The story follows a young woman who runs away from her provincial hometown and ends up at Berlin’s notorious Zoo station, searching for a rock musician who got her pregnant on a one-night stand.
According to the GRIPS, “it’s a show, a drama, a musical about living and surviving in a large city, hope and adaptation, courage and self-deceit, to laugh and cry at, to dream, and to think about oneself.”[1] As its other plays, Linie 1 includes sociocritical elements, but it also serves as an amusing portrait of Berlin's society before the fall of the Berlin Wall.
The music was written by German musician and composer Birger Heymann, a longtime friend of Ludwig, and the rock band No Ticket (Thomas Keller, George Kranz, Axel Kottmann, Michael Brandt, Richard Wester, Matthias Witting).
However, after Volker Ludwig mentioned on a talk show that the theatre would have to close without additional support, the government eventually increased its subsidies.
For years, Linie 1 was the most-played German production and it remains the second-most successful musical after Bertolt Brecht’s Threepenny Opera.
[4] After learning about this, members of the GRIPS, translated his song Morning Dew into German, visited South Korea in 2004, and gave it to him as a gift.
The song was also included on the band's 2008 live album Kanonen auf Spatzen (Shoot at sparrows with cannons) and released as single.
In 2009, Berlin rapper Sido also released a single with the title Hey du!, which included the first verse of Marias Lied.