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Brother Eichmann @ Schauspiel Köln
23 October 2021 @ 20:00 - 22:00
“Brother Eichmann” by Heinar Kipphardt
with JÖRG RATJEN as Adolf Eichmann
DIRECTION: THOMAS JONIGK
STAGE & COSTUME DESIGN: LISA DÄSSLER
MUSIC/SOUND: MATHIS NITSCHKE
DRAMATURGY: STAWRULA PANAGIOTAKI
PREMIERE: 23. Oktober 2021
From the rehearsals (video by me):
“In 1961, Adolf Eichmann, the planner and organizer of the Holocaust, was sentenced to death by hanging in Jerusalem. In one of the most highly regarded trials of the post-war period, unbearable details about the National Socialist extermination machinery and its perpetrators come to light for the world public, because the defendant talks.
Author and dramaturge Heinar Kipphardt – along with Peter Weiss and Rolf Hochhuth one of the main representatives of documentary theater in the 1960s – distills over 3,500 pages of interrogation and court transcripts into a theatrical text. The play is premiered posthumously in Munich in 1983. “A trial has in common with a play that both begin and end with the perpetrator, and not with the victim,” writes Hanna Arendt in her account EICHMANN IN JERUSALEM. Kipphardt’s play brings this perpetrator, this “brother” (“Bruder Hitler” – Thomas Mann), uncomfortably close.