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Many factors play a role in choosing a partner: looks, status, education, money. Of course ideally your other half has it all. But what if you have to choose? This novel zooms in on the family and marriage politics of the bourgeoisie in Berlin around 1900.

Flaubert’s novel tells the story of common folks, just like you and me, and their common struggles: unhappy marriage, extramarital affair, shopping addiction. Nothing that would shock readers – at least not readers in the 21st century, that is.

„Diamonds are a girl’s best friends,” Marilyn Monroe sang in 1949, but the idea that women want to be impressed by money is much older. The tragic story of Jay Gatsby, which glitters with real and fake gold, shows that this strategy doesn’t always succeed.

Literary history is populated by extraordinary heroes, odysseys, and battles. George Eliot, by contrast, pays homage to ordinary, average people, their worries and problems. Because it is these ordinary, small people, after all, who together make up the big wide world.

It’s the time of the Cold War. The cultural imaginary is populated by mad scientists, nuclear physicists, and villains, from James Bond’s Dr. No to Stanley Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove. Friedrich Dürrenmatt brings the question of the responsibility of science in these times to the theater stage.