But Michael Wertmüller’s long-gestating work, with a libretto by Roland Schimmelpfennig, took place in the aftermath of October 7 attacks by Hamas on Israel, amid the ongoing destruction of Gaza by the IDF and the German government’s panic about what a possible genocide committed by Jews might mean for German “Errinerungskultur,” the culture of memory. The last two years of listening to Germany’s sanctimonious kvetching, on the pretext of protecting Jews and fighting antisemitism, has largely revealed “Errinerungskultur” to be “Errinerungstheater.” Echo 72 wrestled provocatively with postwar Germany’s trauma, guilt and the legacy of both Nazism and radical left-wing terrorism of the 1970s. The stage of Lydia Steier’s world premiere production was an infernal perpetuum mobile where visitors to a sleek German museum relived the horrific events of Black September in an eternal loop. The highly complex and meticulous stagecraft was a sobering compliment to Wertmüller’s swirling, amplified score, while Schimmelpfennig’s libretto, by turns journalistically detached and journalistic, approached its weighty subject matter aslant. It was anguished and enraged without ever finger-wagging or slipping into piety and cliché.