by Ulrich Alexander Boschwitz
.The excavation of this impressive novel in spring 2018 was a small sensation: in 1938, at the age of 23, the young Berlin author Ulrich Alexander Boschwitz - who could not have known about Auschwitz - tells with shocking insight the story of the suffering of the Jewish merchant Otto Silbermann, who loses his home, his family and ultimately his identity in the November pogroms of the Nazis.
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The businessman Otto Silbermann is in the middle of a well-ordered life with a successful business and a circle of trusted friends and acquaintances. At that point, anti-Semitism in Germany turns into brutal agitation. It won't be that bad, Silbermann hopes, even as he finds himself attacked in his own apartment and threatened with physical violence.
For him, this is the beginning of an odyssey of escape through Germany, in which he painfully experiences how business partners and friends, on whose humanity he relied, betray him. He has to let his wife go, loses his business and ultimately his entire fortune. He travels through Germany on Reichsbahn trains in the hope of finding a way to escape - but the borders are already closed and no one in the neighboring countries is prepared to take in the Jewish refugees.
The German-Jewish author, who was born in Berlin in April 1915, lived with his mother on Hohenzollerndamm and, after his own odyssey, sank at sea on a refugee ship in 1942 at the age of 27, paints a depressing picture of a society that is rapidly losing its humanity. And he vividly describes the humiliating experiences of flight and expulsion.
(PLAY IN GERMAN)
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Participating artists
Mirko Böttcher (Regie)
Michael Kessler (Komposition)
Flavia Schwedler (Bühnen-und Kostümbild)
Mirko Böttcher (Autor/in)
Jonas Laux
Silke Buchholz
Matthias Rheinheimer
Michael Rothmann
