(A. J. Goldman’s article appeared in The New York Times, 11/21; via Pam Green.)
BERLIN — In Germany, with its lavish public support for the arts, going to the theater can seem like a civic duty.
In Andres Veiel’s “Let Them Eat Money. Welche Zukunft?!” at the Deutsches Theater Berlin, the audience showed its support with more than just its taxes: The play, a speculative look at a coming financial and political crisis that it predicted would hit Europe in the next decade, was created with input from the public.
“Let Them Eat Money. Welche Zukunft?!,” the last part of which means “Which Future?!” in German, is a collaboration between the Deutsches Theater and the Humboldt Forum, a new museum that will be housed in a rebuilt palace in the center of Berlin. The production grew out of a series of workshops and a symposium whose goal was to plot a credible path for European history to take over the next 10 years. Thirteen academics and 250 participants were invited to imagine that a global crisis would hit in the year 2026, and asked to construct a plausible chain of events to explain it — and, ideally, to work out how to avoid it.
In Mr. Veiel’s production, Italy’s departure from the European Union in 2023 leads the rest of Europe to introduce a basic universal income, a well-intentioned yet unsustainable measure that further plunges the continent into chaos as the euro loses its value and is replaced by shady cryptocurrencies.
Photo: Arno Declair
