“How many days does it take to turn a war person back into a peace person?” the actor Katharina Bach asks the audience when she comes to the front of the stage in the final scene of Wallenstein. A slaughter feast in seven courses. After seven hours of theatrical heavy labour, she is exhausted and peels off her costume, a muscular man’s body made of latex. She leaves it behind her like a snake discarding its dead skin: it lies there on the stage, heavy and ready for battle.
The Theatertreffen reveals the themes that have concerned artists and their audiences in the past year. In 2026 one central experience has had an enduring influence on thinking on German stages: war. Jan-Christoph Gockel’s interpretation of Wallenstein condenses this experience into an image of exhaustion. With a notable shift of perspective: it is women in male costume who put war on stage for us – the same war of which Schiller said, more or less, that we would know it exclusively from the descriptions of men.
With female perspectives the Theatertreffen productions challenge conventional oppositions between male and female. Roles are read in new ways – such as the army portrayed by women in Gockel’s Wallenstein or in Jaz Woodcock-Stewart’s interpretation of Die Glasmenagerie (The Glass Menagerie) that focusses on a daughter who can be read as queer. Other works make the shift of perspective itself their theme: they examine power, the right of interpretation and social lines of conflict like Julian Hetzel’s Three Times Left is Right or reflect on the theatre in its own attributions like Julia Riedler and Leonie Böhm’s Fräulein Else. At the same time, femininity represents a new collective strength on stage when performers of different ages and both with and without disabilities come together to make human beings’ fragility and power of resistance visible in A Year without Summer by Florentina Holzinger.
Women are not the only ones who tell of such shifts of perspective at the Theatertreffen; it is an aesthetic experiment that transcends gender boundaries. And this development is also evident in numbers: women artists are responsible for six of the ten productions. And there is another gratifying thing: the inclusion of actors with disabilities is becoming increasingly self-evident and opening new aesthetic possibilities. In this way the Theatertreffen itself is becoming a place of transformation: established images and roles are being done away with and new bodies and perspectives are emerging. The question of how violence can be transformed into experience and “a war person can turn back into a peace person” remains open but it has found a new form on stage.
We wish visitors to the 2026 Theatertreffen some exciting experiences. We offer our sincere thanks to the Theatertreffen Director Nora Hertlein-Hull and this year’s jury, the Director of the Berliner Festspiele Matthias Pees and the whole team. We wish all those taking part both on- and backstage, great success, loud applause and send them a heartfelt “toi toi toi”.
Katarzyna Wielga-Skolimowska
CEO / Artistic director German Federal Cultural Foundation
Kirsten Haß
CEO / Administrative Director German Federal Cultural Foundation