Trautwein’s newspaper is howling into the void, compared with the megaphone of Nazi propaganda, yet the uncomfortable facts he sends to his émigré readers still annoy party officials in Berlin. While the threat of violence often hovers over the characters, Feuchtwanger shows us that it is the destabilizing, disruptive experience of exile that is the greatest harm to befall them. The misery of being uprooted and purposeless, with nowhere to go, leads several of the characters — Trautmann’s wife, Anna (Maja Beckmann, noble in the face of panic), and the young revolutionary poet Harry Meisel (the chameleon-like Julia Riedler, who also plays two other roles) — to suicide.

Without reducing either of these multifaceted productions to a clear-cut moral — this is theater, not advocacy — taken in tandem they offer an compelling defense of the 1951 Refugee Convention, which in the aftermath of World War II outlined the rights of displaced people along with the legal obligation to protect them. At a political moment when such rights and obligations are being questioned, the Kammerspiele reaffirms them through powerfully engaging works of art.

This is important, urgent work that demands to be seen; yet much of the Munich theatergoing public seems to have turned its back on the Kammerspiele and its artistic director. Since arriving in Munich in 2015, Mr. Lilienthal, a Berlin native who spent much of the 1990s at the Volksbühne theater there, has shifted the focus away from classical theater and toward harder-to-classify performance-based works, often mounted by outside groups and artists. It’s a strategy not too dissimilar from the one pursued by Chris Dercon during his brief, controversial tenure at the Volksbühne. (Mr. Lilienthal didn’t make many friends in Berlin by supporting Mr. Dercon’s appointment, at least initially).

The Christian Social Union, the conservative party that has recently strong-armed Ms. Merkel into setting up “transit centers” for refugees at the German border, has made no secret of its dislike of Mr. Lilienthal. In March, after the party’s politicians vowed not to vote to renew his contract, Mr. Lilienthal announced he would leave Munich at the end of his current term, in the summer of 2020. Shortly before this news broke, the theater mounted “1968,” billed as an “occupation of the Kammerspiele.” It examined the legacy of that pivotal year and seemed designed to offend bourgeois, conservative sensibilities.

Before Mr. Lilienthal’s spat with the Christian Social Union, the theater’s audience attendance had been hovering around 60 percent. At most of the performances I’ve visited since then, that figure has seemed considerably less, with the notable exception of “No Sex,” Toshiki Okada’s droll, karaoke-filled exploration of sexual abstinence and emotional repression featuring the German film star Franz Rogowski.

By insisting the Kammerspiele respond to contemporary issues, Mr. Lilienthal has been successful in attracting a younger audience, but the approach has appeared to alienate the theater’s traditional base, who seem to want something less polemical — or at least more safe — from the stage.

Perhaps the extremely personal perspective on Syrian asylum seekers offered by “What They What to Hear” is not a point of view that people here in Munich want to hear. Programming that work in the same season as “Wartesaal,” which so affectively plumbs the psychology of exile, sends the message that the only way forward in dealing with the largest refugee crisis since the end of World War II is to learn from the past. Feuchtwanger’s émigrés in Paris, Mr. Al Kour and the members of the Open Border Ensemble share fundamental experiences of dislocation, insecurity and powerlessness. Implicit in both productions is an injunction that we listen to their stories.

Even though his days in Munich are numbered, Mr. Lilienthal looks sure to use his remaining two seasons here to challenge, provoke and disrupt.