BORN IN 1969, almost ten years after Christoph Schlingensief, and thus just after the ruptures of 1968 that came to demarcate the politicalideological fault lines in postwar West Germany, Falk Richter is one of a younger generation of theater professionals whose formative experiences align themselves with several shifts in recent German history and culture. During his youth, the progressive, critical, antiauthoritarian, extraparliamentary stance of the new Left became more or less normative, working its way through and into the institutions of governance. At the same time, the terrorist attacks of the mid-1970s by the Red Army Faction and the virulent protests against NATO missile deployments of the early 1980s brought to light serious internal political tensions in German society (perhaps best symbolized by the ascendancy of the Green Party) and marked an increased German proclivity to withdraw from hegemonic American political influence, with decidedly mixed success. Falk Richter cut his professional teeth in the long decade between the events of 1989/90, which signaled the putative victory of neoliberalism, and the events following the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, which triggered an aggressive assertion of neoconservative ideology, especially in George W. Bush's United States. During that time, Richter trained as a director with Jürgen Flimm in Hamburg and began working as a freelance author and director in Hamburg, Düsseldorf, Mainz, Linz, Zurich, Berlin, Amsterdam, and Atlanta. The 1990s were simultaneously the decade when the importance of the principal shapers of West German Regietheater (Stein, Zadek, Grüber) waned in favor of a more heterogeneous generation (Castorf, Marthaler, Schlingensief, etc.), triggering a sustained examination of the place of theater in German culture by politicians and the press.

My introduction embeds Richter explicitly in this politico-cultural context, because he is one of the few German theater makers (Theatermacher—a term not usually applied to the more stratified Anglo- American scene) who is ambitious enough to want to engage with the totality of his social and political environment and who regards the theater as a potent enough medium to allow such engagement. This stance has occasionally exposed him to the accusation by theater critics that his critiques of the corruption of social discourse by mass-media entertainment and the rampant voyeurism of reality television delivered in some of his earlier plays such as God is a DJ (1999) are merely superficial or similarly voyeuristic.