Campus Welcomes German Radio Personality

Truman’s campus will host German radio personality, theater director, actor and author Jürgen Kuttner, from Oct. 23-27 as part of his tour of the Midwest.

Kuttner is a well-known radio moderator, theater director and freelance artist in Berlin. He came to prominence in the 1990s as a public radio talk-show host and moderator oriented toward youth culture. In 1996, Kuttner began a regular stand-up improvisation show using television video clips as the basis for running commentaries on politics and art at Berlin’s Volksbühne Theater. Since 2000, he has been active as director, with Tom Kühnel, author and actor at numerous theaters across Germany. He also served as one of the co-directors of the Brecht Festival in Augsburg, Germany, to which Truman students contributed. Kuttner toured several U.S. campuses in spring 2018 – including Truman, the University of Wisconsin-Madison and New York University – presenting an improvised video clip show called “I Wanna be Americano!”

While on campus, Kuttner will work with students in German and theatre to present a version of his production of Bertolt Brecht’s adaptation of J.M.R. Lenz’s play “The Tutor” (Der Hofmeister) at 5:30 p.m. Oct. 27 in the Black Box Theater.  

“The Tutor,” originally by the 18th century dramatist J.M.R. Lenz, is the story of an underpaid and humiliated private teacher who maims himself to maintain his social status. In adapting this play, Brecht wished to rehabilitate a largely forgotten outsider poet and to provoke narrow-minded cultural functionaries in East Germany, where he lived and worked during the last years of his life.

Kuttner’s visit is sponsored by the Department of Classical and Modern Languages, with support from the Theatre Department.