Even Goethe was afraid of Faust. The overwhelming ambition of this character, who wanted to discover the whole and final truth along with all the accompanying doubts, had already infected the poet early on in life. Faust was always a reflection of Goethe himself. He was permanently dissatisfied with his Faust creations, and throughout his life he reworked the material, writing, rewriting and discarding the many different versions starting with his Urfaust. And maybe Goethe had made a pact with Mephisto as well, at least he was able to still complete part two in his old age shortly before his death. His Faust, consisting of 12,111 verses, emerged as the superlative, the most important, most beautiful, most enigmatic work in the German language. Inexhaustible. Even Goethe thought it was an impossible challenge for the theatre. Before the performance of part one in 1829 in Braunschweig he wrote to the theatre director: “Do whatever you like with my play!” The most impressive individual interpretation was delivered by Gustaf Gründgens in 1957/58 in Hamburg. Every director who takes up the challenge of Faust has to grope his own way through the Faustian labyrinths until Gretchen is seduced; but the professor’s despairing ambivalence in his study, the chiming of bells, the Easter walk and the poodle’s strange appearance on the scene are an absolute must in every production. The crux of the matter is that the poodle is Mephistopheles in disguise, the Devil: “Part of that power which still/ Produces the good, while ever scheming ill.” And Mephisto makes the irresistible offer to Faust, to be his servant on Earth in return for power over Faust in the hereafter. The pact is sealed with a drop of blood and the tragedy takes its course.

What a good person. So prudent, empathic, a model of cultured life experience, that it’s almost too boring for the theatre. But there are still enough riddles and breaks. How discreetly he has to contend with his life’s tragedy. How tragically lonely he is. Nathan, a wealthy world-travelled merchant, leads a tolerated, precarious existence as a Jew, continually forced to prove that he is not simply a Jew. But despite this pressure he manages to develop his high ethical values. After Christians had killed his wife and seven sons in an anti-Semitic pogrom, he adopted Recha, a Christian girl. “The Jew shall be burned,” orders the Patriarch when he is informed about this by the enamoured Knight Templar. The play takes place during the Crusades. When the Sultan poses the delicate question, which religion is the true religion, Christianity, Judaism or Islam, Nathan replies with the famous parable of the three rings. The ring bearer is charged with the task of always proving himself worthy of his ring. And that was that. Gotthold Ephraim Lessing’s dramatic poem Nathan the Wise, his sermon for tolerance written in 1779, certainly succeeded in its aim. In the end Nathan, the Muslim Sultan and the Christian Templar are all equally good human beings. The triumph of reason. The fact that their personal stories reveal they are all intricately related to each other, brother and sister, niece and aunt, nephew and uncle who end up embracing each other, is the incredible stuff of fairy tales, but that doesn’t matter. After all, we’re all interrelated as part of the human race. Until everyone grasps this, Lessing’s Nathan will – unfortunately – remain highly topical.

The honourable robber. Of all the angry young men churned up in German lands every few decades, Karl Moor is an outstandingly tragic figure. A German Robin Hood: the avenger of the dispossessed, the idealistic rebel challenging an unjust social order, but nevertheless a murderer. In the end he even kills his own bride Amalia. In The Robbers, his Sturm und Drang play, the moralist Friedrich Schiller drastically depicts how all kinds of violence develop a fatal momentum of their own ending in destruction and death. The drama with the dedication “In tirannos”, against tyrants, starts in a family context as a conflict between two unequal brothers: the younger, ugly Franz Moor envies the firstborn Karl along with his advantages and privileges and his father’s obvious love for him. Franz, the cold calculating nihilist, creates intrigues and deliberately deceives the old Count Moor who disinherits Karl. Embittered and defiant he then founds a band of robbers. As robber chief he fights for a better world. In his description of the premier in 1782 at Mannheim’s Nationaltheater an eyewitness wrote: “The theatre was like a madhouse, rolling eyes, clenched fists, stamping feet, hoarse cries in the auditorium!” The powerful robber drama was a worldwide hit, in London and Paris, New York and Moscow. Although leading actors preferred playing “Franz, the canaille”, Karl, the good one of the two so different robbers was always the definite favourite with the audience.

The one and the other. The roaring times are over. Suddenly they’re old. Failures, embittered, two women who have been fighting each other for a lifetime. As friends during the seventies in West Berlin, later as enemies, because one of them steals the other one’s husband. Each has a child by this man who has since made himself scarce. “If anyone belonged together, then it wasn’t Henrik and me, or you and Henrik. But always us two.” Strange – Insa and Lissie are a couple now. The unemployed, but still flirtatiously aggressive journalist, Lissie, has moved into Insa’s guesthouse acting like a “female super power”. Insa drowns her sorrows with white wine. Love and happiness are things of the past, dreams were illusions, the future has vanished. Now it’s time for the great last stand. Men, children, career, a final inventory of all the memories. At least the bickering and fighting keeps them awake. But then the battle lines are surprisingly redefined when the old man-grabber Lissie summons all her remaining powers to hook the last permanent guest, on whom Insa had secretly set her hopes. This is simply grotesque, an epilogue to passionate emotions. The two women launch themselves into their endgame. This black comedy by Botho Strauss premiered in 2005: an aspect of contemporary Germany?

Hyenas of the battlefield. That’s how Bertolt Brecht wanted to see them. But when a lively specimen of these maternal creatures aroused pity in the audience during the premier in Zürich in 1941 with the incredible Therese Giehse in the leading role, the pacifist changed his mind. He rewrote the epic drama Mother Courage and Her Children a bit: people shouldn’t be moved, they should be appalled by the stubborn war profiteer! War shouldn’t be seen as a tragic fate but as a tragedy created by human beings. Anna Fierling, also known as Mother Courage, gets by with her three children as a camp provisions supplier in the Thirty Years War. She doesn’t care which army she serves, the war is a good source of business that she simply can’t give up. She is crafty and good-natured, an unscrupulous perpetrator and yet a pitiable victim, she is reduced to poverty, loses her children to the war, but still grows none the wiser. In an exemplary production of 1949, Helene Weigel, Brecht’s wife, played Courage at the Deutsches Theater in East Berlin. Her performance was so hard and cold that she became the “primeval Courage”. But the role, with all its contradictory, elemental aspects of life regularly surpassed Brecht’s own didactic intentions, which is presumably one of the reasons that Mother Courage became his most widely performed drama.

A small prince’s fairy tale, a mating ritual in the shape of a capriccio. It all begins when two royal offspring absolutely refuse to come together. But there is a melancholy undertone in the wittily phrased light comedy, the only one of its kind written by political troublemaker Georg Büchner in 1836. Weariness and sarcastic despair in a drearily empty, sclerotic society. Prince Leonce takes a look at the people and in his view: “They study out of boredom, they pray out of boredom, they fall in love, marry and procreate out of boredom, and finally they die of boredom.” He too is a hedonistic, occasionally pompous idler. Leonce bores himself to death in the realm of Popo, a ridiculously small territory, not an idyll but more of a parody of German particularism. King Peter, an unworldly philosophizing babbler, fruitlessly rules court officials and servile subjects. When Leonce is supposed to marry Lena, a princess in the realm of Pipi, he turns tail and runs away. Lena isn’t interested in an arranged marriage either and secretly escapes her royal home. The two royal children then unwittingly meet up and fall in love. Courtly life in Popo descends once again into satire when the dotty monarch stages the royal wedding using two masked mechanical figures. But the masks in fact conceal the real Leonce and Lena. Everything is completely rigged, what truly absurd theatre! The newly weds have no idea whether it was a swindle, coincidence or destiny. Quite a subtle happy end.

A scandal-surrounded woman. In fact the archetypal woman when seen in terms of the cravings and fears of the men who lived in the prudish yet decadent fin de siecle society around 1900 and avidly discussed the essence of female nature. That was when Lulu entered the stage, as a creature that combined all the most extreme feminine attributes: nymph and slut, innocent and destructive, devilishly beautiful angel, nymphomaniac, brazen, immoral. Nobody can resist the siren, they grotesquely plunge themselves into ruin, pay with their lives. In her oblivion, Lulu simply consumes the moments of love. Can love possibly be a sin? The playwright Frank Wedekind was thinking of “the real animal, the wild, beautiful animal”, of “the most basic animal instinct”. But man-murdering Lulu also meets her fate. She ends up as a prostitute in London, her final refuge, where she becomes a victim of the sex killer Jack the Ripper. Wedekind, a knight errant battling against middle-class hypocrisy, wrote the original version as two plays. Earth Spirit was published in 1894 and Pandora’s Box followed in 1902. Lulu soon became one of the most scintillating figures in world literature – and film. Nowadays, where Lulus are ten-a-penny in all kinds of media, nobody gets overly excited by this femme fatale any more. Was she perhaps a pioneer of sexual emancipation? Or was she more of a male fantasy?

A Berlin jester, a little shoemaker, a poor devil. He held a mirror up to the world with native wit and masquerade. He really did exist, Wilhelm Voigt. In 1906 the journeyman with a criminal record donned a badly fitting captain’s uniform, took command of a troop of guards, marched into Köpenick town hall, arrested the mayor and confiscated the money in the treasury. The whole world laughed at the prank which ridiculed the devout respect for Prussian uniforms and Wilhelminian subservience. “A German fairy tale” was the way Carl Zuckmayer described his tragicomedy, The Captain of Köpenick, which took him to the peak of his success in 1931. Delightful, humorous and satirical – he paints a detailed portrait of militarism as well as the sad reality of the workless hero who has been caught up in the vicious circle of bureaucracy. In order to get work, he needs a residence permit, and he can’t get a residence permit without work. “No, no, it’s all just a merry-go-round, it’s all just a coffee mill. If I ain’t got no residence permit, I don’t get no work, and if I ain’t got no work, then I ain’t allowed a residence permit,” says shoemaker Voigt in Berlin dialect. In the town hall he really only wants to get himself a passport. Bad luck, that’s not where passports are issued. Playing the role of the captain, a classic figure in German theatre comedy, was a must for all the major comedians. Heinz Rühmann starred as the captain when Zuckmayer’s masterpiece was filmed in 1956 – an unforgettable performance.