Ein Mann seiner Klasse

Poverty, fear and shame shape the childhood of Christian and his siblings. His frequently inebriated father is unpredictably violent and yet, Christian always wants him to stay. In his debut novel, author and journalist Christian Baron looks back on his own 1990s childhood in Kaiserslautern, and on a father who had many different faces. In this precise stage adaptation, director and actor Lukas Holzhausen and his cast present a sensitive and impressive portrait of classism, marginalisation and family solidarity.

Statement of the jury
Christian Baron grew up during the 1990s in Kaiserslautern, on the crumbling curb of the precariat. His father was an alcoholic and routinely hit Baron’s mother. And yet: “I always wanted him to stay”, says Christian Baron at one point. This violent-tempered, strong man was also the hero of his childhood. In this memoir published in 2020, Baron, who works as an editor and author today, talks about violence and love, and about how his family isolated themselves so that no one would know. A wordless amateur performer plays the father in Lukas Holzhausen’s production. Unperturbed by the events around him, he knocks together the poorly insulated one-room-flat designed by Katja Haß. The father’s loud voice shouts from offstage and in the coarsest Palatine dialect, interrupting the characters’ dialogue again and again. Together with the buzzing of the cordless screwdriver, this voice becomes the unpredictable soundtrack of the show. A show that talks intelligent and dispassionately about classism, about solidarity and family and about what it is like to grow up poor in this rich country.

Tojuror Katrin Ullmann’s video statement in the Berliner Festspiele Media Library (in German)