Lost Generation!?

A Fever Dream by Carina Pesch and 4 Hunger Strikers.

Ahead of the 2021 elections 7 young people went on hunger strike to demand public talks with the candidates for chancellor on the climate emergency. Their activism was inspired by old texts on civil disobedience from Thoreau to Gandhi and King. Between fiction and reality the radio play explores what drove these young people to the point of hunger strike and how they envision their future in 2035. Together with 4 of the young activists, the author explored the past, present, and future and distilled the radio play “Lost Generation!?” from the collective process. The activists imagine their lives in the year 2035 and play themselves in the imagined future. What will their lives be like and sound like? What social and political crises will define everyday life, and how will they look back on the hunger strike that brought them together in 2021? These questions were discussed in the process, fictionalized, and culminate in the acoustic fever dream that has the audience experience the irreversibility of climate change and the young activists’ expectations for their future. In 2035, the nightmare-ridden main character Rumen has long given up on system change and retreated to one of the last green oases in Europe. But in his dreams the past will not let him go. Unexpectedly, after years without contact, his old companion Simon bursts into the idyll and Rumen sets off to visit old friends in the Berlin underground, where nothing is as it used to be.

English-German Script: Download pdf

“In skeptical fabulation, between dream landscape and politician’s quotes, this radio play explores the question ‚What should we have done?‘ and causes us in exceptional manner to think about our possibilities to shape politics and about the limits of participation.”

Jury statement, Radio Play of the Month March 2022 – honorable mention

text / sound / directing

Carina Pesch

assistant director

Dagmar Palowski, Hannah Bickhoff

composition

La Pesch

location recording

Teleskop Leipzig / Sebastian Bode, Jonas Wolter

studio recording / endmix

André Luer, Christian Grund, Holger König

1st broadcast

6th March 2023

dramaturgy

Stefan Kanis

production

MDR 2023, ARD-Series 2035

actors

Walter Kreye, Markus Lerch

further roles

Rumen Grabow, Simon Helmstedt, Hannah Lübbert, Jacob Heinze, Lea Hinze, Paul Foltin, Hannah Bickhoff, Marisa Sanchez, Thomas Campbell Tyler-Williams, Mauricio Vivas, Aymen Zaitoun

thanks to

Schloss Tonndorf and Baumwollspinnerei Leipzig for on-location recordings