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… that they were neighbors! The own neighbors!
Who knew each other, where the children played together.
Here, a small town has turned on each other, here, all the dams that normally hold a
that normally hold a civilization together.
Where it is no longer clear who is friend and who is foe. How thin this layer is!
How does something like that happen? It happened that quickly.”
In June 1933, hundreds of people in Köpenick were dragged off the streets
or from their apartments and tortured for days – there are well over 20 fatalities. All over Germany, at the beginning of the so-called Gleichschaltungsprozess of the Nazi state, excesses of violence take place.
There is hardly any civilian resistance, the police and the judiciary cannot protect the victims protect the victims or, in some cases, no longer want to.
Neighbors become victims and perpetrators. This escalating terror, visible to the public, puts the pluralist society of the Weimar Republic to a brutal end.
Today, we are being put under pressure by increasingly open right-wing networks.
Right-wing thought is increasingly present and influences social discourses in its sense.
The early summer of 1933 is closer to our present situation than Nazi Germany from the second half of the 1930s.
What happened then, how do we remember, and what do the dramatic days of June 1933 for us today? What happened to the relatives of the kidnapped, tortured and murdered neighbors,
What happened to the wives, mothers, girlfriends, brothers and sisters, whose names are not mentioned anywhere? How does the horror continue to have an effect into the 4th generation?
On the basis of documents from the Köpenick and Berlin State Archives,
eyewitness accounts and conversations with descendants of the victims the artists have developed this production.
Performance venue: ABC-Hirschgarten, Hirschgartenstr. 4, 12555 Berlin-Köpenick
In cooperation with Schlossplatztheater, supported by research grants: Berliner Senat für Kultur und Europa, Darstellende Künste 2021, Bildende Kunst
2022 and Fonds Darstellende Künste e.V. 2022.
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