I’M SEARCHING FOR I:N:R:I (MILITARY FUGUE). Director Jossi Wieler

Western Germany, end of the 1950s - a sense of stability and happiness is reflected in the relationship of mysterious Rieke und Maibom, a journalist and Nazi tracker. Maibom and Reike have been living together for seven years, they are about to get married. But when Maibom returns from a trip to Brazil and Cuba, he discovers that Reike has disappeared, and their apartment has been turned upside down. Has she been kidnapped? The audience are brought inside a spy thriller, which shows a collapse of the heroes’ love and lives in three dimensions. Germany during World War II, the miracle economic recovery after the War and the period starting from1989 shortly before the German reunification turn protagonists into victims of social circumstances and challenge them with questions of personal guilt and responsibility. Maibom sets out on a search for Reike. Like Orpheus, the Greek mythological singer, he wants to return to his beloved, and follows her into the realm of shadows. Her footprints lead him to Bonn-Bad Godesberg and the Eifel. They meet. Do they still know each other? This play is somewhere in between a melodrama and a “film noir” about the power of the past and love that can not overcome everything. Jossi Wieler, the artistic director of the Stuttgart Opera, after six-year break returns to drama theater.

The Fritz Kater’s play portrays German history from a special perspective. This is a completely different, unexpected kind of reflection on the wounds of war. We are talking about "ordinary" people, not historic figures. They are agents of themselves. They may be compared with Fassbinder’s characters: people who make history without realizing it. It’s deeply shocking. World War II is often analyzed from a moral point of view. Here it’s different. There is no fear. It is rather a history puzzle, which does not want to become a whole picture. Traces of history, weakness, traumatized identity are transformed into "military fugue", which is performed in the interval from 1941 to 1989. It will sound and repeated in the future. This is a true detective story.