Homo faber at Nationaltheater Mannheim

»I do not believe in fate or destiny. As a technician I am accustomed to calculating with formulas of probability. How come fate?« (Walter Faber)

Walter Faber is a rational person, a doer. He believes he has his whole life under control. But when he is a passenger in an airplane that must make an emergency landing in the desert of Tamaulipas in Mexico, an adventurous journey begins that throws his life completely off the rails. He sets off to Guatemala with Heribert, who he has just met on the plane and who is the brother of his old friend Joachim. When they arrive they find out Joachim has died and they bury him. Since Walter must travel to Paris on business, he decides spontaneously to book a cruise. On board he meets the young woman Sabeth, not knowing that she is his daughter. Sabeth was brought up by Hanna, Walter’s childhood sweetheart, and Joachim after Walter left Hanna in order to work abroad. Sabeth and Walter fall in love, but what begins happily ends up as a tragedy of biblical proportions.

With his novel Homo Faber published in 1957, Max Frisch presents technology and myth not as opposites contrasting one another, but shown rather as complementary portraits of world interpretations. He asks the eternal question of the consequences of human behavior and subjects Walter constantly against the forces of destiny.

Georg Schmiedleitner, who recently staged Woyzeck at the Nationaltheater, will direct.