shakespeare Company), Armin Smailowic (Der Würgeengel [The Angel of Death] of Schauspielhaus Bochum and Der Schimmelreiter/Hauke Haiens Tod at Deutsches Theater Berlin), Giannis Antonoglou and Jennifer Fey (Der Nabel der Welt. Where the Eagles Meet of German-Greek Theater Cologne), Jörg Metzner (Wie ist das Wetter? of Theater Strahl Berlin), and Katrin Ribbe (Anthropos Antigone of Staatstheater Kassel). Thanks also to the team at the Brandeis University library, Mary Calo and Matthew Sheehy, for welcoming us back to their space, and to the DAAD (German Academic Exchange Service) and the Heinrich Böll Foundation for their financial support without which this would not have been possible.