Der Komet

In the organizer's words:

Dora W. follows her boyfriend from Silesia to Dresden in the early 1930s. He was a journeyman at the Dresden slaughterhouse, and the former goat herder and gardener's assistant experienced her "golden years" with him in the baroque city of art and culture, as she reports. Everyday life is characterized by hard work, early parenthood, but also by the joy of having escaped from rural circumstances. However, National Socialism and war increasingly take over the lives of the young family before the town is engulfed in an inferno of flames on February 13, 1945 and collapsing houses and magnificent buildings bury "the guilty and the innocent" beneath them.

Büchner Prize winner Durs Grünbein interweaves the story of his grandmother with an impressive portrait of Dresden and a social study of the 1930s and 1940s in Germany.

The artistic team led by Tilmann Köhler sees the basic situation of the book - the story of a young woman's everyday life under National Socialism from the perspective of her post-born grandchild - as a starting point for the realization of the material on stage. Anecdotes, observations, photos, letters and family secrets are used to reconstruct the lives of previous generations and trace experiences that reach right up to the present day. The associative production makes the past tangible and opens up a space for personal memories and current questions about war and peace, coming to terms with the past and current social fears and hopes.