Vor Sonnenaufgang

In the organizer's words:

"Man is what he can be, and not merely what he is. "

An unexpected visit at Hoffmann's house. His old student friend and roommate Alfred Loth is at the door. At an inopportune time: Hoffmann's wife Martha is heavily pregnant, the house is being remodeled, Martha's failed single sister Helene has moved in with them, and the father-in-law, from whom Hoffmann took over the engineering business, has a drinking problem. But it's not just circumstances that separate the old fellow students. Alfred now writes for a left-wing weekly, while Hoffmann defends his wealth and status with right-wing populist theories. The social divide not only divides the old friends, it also prevents the story of a possible love and future.
As one of the most frequently performed contemporary dramatists, Ewald Palmetshofer has brought Gerhart Hauptmann's socially critical classic surprisingly close to the present day. In doing so, he shifts the focus from Hauptmann's social study of hereditary alcoholism to a political psychogram, to an examination of the characters and constellations under which right-wing populism in the guise of economic smartness and oppression in familial disguise return, but also the failure of left-wing intellectualism is held up to a mirror. Gerhart Hauptmann's socially critical classic has never been as close to our present day as in Ewald Palmetshofer's adaptation.