About the work
Mein Herz dein Bunker – 290 BPM is a play written and directed by Paula Thielecke and produced within DT Jung*. It received its world premiere in the Kammer of Deutsches Theater Berlin on 25 November 2023. The work draws on Berlin's early-1990s club and techno culture and uses this historical moment as the setting for a collective coming-of-age narrative.
Plot
Berlin-Friedrichshain, 1993: a group of young friends occupies part of a former East German slaughterhouse and sets out to create its own club. They want the new space to allow freedom, music, intimacy, ecstatic experience and collective life. As the group explores the abandoned building and negotiates the values their countercultural space should embody, the club becomes a laboratory for adulthood. Electronic music and physical performance are integral parts of the community imagined by the work.
Cultural significance
The play treats the club culture that emerged immediately after the fall of the Berlin Wall as part of a historical constellation in which vacant buildings, political transformation and techno enabled new forms of social experimentation. Its production also brought together theatre, youth performance, dance, circus and Berlin club culture, giving the collective character of the subject a corresponding form on stage.