Nullerjahre

Studio Production 2024
Stage version by Marco Damghani

In his furious debut novel “Nullerjahre”, Hendrik Bolz describes a double culture shock: In his Berlin “exile”, his protagonist – or rather, his autobiographical first-person narrator – learned to stay away from the cultural codes of his youth; he has learned that a coat by Alpha Industries, combat boots and a propensity towards violence may have helped him find acceptance in his home town, but not in the world of college students. Here, social approval is won by different behaviour, and exclusion is much more subtle. A trip to see his old friends back home turns into another culture shock and triggers a rage of storytelling which relentlessly unfurls his own past in confrontation with his former self. Where exactly do we come from – and what is the point of being there? “There’s nothing nice, nothing beautiful here, it’s all fake, and it’s all a wind-up, a pile of shit painted in pretty colours.” His youth was shaped by drugs, violence, toxic masculinity, right-wing extremism and immense personal insecurity.

Before “Nullerjahre” was published, Hendrik Bolz had already directly and confidently expressed the experience of the generation who grew up after German reunification: As “Testo”, he belongs to the Berlin hip hop-duo Zugezogen Maskulin who anticipated the novel’s stories in tracks like “Plattenbau O.S.T.”.

Directed by Marco Damghani, “Nullerjahre” will be the point of departure for Schauspiel Leipzig’s analysis of experiences of social transformation, of being young in turbulent times. How can we relate to the stories Hendrik Bolz tells, what are ways of tracing back our own experiences as young people?

Marco Damghani was born in Hamburg in 1992 and studied directing at Berlin’s Hochschule für Schauspielkunst Ernst Busch as well as at the National Institute of Dramatic Arts in Sydney. He works as an author, director and moderator, focussing on political issues, questions of (post-) migrant society and the connection between the personal and the systemic. The monodrama “Die Leiden des jungen Azzlack”, which he developed together with Eidin Jalali, received the 2022 German theatre prize DER FAUST in the category of “Best performer in theatre for young audiences”. “Anouk & Adofa” was invited to the 2023 Autor:innentheatertage at Deutsches Theater Berlin and is still part of Diskothek’s programme.