The theme of this year’s festival is "Heimat," a word that means roughly "homeland" but which is more closely associated with a person’s feeling of being home. The event logo chosen for the festival fittingly resembles a German town flag, an image that easily evokes emotion.

The festival jury surveyed the entirety of the German-speaking theatrical world, viewing about 600 different productions in all, before selecting just ten to be invited to Berlin. Only one of the selected plays, the Vienna Burgtheater’s production of Schiller’s "Don Carlos," had to decline Berlin’s invitation because of its technical requirements. Instead, a free, filmed version of the play will be shown.

Yet even without a live staging of Schiller play during Schiller Year 2005, organizers expect their selections to attract hordes of eager theatregoers to the German capital. Among the plays deemed the crème de la crème are the Munich Kammerspiele’s "Nibelungen," starring "it" actress Julia Jentsch, and Paul Wedekind’s modern classic "Lulu," which had a run at Hamburg’s Thalia Theater, starring stage and screen star Fritzi Haberlandt.

But despite an unusually star-studded festival, jury speaker Barbara Burkhardt warned against reducing the rich tapestry of Germany’s lively theatre scene to just a few popular actors — or a few venues in the biggest German metropolises.

"Unfortunately, the prominent theatre life is being concentrated more and more in the big cities," Burkhardt said at a press conference. Germany especially is a country in which many smaller towns have their own theatrical scene, but more and more young people are moving to the major theatre cities of Berlin, Hamburg and Munich, she explained.