Der Bus nach Dachau

A film set has been assembled; the director presents his project to several actors and a cinematographer. The film is to tell the story of former concentration camp inmates from the Netherlands taking a coach trip to the Dachau Memorial Site. The cast and the director approach this material with caution – they try out ideas and reject them, they despair, hesitate, flounder. How to tell the stories of these characters: Teddy and his friend Beck, Both, the inmate with a leadership role, the Hungarian who asks for soup? What images, what forms, what devices are appropriate? And how can remembrance work once the last remaining witnesses of that time have disappeared?
The Dutch collective De Warme Winkel and the cast of Schauspielhaus Bochum don’t pretend to have answers in this courageous, trenchant show that intertwines several time levels and generations. At its core is the process of asking questions and searching for ways of keeping memory alive – overwhelming and provoking in the best sense.

Statement of the Jury
In “Der Bus nach Dachau”, the Dutch collective De Warme Winkel and the ensemble of Schauspielhaus Bochum venture into a risky experiment: Vincent Rietveld and Ward Weemhoff want to stage a screenplay about a trip to Dachau following the traces of interned Dutch resistance fighters. Ward’s father had written this screenplay in 1993, but in the shadow of “Schindler’s List”, it was never made into a film. By way of this endeavour, the show expands to include issues like the representability of the Holocaust as a singular crime in the history of humankind and a radical rupture of civilisation, the (im)possibility of fictionalising it, and forms of remembrance in times when witnesses of this period can no longer be consulted. De Warme Winkel and the cast try out a wide variety of aesthetic devices: they don’t stop at Snapchat or participation and expose their audience to a roller-coaster of emotions that constantly provokes questions and objections. But it is precisely this kind of friction that prevents remembrance from becoming an empty ritual.

Tojuror Janis El-Bira’s video statement in the Berliner Festspiele Media Library (in German)

Programmebooklet (pdf, 5.4 MB)