A man of little distinction from Solingen, wearing horn-rimmed glasses. When former SS Obersturmbannführer Adolf Eichmann stood before a court in Jerusalem in 1961 to be tried for the deaths of millions of Jewish people, the whole world watched. After an eight-month trial with over 100 witnesses, Eichmann was found guilty and sentenced to death. He consistently defended himself as merely a little cog in the machinery of mass murder. Even in his closing testimony, he described himself as ‘just carrying out orders’ but did not consider himself guilty of his actions.

With Brother Eichmann by Heinar Kipphardt, one of the most important texts in political documentary theatre was first performed in 1983. Based on interrogation records from Jerusalem, Kipphardt describes Eichmann’s path from being an ordinary and unremarkable representative of an oil company to the person who would organise the deportation and murder of six million Jewish people. He shows Eichmann in both his monstrosity and mediocrity and asks whether any one of us could become a person like Eichmann. The play polarised opinion with scenes in which Kipphardt explores the ‘Eichmann posture’ in the political present: from the banality of evil to the trivialisation of the Holocaust?
But is everything finally good now? In Siblings Eichmann (premiere), contemporary author Lukas Hammerstein turns a sharp eye on all of us who have left the evil behind us and thoroughly processed it. Or have we just swept it under the carpet, put it to one side, suppressed and forgotten it? With powerful eloquence, Hammerstein dissects how the past remains part of our present in his portrait of society. A chorus of many voices engages in a challenging way with the conclusion, keeping on the trail of both good and evil.

In her production, theatre director Kathrin Mädler invites Brother Eichmann and the Siblings Eichmann to a perpetual German family celebration. Does Eichmann still live on in us?

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production Staff

Director: Kathrin Mädler
Stage and Costumes: Mareike Delaquis Porschka
Music: Cico Beck
Dramaturg: Laura Mangels

Bilder

Trailer