Abgesagt | Fremder als der Mond

In the organizer's words:

Playwright, theater theorist, political thinker, refugee, communist without a party card, founder of the Berlin Ensemble - Bertolt Brecht was all of these. But also: gifted lyricist, tireless reporter in work journals and letters, Augsburg singer-songwriter avant la lettre and "people's singer in the age of skyscrapers," as the feuilleton of the 1920s called him. Songs are central to almost all of his major plays, and the settings of his texts by composers such as Hanns Eisler, Kurt Weill and Paul Dessau are just as world-famous as their interpretations by Therese Giehse, Gisela May, Ernst Busch and others, which have become canonical. "Stranger than the Moon" weaves musical pieces by Eisler and others with poetry and Brecht's autobiographical prose into a musical, fragmentary life narrative. It deals with the development of an artistic personality, with the general difficulties of love life, with artistic creation in dark times and political struggles in three different German state systems, with war, exile and homecoming, and finally with death and the complex relationship between author and posterity. For Brecht, who announces early on that he is "beginning to become a classic," at the same time provocatively asks, "Why should there be a past when there is a future? Why should my name be mentioned?" Singer and actress KATHARINE MEHRLING is well known to Berlin audiences through her numerous appearances at the Komische Oper Berlin and the Bar jeder Vernunft. In "Stranger than the Moon" she can now be experienced for the first time, together with Paul Herwig, at the Berliner Ensemble. This content has been machine translated.