Felix Krull

Felix Krull is a master of deception who worked out as a child that people want to be taken in. He hires on at a hotel as a liftboy and rises to head waiter at breathtaking speed, gaining one advantage after another in a way the house calls roguish and almost endearing. Mann was occupied with the best-known impostor in German literature all his life: he began it in 1910 as a parody of Goethe's »Dichtung und Wahrheit« and finished it in Switzerland a year before his death. Here it is a monologue evening — Tim Freudensprung alone, in a stage version by Eva-Sophia Haußen — and the question under it is how quickly lies and appearances take possession of a society.