Des Simplicius Simplicissimus Jugend

according to its inventor, the author Hans Jakob Christoffel von Grimmelshausen, the story of the holy fool Simplicius is "exceedingly amusing and only useful to read". A simple-minded, possibly aristocratic foundling experiences the horrors of the Thirty Years' War, becomes a soldier, explorer, charlatan and galley slave himself, travels the ramshackle "best of all possible worlds" and ends up as a hermit in the forest.

The composer Karl Amadeus Hartmann took this classic of German-language literature as the basis for his chamber opera named after the title character. Created for the drawer during the Second World War, this work is a testimony to inner emigration, an impressivedrucking manifesto against the cruelties of war.

Star director Eva-Maria Höckmayr stages Hartmann's pessimistic view of the loss of civilization as a salto mortale into the abysses of the human soul.