Axel Milberg, narrator in the radio play version of Christian Kracht’s novel “Imperium”, describes the characters as “stalls and flotsam of the German Empire”. The novel, published in 2012, was controversial, the accusation: It was shaped by right-wing ideas. In his three-and-a-half-hour radio version, the director Walter Adler shows very nicely that not the narrative attitude, but rather a number of characters have a problem with colonial thinking. Kracht sends eccentric people to the South Seas, who look for a happiness in life that they cannot achieve at home in Germany in abstruse worldviews made of esoteric set pieces and also man-man fantasies. Jens Harzer, Judith Engel, Tom Schilling, Wolfram Koch and many more form an ensemble that does justice to this very special milieu.
imperium, HR 2, November 21, 2021, 10 p.m. Part 2 on November 28th.