Alles Glück der Welt

In Thomas Brasch’s previously unpublished comedy screenplay Alles Glück der Welt, the East German poet and writer imagines a future in 1985 that feels strangely familiar in today’s world. Full of humour, he depicts a society after the fall of the Berlin Wall in which the Nazi past has not been dealt with but continues to exert its influence. Although the political division of Germany into East and West has formally come to an end, it persists in people‘s minds, bodies, and relationships.  A new war seems imminent. People wear gloves, and there is widespread fear of an epidemic – of anything that might be contagious. Intimacy feels like an imposition. Freedom only exists in the form of collective isolation.

The year is 1999, and Berlin is located at the seaside. After attending a US military boarding school, Robert Küssler, son of an arms manufacturer, returns home. His unexpected arrival rocks the family's world. Will he be able and willing to carry on the family business as tradition dictates? The family crisis is a lens through which societal conditions are magnified, offering a glimpse inside bourgeois structures and ideas of emancipation that are shaped by economic interests and ideological continuities. The songs, written by Brasch in the spirit of punk, draw on the traditions of music theater from the 1920s.

Lena Brasch was born in Berlin in 1993. She is a writer and director, and the niece of Thomas Brasch. Having close access to her uncle‘s unpublished screenplay, she decided to revisit her family history and examine the film script from a contemporary perspective. Her own work navigates between literature, pop culture and political analysis. She likes to fuse her biographical entanglements and contemporary discourses to develop a new form of theatre that does not attempt to reconstruct the past, but reimagines it as part of the present, making the future conceivable as an open possibility beyond traditional narratives

Performance rights: Suhrkamp Verlag GmbH, Berlin
The screenplay on which the play is based was written in the mid-1980s with the involvement of the Von Vietinghoff Filmproduktion.

Premiere: Nov 25, 2026