So you’ve never been to Karsberg? Yes you have. It’s where you bloody come from. And every time it snows you hope that the misery and squalor of your prefabricated home town will be buried underneath its blanket, reawakening the quiet innocence of your childhood days. We were all one family back then. These days everyone is a little poorer and prouder than they used to be. Islamic fundamentalists go from door to door. They say that poverty and squalor has descended on us because we have turned our backs on God. According to Orhan Pamuk, the never-ending snowfall is a tiring, deadening situation.

The only thing you can do in Karsberg is watch telly, turn religious or kill yourself. People don’t approve of this last option, especially not if it concerns young girls in headscarves. But if being unhappy is a valid reason for suicide, at least half the female population of Karsberg would surely prefer it.

Karsberg is a hole. Once you fall into it, you never get out.

When Ka is shored up in the small town of Karsberg one winter night, he runs into his childhood sweetheart and suddenly finds himself in the political crossfire. But really all he wanted to do there was write an article about the wave of suicides among the town’s young women.

In this town, where everyone knows everything about each other, Islamic fundamentalists and militant Germanists are fighting it out to the death. How can Ka get Seide out of this hole alive and take her away with him to the big city if every step he takes is watched and reported upon? A confrontation with the charismatic leader of the Islamic fundamentalists is inevitable.

Hakan Savaş Mican’s stage adaptation of Orhan Pamuk’s novel Schnee transposes the story into the German present to address the urgent issues of our time.

Following his stage plays Der Besuch, Die Schwäne vom Schlachthof and Warten auf Adam Spielman, the young author and director Hakan Savaş Mican turns his attention to a novel by the celebrated Orhan Pamuk. Transposing the story set in Turkey of the 1990s into a fictional European present, Mican cleverly explores the socio-political circumstances, the universal drama of the love story, and the many individual situations that link one to the other. Arriving in Berlin in 1977, Hakan Savaş Mican studied direction at the DFFB German Film and Television Academy and now regularly writes and directs for the Ballhaus Naunynstraße.