UNTERM TEPPICH - DER KRIEG, MEINE ELTERN UND ICH

In the organizer's words:

Scenic collage by and with Ilona Schulz

After the death of her parents, the actress Ilona Schulz discovers old letters that her then newly married parents wrote to each other during the Second World War. She deciphers the texts, written in Süterlin, and discovers completely unknown sides of her parents: tenderly desirous words, anxious observations, suppressed shame and sad experiences of suffering and ignorance of those who fled their destroyed homeland after the war. Things that were not an issue in the home of the actress, born in 1955, too strong a desire for normalization, to let the past rest - everything "under the carpet".

Together with director Dania Hohmann, Schulz used the content of the letters to create a theatrical collage about shame, guilt, disappointment and repression, an unsparing family constellation.

We are the descendants of war-traumatized people from a guilty war. We bear no guilt for the past, but responsibility for the future. We are in a position to look "under the carpet". What lies there is upsetting, funny, sad, absurd, loving, deluded, frivolous, frightening, naive, silly, disturbing and human.

The evening is a stocktaking, the realization of the deep traces war leaves across generations and that there are no winners.

In this day and age, with daily news from Ukraine and Gaza, it makes sense to take a look "under the carpet" and understand what a fragile gift a life in peace is.