After Theatre of Reconciliation and Overcoming the Present, the third season of Max Czollek’s series of talks, entitled The Beginning is Near, looks to the future. Considering the calamities of recent years and those currently looming, this may seem counterintuitive, but that’s the point: to take these crises as a starting point from which to move forward to different and better things. It requires a twofold insight: firstly, recognizing that current developments radically question previous political and economic conditions and social mores, and secondly  acknowledging that things must therefore start anew in order to change for the better. The question of what has not worked and is currently not working is closely linked to the question of the future. It forms the context for Czollek’s conversations with people who, in one way or another, are dealing with the question of how things can and must continue. These interlocutors  develop ideas and provide stimuli for the motto of this third season: The Beginning is Near.

Sasha Marianna Salzmann is a playwright, novelist, essayist, and the co-founder of freitext magazine. From 2013 to 2019, Salzmann was an in-house playwright at the Maxim Gorki Theatre Berlin and headed its Studio Я. Together with Max Czollek, Salzmann initiated the Dis-Integration Congress (2017) and the Radikale Jüdische Kulturtage (2018). Salzmann is the author of the novels Außer sich (2017) and Im Menschen muss alles herrlich sein (2021), among others, and has been honoured with the Art Prize for Performing Arts of the Berlin Academy of Arts, the Prize of the Houses of Literature, the Hermann Hesse Literature Prize and the Kleist Prize. Salzmann lives and works in Berlin.