Trutz

Play by Christoph Hein

Maykl Trutz cannot forget. He cannot forget the fate of his parents, who fled to the Soviet Union full of hope to escape the Nazis and who—like his friend, the Russian linguist Gejm, and his family—fell victim to the Stalinist system there. At the age of 18, Maykl returns to Germany, to the GDR. But the memory of what happened prevents him from joining the FDJ youth organization, and after the fall of the Berlin Wall, he pursues a lawsuit against a Stasi agent—a case he ultimately loses.

Just as Maykl cannot forget, Christoph Hein refuses to forget and, together withTrutz, writes a monumental memoir about the cruel entanglements and the tumultuous history of suffering that shaped Germany and Russia—or rather, the Soviet Union—in the past century. A “century-spanning” text in multiple senses: spanning a century, making a century comprehensible, and offering a painful yet clear-sighted retrospective—because history is not simply over; because what was influences us and our actions today; because history is used to legitimize today’s politics.

The Czech theater director Dušan David Pařízek skillfully and humorously dissects major political and historical narratives—not as an archive, but as an open wound of the present. In his production*Trutz*, he shows what happens when historical injustices are not addressed: they return—in the form of authoritarian reflexes, repressive systems, and simplistic answers to the complex questions of our time.

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