Heinrich Mann

Whether it is a matter of social recognition, financial gain, or love: life requires lies. At least this is the experience of the figures in Heinrich Mann's 1911 drama. Open eyed, they move by the means of lies over the narrow bridge which lies between self-respect and self-denial. Everyone can report mistakes and failures, whether they are artists, the sinking bourgeoisie, or the puppet masters behind the fragile social fabric.

The actress Leonie, successful and envied for her ability to tell the truth on the stage, wants to escape the self-interest and the cold calculation of the world around her. She longs for real feelings. By means of a bourgeois marriage, she means to counteract her "borrowed life", in which emotions are only experienced in order to be able to represent them on stage. But it is not only her family who oppose this. Even Fork, Leonie's former lover, puts her under pressure. Trained in all the finesse of manipulation, he is unresponsive to Leonie's performance in real life. "To be true" is for him a ridiculous goal.

He succeeds in bringing the two loved ones to the point that they compete on the question of who is more willing to die for the other, and who is capable of sacrificing more. This game of instrumentalized feelings becomes serious: Leonie realizes that she can only be honest in her art and kills herself. Even her suicide is regarded as an act of self dramatisation.