Opening speech Körber Studio Junge Regie 2026

by lynn t musiol and Christian Tschirner

27th May 2026

LYNN: Hello! It’s lovely to see you all. We’re absolutely delighted to be here. Thank you so much for the invitation – it’s wonderful that we’ve been given the opportunity to give the opening speech for the Körber Young Director Studio.

CHRISTIAN: We feel honoured, but also a bit under pressure. We’ve naturally spent a long time thinking about what nice things we could say to you. Whether we can say anything at all. Because, after all, we don’t want to tell you any fairy tales here.

LYNN: Although, I don’t know about you, but I grew up with lots of fairy tales. One of them goes like this: Once upon a time, there was a working-class child. The working-class child was from Leverkusen. Their family was poor. One day, the working-class child lost their laptop. And they were afraid to go home, because their father had worked so long to pay for it. And in their despair, they jumped into the river Rhine, lost consciousness, and when they came back to their senses, they found themselves in a beautiful meadow where the sun was shining and thousands upon thousands of flowers were growing. They left that meadow and passed by an agency, and the files in the agency called out: ‘Copy us, copy us.’ And so the working-class child did an internship at the agency. When the internship was over, they passed by a theatre. And the coffee cups on the rehearsal stage called out: ‘Fill us, fill us.’ So the working-class child did a work placement and filled the coffee cups day in, day out. And they never received any money back for the coffee. But as a reward, they were given a job as an assistant.

Yes, and so on and so forth. You have surely recognised the fairy tale. It is the German fairy tale "Frau Holle" or "Mother Hulda". And Frau Holle is not just the benevolent bourgeois fairy who ultimately rewards poor working-class children for their diligence, overtime and the coffee, but she is, in a sense, also the climate representative in fairyland. Or a weather goddess. For she makes it snow and ensures fertile fields. 

Yes, I grew up with this fairy tale. With the rags-to-riches fairy tale: if you work hard, you will be rewarded. At some point you will walk through a gate and then it will rain gold. 

CHRISTIAN: I grew up with a slightly different fairy tale. It’s about a dark empire in the East. And the rulers of this dark empire enslaved their people, keeping them in bondage.

But one day the people rose up against these dark rulers, chased them away and from then on took their fate into their own hands: they had inherited nothing and had nothing to pass on, so they laboured and laboured, for they knew it was entirely in their own hands! If you work hard, you will be rewarded. At some point you will walk through a gate and then it will rain gold. 

LYNN: Yes, I have now grown a little older and I have come to realise: No, Frau Holle does not exist at all. The weather goddess has been cancelled. She no longer plays a role. Or at least not a good one. And that is why the fairy tale of social advancement does not work anymore either. You could say Frau Holle is taking revenge for being cancelled: she is pouring buckets of pitch and shit down on us. Even though we’ve been so hard-working. Or perhaps precisely because of that. 

CHRISTIAN: Well, we probably could have worked that out sooner. It is in the newspapers almost every day; let me just read out a report from last year:

“According to a risk management study by the Institute and Faculty of Actuaries (IFoA) at the University of Exeter, the global economy could shrink by up to 50% this century as a result of climate change, unless policymakers take immediate action to decarbonise.” It is not climate scientists or activists who are writing this, but insurance experts who calculate the risk for businesses.

Okay, decision-makers are taking few measures towards decarbonisation. We aren’t even experiencing an economic decline at the moment, just stagnation, and yet a certain sense of panic is already palpable – what will it look like with a 50% decline? Yet our notions of participation and democracy have always been linked to growth.

LYNN: Quite clearly, the end of Frau Holle affects a whole series of other fairy tales: the fairy tale of progress. The fairy tale of eternal growth. The fairy tale of the ideal union of capitalism and democracy. The fairy tale of prosperity for all. The fairy tale of the triumph of Western reason. 

CHRISTIAN: Yes, fairy tales in general have had a rather hard time lately. The happy ending is out of fashion. In terms of genre we have moved towards the tragic or the apocalyptic. There is much talk of collapse, of the end days, of doom, even of dooms day fascism. Ever since I experienced, at the age of 20, how a world around me collapsed from one day to the next – namely socialism in the GDR – I have been very interested in end days. In this respect, I have a comparative advantage over many West Germans. 

LYNN: The perspective on the end is, of course, quite varied: for many queer people, for example, the end – and with it dying and death, negation or rejection – is ever-present: “Life and death are so closely intertwined that the idea of an unlimited future is lost,” writes Sarah Ensor. The loss of a future, which is shocking to many middle-class people, has therefore long been the norm for many queer people. For this reason, queer people have replaced the concept of the future or interest in the future with small forms of permanence: “It is not about restoring the normative future or creating an alternative, but rather about fundamentally rethinking the grammar of relationship, possibility and permanence itself,” Ensor continues. Here, queer communities have a comparative advantage. 

CHRISTIAN: At our workshop “Dating Unsafe Times”, together with Christophe Meierhans and students, we have spent the last two days intensively exploring what might now be coming to an end, what ought to come to an end, and how we can come to terms with this ending without being paralysed or discouraged.

By the way, in the Bible, the Apocalypse was not simply a horror scenario, but a message of hope for the damned of this earth. As a revelation, the Apocalypse offers the chance to finally hope REALISTICALLY. For what is revealed are the fundamental, present-day problems that have long existed, hidden behind the catastrophes, which were always pushed into the future.

Such as: a capitalist logic of growth, a fetish for property, patriarchal fantasies of omnipotence, technological fantasies of omnipotence, obscene ownership structures, grotesque power structures…

In the theatre, there is a widespread belief that theatre itself, art itself, as we practise it, is already a social value in its own right. That is another fairy tale I can no longer believe in. Art and theatre play just as much a part in the destruction of the world as all other aspects of our culture. 

LYNN: The question now is, how do we deal with the shit we’re stuck in? Can it be composted somehow? How do we say goodbye to our illusions? How do we deal with our losses, with our anger and our grief? How do we learn to endure what is difficult and nasty without constantly having to throw up, having tantrums or throwing in the towel? How do we stay with what is difficult and painful without relationships falling apart, without becoming depressed, and without demanding a quick fix? 

CHRISTIAN: We do not know what is coming next. We don’t even know whether it’s going to get bloody hot here in Hamburg over the next few years, or freezing cold first, because perhaps the Gulf Stream is shifting. The only thing we can say for sure is that things won’t stay as they are. It won’t be the end of the world, but the end of the world as we know it. 

What does it mean to acknowledge this end? What does it mean to think from the perspective of this end? What will ultimately have mattered to us, and what will have been meaningless? How should we imagine this end? Will we all, as a common Western narrative in dozens of blockbusters repeatedly tries to convince us, automatically turn on one another like wolves or cannibals? If so, we’d best arm ourselves immediately and trust no one. Or will we, as numerous anthropological studies show, become more united in times of crisis?

From palliative care, we know that people confronted with the news of their impending death statistically act in a more altruistic and supportive manner. We also know that, on average, they are happier than the rest of us who repress the possibility of our own end. What does this mean? What are we actually doing wrong?

LYNN: I have been looking into the AIDS pandemic for some time now. In the mid-1980s, when infection rates were at their peak, nurse Valerie Hughes worked in one of the few AIDS wards in New York. She was part of the “Blood Sisters”, a group of butches, femmes and trans people who looked after their sick gay brothers. Since then, they have been regarded as the unsung heroes who were there for their gay brothers and sisters when others turned their backs on them, who cared for them and took to the streets on their behalf. This seems particularly self-sacrificing and selfless, especially given that lesbians also experienced sexism and devaluation within gay communities. The work on the wards was life-threatening for everyone. I don’t know if I could have done that. What I’ve taken away from the Blood Sisters as a strategy in times of crisis: Don’t talk rubbish. Give good excuses. Ask questions to those around you. Listen actively. You only learn when you let yourself feel unsettled. Do only as much as you can. Sick bodies are not the exception in this world. Keep your sense of humour. Allow yourself to grieve: the grief over our disempowerment, the grief over the systemic division into lives of worth and worthlessness, the grief over the lack of time to recover, the grief that modernity has bewitched us, the grief that we queers will never be recognised. I believe that if we allowed it—the grief—we could start a revolution. But there is too much fear of death. Yet death—or rather, dying—is almost everywhere. We are in the midst of a slow, exhausting and agonising death under patriarchy, colonialism and capitalism. And our institutions are dying too: the modern logic that institutions should exist and endure goes hand in hand with our culture of fear of death. Institutions, too, deserve a good death. What blissful days it would be if we were to lay the tax office, the immigration authorities or the Ministry of the Interior to rest.

CHRISTIAN: Dear all, dear students, with this in mind, we wish you a truly lively Körber Studio Festival.

LYNN: Or, to quote Joan Nestle: Take your lovers into your mouths, take breasts and cocks into your mouths, take wetness and fullness into your mouths, but never the old, worn-out fairy tales…