How Grischa almost sparked world peace with a daring idea

Venue: Chamber - Grischa Tannberg is coming to Berlin as a freshly trained graduate of the Bruno Leuschner School of Economics to take up his first position on the State Planning Commission. He is highly motivated and determined to make his labor available to socialist progress. But first and foremost, his department has one thing in particular: nothing to do.

But he ignores his superior's instructions to practice artful waiting. He reads, calculates, thinks — and develops a plan for economic cooperation with the Democratic Republic of Afghanistan.

Afghanistan needs goods from the GDR. The GDR needs foreign exchange. And Afghanistan has an agricultural product that people prefer not to talk too loudly about in offices. A daring idea becomes a process, the process becomes a working group, the working group becomes a pilot project. Soon, not only the State Planning Commission, but also border troops, ministries, West German authorities and political leaders will be concerned with a question that no one was prepared for: What happens when an absurd idea suddenly works?

Jakob Hein, born in Leipzig and raised in East Berlin, has a special gift for this kind of historical bias: He takes the big systems seriously enough to reveal their comedy. In his novel, history is not corrected, but put together in a different way on a trial basis.

A German-German comedy about acts, border crossings and big politics. About an idea that works too well. And about the question of whether world history is sometimes not created out of conviction, but out of responsibility, chance and the wrong person at the right desk.