I spent Thursday morning at my leisure, wandering the neighborhood around the hotel and taking in the wonders of the historic and colossal luxury department store KaDeWe located directly across from the majestic Wittenbergplatz U-Bahn Station… that just happens to have been the embarkation point to some of the most notorious concentration camps of the Nazi regime.

KaDeWe (left), Wittenbergplatz U-Bahn Station (right)

That’s what it’s like to be in Berlin – it fucks with your head. And I haven’t yet written about all the amazing, intense, thoughtful colleagues I was talking to every day at the symposium. That’ll come later.

I have to admit, at this point of the trip my brain was just about overloaded – so many big ideas, so many big productions, so many thoughts, feelings, experiences – I started to wonder how I was ever going to sort through all of it. And it was in this mindset that I steeled myself for Sebastian Hartmann’s Krieg und Frieden, presented at the Volksbühne in a production of the Centraltheater Leipzig and Ruhrfestspiele Recklinghausen.