An order, a drive, a mileage reading: the assignment sounds as mundane as it is pointless. At the end of his service in the Bundeswehr, Georg Gruhl is told to drive an off-road vehicle aimlessly so that it reaches the prescribed mileage for its inspection. Instead, he goes home and helps his father in his carpentry workshop. In Heinrich Böll’s “End of a Mission”, this minor deviation becomes a public affair – and the courtroom becomes a stage on which the established order puts itself on display.
On Friday, 6 November, Armin Petras brings his own stage adaptation of the story to Theater Bonn. The premiere begins at 7.30pm at the Schauspielhaus. This is Petras’s third production at the theatre. The cast includes Jörg Hornbostel as Johann Gruhl and Paul Michael Stiehler as Georg; the set is designed by Julian Marbach, with lighting by Ewa Górecki. How these elements will give spatial form to the small-town trial cannot be anticipated before the opening night. ARTROOM has not spoken to the production team for this preview, so the production’s specific interpretative intentions remain an open question.
A small act, a vast apparatus
Böll published the satirical story in 1966. Its starting point is a contradiction between bureaucratic instructions and practical sense: Georg is supposed to serve an administrative purpose that appears in the story as empty routine. He chooses to work with his father instead. Yet the story does not stop at the individual gesture. Father and son find themselves in court over a burning Bundeswehr vehicle; there, their breach of the rules is examined, debated and placed within the context of a local community.
It is precisely this shift that makes the text political. At issue is not just the individual’s obedience, but also the ability of institutions to deal with dissent without allowing themselves to be fundamentally called into question. The trial takes on the character of a small-town family gathering. Böll’s satire focuses on a society in which personal ties, bureaucratic logic and public propriety interlock. The friction arises not only between an objector and the state, but also between the professed rationality of a legal process and its sometimes absurd procedures.
What can be co-opted?
The Bonn announcement describes Böll’s story as a farce about order and conformity: protest is not merely opposed, but can also be defused and co-opted. That is a productive starting point for the present day, but not yet evidence of the specific political connections Petras’s production will make. The question raised by the material nevertheless remains pointed: when does an act of refusal have an effect – and when does an apparatus turn it into a manageable exception?
Böll’s answer does not lie in a political maxim. His comedy emerges from the precision with which he observes the circumstances of the trial and the characters involved. The act of disobedience is small; its consequences, at first, are not. Yet society can channel it into a legal process, a narrative and, ultimately, back into its own order. Whether the Bonn production turns this primarily into a farce, an interrogation of institutional reason, or both will only become clear in performance. In any event, the premiere takes up the material at precisely the point where its challenge begins: with the question of whether one must obey a pointless order simply because it has been properly issued.
Original reviewed by the editors · 4 November 2026
