Das schweigende Klassenzimmer

In the organizer's words:

"We weren't a collective, we weren't a team either.
We were us."

In November 1956, news of the brutal and bloody suppression of the Hungarian uprising reached the GDR via various media channels. The pupils in year 12 at the secondary school in Storkow wanted to take a political stance and showed their solidarity with the insurgents in Hungary by observing a minute's silence during class. The GDR authorities, who learned of this incident, decided to take action: This political disobedience must be prosecuted, the instigators should be found. Teachers are questioned, pupils are interrogated, parents are put under pressure by being made aware of the sometimes future-destroying consequences that await the whole family if they do not cooperate. But the class sticks together, no one is named as the sole "ringleader". As a result, the entire class is banned from taking the Abitur in the GDR. In order to escape this punishment - and the constant surveillance by the State Security - the young adults decide to take a drastic step: they leave their country, the GDR. Individually and in small groups, they fled to West Berlin and then on to Bensheim in West Germany. There, where high school graduation and freedom awaited them. Dietrich Garstka, one of the pupils from the 12th grade, has published documentary accounts of the events 50 years later.

The Mainfranken Theater Würzburg, in cooperation with the Institute for German Studies at the Ruhr University Bochum and with funding from the Federal Foundation for the Reappraisal of the SED Dictatorship (Berlin), will bring the story of Dietrich Garstka's 12th grade class to the stage.