"The american dream - eine verlorene Liebe?"

Opening, Part 1

Anyone attending both "Hamburg liest Amerika" and "Szenario" on opening day pays just 50 EUR instead of 65 EUR. Simply select both individual tickets - the discount is applied automatically at checkout.

A many-voiced portrait of the USA - the country that has shaped the Western world, Germany, and Hamburg (a city built by emigrants) more than almost any other - developed together with the city's residents. No country is so strongly associated with the promise of social mobility and freedom, and none has provoked so much contradiction worldwide. For Germans, this is a tension that is almost impossible to resolve.

And yet American culture continues to dominate and fascinate: music from jazz through rock and pop, from Woodstock to Madonna, Laurie Anderson, Lou Reed, and Bruce Springsteen; literature from Mark Twain to Bret Easton Ellis, Jonathan Franzen, Margaret Atwood, and Ocean Vuong; films from "Gone with the Wind" to "American Psycho"; global icons from Humphrey Bogart and Marilyn Monroe to Tom Cruise and Leonardo DiCaprio.

Do we have to say goodbye to all of it? 250 years of America in 2 hours - that can never be complete, of course. So the afternoon looks for surprising combinations and snapshots. One thing is fixed at the start: Senator for Culture Carsten Brosda and Joachim Lux, both self-declared Bruce Springsteen fans, will open the programme. And the end is fixed too: at 18:00 it stops, however far the conversation has come.