Thomas Walter stands in front of Kaufland and guards the supermarket as a security man.

He has to start there again “from scratch”, as his wife Anja says.

He, the once proud miner who shifted his shifts in the opencast mines of Lusatia, is left with nothing.

His children are going through puberty.

The daughter Tine fights against the coal and thus against her own father in "Fridays for Future".

His son Finn turns to the right-wing radicals.

And his wife tries to keep up the last remnants of the petit-bourgeois family facade, although here in Lusatia it has long since been doomed to failure.

Kevin Hanschke

volunteer.

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Already in the opening scene it becomes clear that this evening of theater is a spectacle of lost lifeworlds, played on the stage of a special theatre.

Oliver Bukowski's play "The Son" tells the recent history of transformation in Lusatia using the example of a family.

It is about unemployment and fear of decline, change and stagnation.

But in the end, Elon Musk emerges as the savior.

Even before the performance, it becomes clear that this play is about present-day East Germany, with all its ruptures, problems and contradictions.

The audience has gathered in front of the Senftenberg Theater, the "New Stage", and is waiting to be admitted.

The rising petrol prices are discussed, the conflict in Ukraine is touched upon and the prospect of what that means for the coal industry is discussed.

For him, Bukowski's play is emblematic of the theater history of the region, says artistic director Manuel Soubeyrand, born in 1957, because dealing with social realities has been a tradition since the house was founded.

The history of the theater is closely linked to the industrial development of the GDR.

The country needed steel, and its production was only possible with lignite from Lusatia.

Many workers moved to the region even before the real socialist state was founded.

It took culture to lure and educate people.

That was the doctrine of cultural policy.

A rugged opencast mining landscape emerged, with a workforce engaged in stagecraft.

The Stadttheater Senftenberg was opened on October 21, 1946.

The aura of socialist awakening

It was located in the auditorium of the Walther-Rathenau School, where it is still based today.

The building is a white Bauhaus style homestead.

The first stage production was Schiller's "Kabale und Liebe" in 1947. In 1959 the Senftenberg stage was given the name "Miners' Theatre".

The pace of production during this period was high: there was a premiere every two weeks.

The aura of the “socialist awakening” and the industrial workforce, who helped stage and play from the start, ensured that the house developed into a dramaturgy laboratory within a few years.

Many theater greats started their careers here: Armin Mueller-Stahl, Frank Castorf and Annekathrin Bürger.

Pieces by Peter Hacks and Volker Braun were premiered here.

Heiner Müller was inspired by the Senftenberg atmosphere for his first drama, “Die Brücke.

A report from Klettwitz” about the opencast mine of the same name.

Mirko Warnatz, who was born in Cottbus in 1967 and completed an apprenticeship as a machinist for large opencast mining equipment at the BKK Senftenberg at the age of 17, has experienced the theater in these times.

It was a hard time that still shapes him to this day - "shift system, long nights, physical work".

At the age of twenty, this led him to a crisis of meaning.

"The theater was my lifebuoy." In 1987 he left the company and was hired as a stage technician at the theatre.

A year later he moved to the position of stage manager.

But since the 1980s he has also been singing and acting.

“That was the rule in Senftenberg.

Workers worked together with directors and actors – hand in hand.” Even after reunification, the “cross-divisional solidarity” was special.