Stolpersteine Staatstheater (Tripping Stones State Theatre)

Using staff records of Staatstheater Karlsruhe, director Hans-Werner Kroesinger and dramaturg Regine Dura reconstructed the process of anti-Semitic discrimination and the dismissal of left-wing and liberal theatre artists after 1933. Actors and audience sit together at a large work desk. The actors read from files, newspaper reports, memoirs and interviews with contemporary witnesses. Repeatedly, they transition into brief passages of acting. We hear how in Karlsruhe, Jewish actors, a Jewish prompter and the artistic director were dismissed, arrested, driven into exile and to suicide. Individual artists are not reduced to mere victims, but presented in terse, concentrated portraits. The bureaucratic procedure which provided a detailed set of legal regulations for social exclusion and the preparation of a genocide, the legitimation by procedures that liked to conceal this discrimination in inciting articles in the local NS-paper by citing the pertinent legal clause, the polite, formally always correct letters in which a chief councillor informed the Jewish prompter that her dismissal was lawful – all these make the production into a lesson about the impartial operation of a state bureaucracy.

www.staatstheater.karlsruhe.de