Volksbühne Berlin: Attack of the hip nerds

There aren’t that many certainties in the theater, especially not at the Berlin Volksbühne. But when Jürgen Kuttner comes on stage to show “video snippets” again, the audience knows what they have to do. The choir of spectators from the sold-out hall responds to the emcee’s greeting (“Hello, audience”) with joyful anticipation: “Hello, Kuttner”. You know each other.

For almost exactly 30 years, the thought juggler at the Volksbühne has been lovingly working on finds from East and West German television archives, which he looks at like undiscovered treasures about the history of German everyday life and mentality. Well-read as a cultural scientist and with the show-stopping qualities of an entertainer, Kuttner has developed his own genre with his video snippet exegesis between high-level nonsense, flashes of inspiration and skillfully overwhelming the audience.

This should end now. After a total of 213 sold-out Schnipsel shows since 1996, Kuttner will welcome his fan audience to the Volksbühne for the last time on June 9, 2026. Matthias Lilienthal, the new director of the house, does not want to continue the series. For Kuttner fans, i.e. around half of the old Volksbühne audience, this would be tantamount to an attack on the intangible world cultural heritage of Prenzlauer Berg. Expulsion is of course the director’s right; he is not necessarily particularly nice or extremely clever.

The topics? Police officers in an East-West comparison and the pop singer Ivan Rebroff

During his excursions into the television archives (“From Mainz to the Memel”), Kuttner appears on stage as an archaeologist of German oddities, a man with the wonderful talent of always being amazed at the customs and customs of his compatriots. The excerpts from old hit programs, recordings of state funerals, documentaries from the world of work, advertising clips and educational films since the 1950s serve the lecture artist as a springboard for his meandering chains of associations and hermeneutic endless loops.

The spectrum of topics ranges from German police officers in an East-West comparison, the “birth of radical Islamism from the love handles of the German hit song” or a “phenomenology of the East woman” to the Germans’ favorite fake Russian, the pop singer Ivan Rebroff from Berlin-Spandau, and the German image of Russia from the Cold War to the present day (“The Russians will be on Kurfürstendamm in 50 minutes”). Kuttner easily manages to catch up with such absurd topics in the intellectual pirouettes of his improvised lectures and to develop the most adventurous theses in a completely coherent manner: the world as will and delusion.

The fact that he moves around Berlin faster than other people think and sees no reason to hide his enthusiasm about his own ideas behind understatement ensures the necessary pace and robust charm of the performances. Afterwards you may not necessarily be any wiser, but you will definitely be in a good mood.

The question is whether Kuttner needs the Volksbühne – or whether the Volksbühne needs him

Where else could you have found out, for example, how Cindy & Bert’s hit version of the heavy hit “Paranoid” by Black Sabbath can be classified in terms of cultural and intellectual history. Because he can’t get enough of it, Kuttner dedicates every show to the staging strategies and misunderstandings that are at work when Joseph Beuys clumsily sings “Sun instead of Reagan” in a 1982 election campaign clip for the Green Party and euphorically whirls his microphone around because he believes that’s the way it should be in pop music. Apparently, even after 30 years of video snippets, the interpretation of this contribution by the Greens to art history has not yet come to a satisfactory conclusion for Kuttner. He offers various theories just to answer the question of why the three singers on the right edge of the picture don’t move: Were their feet stapled, or do they want to occupy the studio forever in order to secure their place in art, party and human history? Kuttner’s endless exegesis of Beuys will no longer be continued at the Volksbühne.

Lilienthal’s claim of a reinvention of the Volksbühne using all the common cultural industry buzzwords from “diverse” to “postcolonial” has, in addition to Kuttner, also fallen victim to another formative Volksbühne artist. The choreographer Constanza Macras, who is quite radical in a funny and casual way, also doesn’t fit into Lilienthal’s program. With her company Dorky Park, Macras has found her ideal venue at the Volksbühne for many years and has found a loyal audience with a total of over 140 performances and more than 45,000 spectators. The choreographer and her dancers are moving to the smaller Maxim Gorki Theater, and Kuttner will also find other stages in Berlin. He has already appeared with his video snippets in theaters from Munich to Vienna, from Zurich to Cottbus. The question now is whether he needs the Volksbühne – or whether the Volksbühne needs him.

If you meet Jürgen Kuttner in a Berlin beer garden these days, you’ll be sitting opposite a somewhat angry person who’s talking about what the Volksbühne means to him. As a 16-year-old, he saw Benno Besson’s productions here in the 1970s, and he remained closely and friendly with the theater throughout the Castorf era. It sounds a bit as if the Volksbühne was something like the longest love story of his life.

His secret dream was to grow old with the younger audience

Kuttner definitely doesn’t need to be angry, he doesn’t tend to be bitter for a second, but he is certainly angry. It was actually his secret dream to grow old on stage with the younger audience. In his penultimate Volksbühne show a few weeks ago, he already imagined this: how he, like a grumpy old man, drags himself onto the stage with a walker, toothlessly mumbles “hello, audience” and then a shout like thunder wafts towards him from the theater: Hello, Kuttner. “Man, I’m going to miss this,” he sighed on stage, and it was at least as honest as it was flirtatious and self-deprecating.

In the beer garden he explains that his funny archive excursions are meant seriously as small disruptive maneuvers against the rampant forgetfulness of history. The doctor of cultural studies and occasional Marxist is almost manically interested in history – because it reliably protects against the naivety of cheap moralizing and overly simple world views.

An inspiration for the first video snippets of history lessons was a film title by Alexander Kluge: “The attack of the present on the rest of time”. Kuttner’s show is aimed precisely at this erasure of the past. Unfortunately for him, Lilienthal, as an old hipness nerd, fears nothing more than not being up to date and is driven by the ambition to always be a few revolutions ahead of the others. Now, with Kuttner’s expulsion, his Volksbühne is simply continuing the present’s attack on the rest of time. There’s no shame in that, but it’s a bit of a shame.