In the organizer's words:

Based on the novel by Maxim Biller

The world of the Russian-Jewish family from Hamburg, the subject of Maxim Biller's new novel "Mama Odessa", is full of secrets, poetry, betrayal and literature.

But it is also a clever, beautiful and truthful book about a son and a mother, both writers, who love each other, betray each other again and again because of their writing - and yet never lose each other.

And it tells us about the loss of home and the perpetual search for it.

With impressive ease, Maxim Biller spans an arc from Odessa during the Second World War through the late Stalinist period to the present day. Everything in the Grinbaum family is connected: the Nazi massacre of the Jews of Odessa in 1941, from which the grandfather miraculously escapes, a KGB poison attack on the narrator's father and wife, the Zionist dreams of the father, who ends up stranded with his family in Hamburg's Grindel district, in Bieberstraße, around the corner from the Hamburg Kammerspiele.

In the 1970s, nothing here reminds us of the district's Jewish past. This only gradually returns.

The father leaves the family for a German woman, the mother tries to write. She does this best in her car, in the Toom parking lot in the neighborhood.

Director: Kai Wessel
Stage and costumes: Maren Christensen
Dramaturgy: Anja Del Caro

With Florian Lukas and others

Price information:

Subject to change without notice.