The Last Citizen

The family of patriarch Leo Clarenbach gathers around his deathbed, yet their idyllic world crumbled long ago. In 1990, just after the fall of the Berlin Wall, it emerged that Leo had been spying in West Germany for the GDR, igniting a national scandal that shocked his wife and their three children. Now, in November 2016, everyone expects Leo to finally explain why he became a traitor. But in the background, this story is approaching another kind of ending. In the USA, Donald Trump wins the presidency, forcing many on both the left and right to re-examine cherished beliefs. Suddenly mainstream ideals are subject to intense scrutiny - ideals that especially Leo had believed in...

«What’s being negotiated here is nothing less than how reality is constructed ... Melle depicts his characters as bizarre figures with damaged biographies. But we can – and do – relate to each of them ... The Last Citizen plays with a classic element of the family drama: how children are shattered by their parents’ failings. Here, however, the grandchildren’s generation uncovers this mechanism in a wonderfully smug, sardonic way.» (Süddeutsche Zeitung)