‘Nervous breakdown in Antarctica – Russian researcher stabs colleague’ – was the headline in Fokus magazine in October 2018. The Russian investigators who looked into the case came to the conclusion that the researcher was attacked by his colleague because he had repeatedly revealed the endings of books to him. Both men, Oleg B. and Sergei S., were avid readers, filling the long hours in the Antarctic solitude. What at first sounds like an unusual dispute over books and spoilers reveals a complex story about human limits in the infinite vastness of Antarctica.

An utopian place

As a stateless ‘no man's land’, Antarctica is one of the last shared spaces of humanity and the last large contiguous region on Earth that is still largely unaffected by humans. Its remoteness and undisturbed natural state offer exceptional conditions for scientific research and international
cooperation. It is also a key research location in the fight against climate change. However, the special status of Antarctica as a shared place for humanity has become fragile in a new age of imperialism. Therefore, Antarctica is not only ecologically, but also politically a special, utopian place.

How it started

When director Jan-Christoph Gockel read about the crime in the ice in 2018, he was so electrified by the story that it never left him. When the former director of the Alfred Wegener Institute, Helmholtz Centre for Polar and Marine Research in Bremerhaven Antje Boetius then told him that this story – with all the associated questions about literature, time, loneliness, ecology and research – could be used to derive ‘the great, untold story of Antarctica’ and that the Antarctic environment was so special that place itself must be made the central character of the story, it was clear that this would be turned into a theatre project.

How the journey continues

In January 2026, four artists from the Deutsches Theater – director Jan-Christoph Gockel, documentary filmmaker Lion Bischof, actors Julia Gräfner and Wolfram Koch – will travel to the Neumayer Station III in Antarctica in cooperation with the Alfred Wegener Institute. The journey will take them via Oslo to Cape Town and the Norwegian Antarctic station Troll. From there, it is still a few hundred kilometres to Neumayer Station. At the station, the team will accompany the daily work routine and collaborate artistically with the nine overwinterers – who will then remain alone at the station for nine months. What stories are travelling with them to the South Pole? What costumes do they have in their luggage? And what extreme experiences and adventures will they bring back with them to Berlin?

From the eternal ice to the stage

At the end of the long journey is a surreal mockumentary theatre piece, somewhere between fiction and cinematic documentary, in which the white landscape of Antarctica becomes not only the map of the narrative but also a mirror of the human soul.