Since summer 2025, the Montafon has once again been transformed into a stage on which local stories reflect global developments with its theater hike "Grenzerfahrungen am Zauberberg". After almost 100 fully booked performances of the production "On the Run", teatro caprile 2026 will once again take audiences on hiking trails that weave history, literature and music into an immersive experience. Gargellen, long advertised as "the Austrian Davos", becomes a microcosm in which historical events, literary inspirations and personal destinies come together.

Based on historical documents, newspaper articles and literary texts by Lucie Varga, Ernst Krenek, Thomas Mann, Franz Bernhard Freiherr von Hornstein, Otto Borger, Lőrinc Szabó and others, the theater walk explores the transformation of Gargellen - from Maisäß to a tourist destination - and the place as a historical border crossing for goods, ideas and people. The landscape itself becomes the narrator: weather, light, wind and topography become dramatic elements that make the tension between nature and civilization, memory and repression as well as departure and standstill tangible.

Montafon theater hike 2026 "Borderline experiences on the magic mountain" © teatro caprile, 2025

The literary and musical highlights are special moments of the hike. For example, the audience encounters the Austrian-American composer Ernst Krenek, who stayed at the Hotel Madrisa in 1934 and whose song cycle "Reisebuch aus den österreichischen Alpen" was integrated into the production. In a fictional dialog with the young historian Lucie Varga, Krenek reflects on the rise of Nazi ideology in Montafon - an encounter that poetically condenses historical documents and posthumously published memoirs. While Krenek and Thomas Mann emigrated to the USA, Varga died in exile in the south of France in 1941, a fate that touchingly thematizes the migration.
The production interweaves real border experiences with literary echoes, including from Thomas Mann's "The Magic Mountain", and brings together characters from history and fiction: Deserters, Jewish intellectuals, impostor couples and other contemporary witnesses shed light on flight, identity and social upheaval in all their facets.
Experienced actors and actresses such as Katharina Grabher, Andreas Kosek, Roland Etlinger, Ildikó Eszter Frank and Ruth Grabher guide visitors through the immersive, moving narrative world of Gargellen together with theater guide Margit Ganahl. This makes the Montafon theater hike an extraordinary format that brings history to life in an emotional and direct way.
July 17/18/19, 2026
August 21/22/23, 2026
August 28/29/30, 2026
Bookable from December 1, 2025
www.montafon.at/montafoner-theaterwanderung