This year the 2008 MAX Prize was awarded to Dušan D. Pařízek for his staging of the plays ÜBERGEWICHT: unwichtig: UNIFORM by Werner Schwab and The Trial by Franz Kafka. ÜBERGEWICHT: unwichtig: UNIFORM, Schwab’s 1991 breakthrough, explores the depths of society and lays bare its truth with a radical presence and verbal fury. By comparison, Kafka’s unfinished psychodrama, The Trial, symbolizes the protagonist’s failure to withstand a nightmarish labyrinth of surreal bureaucracy. This year Dušan D. Pařízek’s directorial excellence was equally convincing in both productions, for which he received a doubled honor.

The Prague Theater Festival in the German Language originated in 1996, originally under the name "Deutsches Theater Prag". The aim was to revive the politically interrupted tradition of an international community and the mutual enrichment of Czech, German and Jewish culture in the Czech metropolis. Under the patronage of the Presidents of the four countries involved, the producers of four major theaters in Germany, Austria, Switzerland and the Czech Republic took up this initiative and have been organizing the festival with great success ever since.

A competition for the MAX Prize has also been held by the theater management since 2002 in cooperation with the Allianz Kulturstiftung. It is awarded for the best production of a work originally written in German in the Czech Republic during the previous season. The aim of the competition is to promote artistically valuable productions of German authors on Czech stages, while at the same time making a contribution to ensuring that Czech theater gains a higher profile in German speaking countries.