Abteilung Verkehr - Konspiration zwischen Ost und West

In the organizer's words:

Due to popular demand, BORGtheater is once again using an app, a map and other aids to send the audience on a journey through time to this former SED department at the exact location where it was located - the site of the Fahrbereitschaft in Berlin-Lichtenberg. In this site-specific game, the players are integrated into a bureaucratic, sometimes Kafkaesque apparatus based on the surviving history of the department. In a kind of espionage or economic thriller, they experience the means by which propaganda was used between East and West to find out how the money generated by the SED West companies was circulated. They take part in the meetings of the functionaries of the KPD, which was illegal after 1956, and the sector heads of the department, whose aim was to optimize the bumpy process of smuggling people, propaganda material and, above all, money from East to West and to distinguish themselves as "secret bearers".

As part of this interdisciplinary and participatory production, the players wander through the period from 1956 onwards and experience the changes after 1968 with the founding of the DKP. They gain an insight into the work of a department whose initial purpose was to provide financial and propaganda support to the illegal KPD and which ultimately had to hand over financial control to the Commercial Coordination Department, which implanted a "capitalist heart" in the GDR.

Thanks to its unusual format and the initial situation, "Abteilung Verkehr" offers players the opportunity to constantly change their perspective, to take on the role of the executors and in this way to test for themselves how strong the power of the organization and its structures is and how effective the conspiracy of individual departmental sectors must have been. The players experience at first hand what options were available to employees in this bureaucratic apparatus in terms of choice, promotion and exit.

It also deals with how political events, some of which received less attention or were suppressed in the West, were viewed in the East German media as part of a conspiratorial plot against the GDR. The government bodies and their espionage services provided a distorted mirror of the repressed history of the other Germany, which had its origins in the Wehrmacht's espionage unit "Abteilung Fremde Heere Ost", which was determined by the conspiratorial glorification and myth-making of the NSDAP.

While the players are superficially immersed in a Cold War narrative and a system driven by conspiracy and paranoia, they involuntarily draw a line to the present in view of some parallels (ideological and/or structural).

The event is not suitable for people with walking disabilities due to the lack of elevators.

with:

Director, play + play development Rolf Kasteleiner

Acting Charlotte Alten, Sarah , Sarah Bonitz, Urs Fabian Winiger, Manuel Zschunke,

Michael Günther, Ingolf Müller-Beck and Isabelle Vogt

Dramaturgy + play development Aldus Kiss

Programming Markus Schubert

Game design consulting: Philipp Bunkus

Costume + scenography Eleonora Pedretti and Lana Ramsay

Camera Video Eria Korte

Editing Video Lukas Link

Production management Leonard Beck

Price information:

Normal price: 14 € Reduced price: 10 € plus advance booking fee