The unemployed machinist Alfred "Scheff" Schefczyk moves from Württemberg to West Berlin full of hope, where he finds a job as a transporter. There, however, he despairs at the seemingly insurmountable dependency structures and the lack of solidarity among his fellow sufferers. The rent in the workers' hostel is raised disproportionately, but nobody wants to mess things up with the landlord or janitor. At work, piecework hours are tightened, but nobody wants to go on strike, and when they do, they are quickly crushed by the management's tactics. When Scheff tries to mobilize against the dismissal of one of the delegates, he finds only one worker willing to sign. "Dear mother, I'm fine," he nevertheless writes on a postcard.

The Threepenny Opera proclaims itself "an opera for beggars," and it was in fact an attempt both to satirize traditional opera and operetta and to create a new kind of musical theater based on the theories of two young German artists, composer Kurt Weill and poet-playwright Bert Brecht. The show opens with a mock-Baroque overture, a nod to Threepenny's source, The Beggar's Opera, a brilliantly successful parody of Handel's operas written by John Gay in 1728. In a brief prologue following the overture, a shabby figure comes onstage with a barrel organ and launches into a song chronicling the crimes of the notorious bandit and womanizer Macheath, "Mack the Knife." The setting is a fair in Soho (London), just before Queen Victoria's coronation. In this production, Weill champion HK Gruber led the Ensemble Modern in a performance of Weill's complete original score, the first time it had been heard in Germany in many years. This production was broadcast on German television (3sat).