Philipp Ruch is a philosopher and performance artist. Born in Dresden in 1981, he is the founder of the Center for Political Beauty. He describes himself as a moral hardliner and belongs to the generation of directors who, after Schlingensief, see theater as an artistic form and no longer as an institution. Ruch studied the history of political ideas and completed his doctorate in the history of ancient violence (“Ehre und Rache. Eine Gefühlsgeschichte des antiken Rechts”) with distinction.
In 2015, he published “Wenn nicht wir, wer dann?”, which questions the discursive dominance of scientific interpretation and identifies a series of “toxic ideas” that make any humane self-examination of humanity impossible. In the fall of 2019, “Schluss mit der Geduld” was published on the relationship between imagination and humanity and the end of domestic appeasement policies (“Mit Rechten reden”).
In 2019, the Federal Ministry of the Interior issued an appearance ban against Ruch because, according to a BMI spokesperson, he divides society - mind you, with humanist radicalism. The far-right “Hannibal” network, which has remained unpunished to this day, has him on its death list for “Day X” (“Franco A.”). The state investigated him for 16 months for “forming a criminal organization” (the “criminal organization” meant the ZPS).
His works revolve around the experience of violence and the power of history and fiction. The processing of the shocking experience of the West's inability to act in the face of renewed genocide runs through his entire oeuvre. Numerous productions: GORKI Theater, Münchner Kammerspiele, Theater Neumarkt, Wienwoche, Berlin Biennale, Schauspiel Dortmund, Steirischer Herbst, NGBK.

Sasha Marianna Salzmann is a playwright and novelist, essayist and curator and was co-founder of the culture and society magazine freitext. Salzmann's theater works have received numerous awards and have been translated into over 20 languages. Salzmann was in-house playwright at the Maxim Gorki Theater Berlin and artistic director of the theater stage Studio Я. Salzmann's debut “Außer sich” was published by Suhrkamp Verlag in 2017. The novel received numerous awards, including international ones. In 2021, the second novel “Im Menschen muss alles herrlich sein” was published, which, like the debut, was nominated for the German Book Prize and was honored with the Prize of the Houses of Literature and the Hermann Hesse Literature Prize. In 2024, Suhrkamp also published the volume “Gleichzeit”, a correspondence between Ofer Waldman and Sasha Marianna Salzmann about the world after October 7, 2023. In 2024, Sasha Salzmann is the winner of the renowned Kleist Prize, which honors the literary oeuvre as a whole. 

Simon Strauß, geboren 1988 in Berlin, studierte Altertumswissenschaften und Geschichte in Basel, Poitiers und Cambridge. Er ist Mitgründer des Vereins Arbeit an Europa e.V. und war Initiator des europäischen Zeitzeugenprojekts „European Archive of Voices“. 2017 promovierte er an der HU Berlin mit einer wissenschaftshistorischen Arbeit über Konzeptionen römischer Gesellschaft bei Theodor Mommsen und Matthias Gelzer. Als Redakteur im Feuilleton der Frankfurter Allgemeinen Zeitung ist Strauß für den Bereich Theater zuständig. Außerdem ist er regelmäßig als Moderator im „Podcast für Deutschland“ der FAZ zu hören. 
2017 erschien Strauß’ literarisches Debut „Sieben Nächte“. Es folgten die Autofiktion „Römische Tage“ (2019) und die Novelle „Zu Zweit“ (2023). Mit seinem Band „Spielplanänderung“ hatte er 2022 namhafte Autoren dafür gewinnen können, vergessene Theaterstücke neu für die Bühne zu entdecken.