Kazimira Generationenroman von Svenja Leiber
KazimiraGenerationenroman von Svenja Leiber
Einführung 30 Minuten vor Vorstellungsbeginn in der Bar
‘From day one, I knew this girl was too singular for the role our society would assign her and I feared the pain she would and did encounter.’
Kazimira is an individualistic woman. Taciturn and unflinching, she looks life’s adversities in the eye and goes her own way.
Living in a remote spot by the Baltic Sea in the late 19th century, she collects amber that washes up on the beach and brings it home to her good-natured husband Antas, who is unmatched in his ability to turn it into jewellery and figures. He catches the attention of Moritz Hirschberg, a Jewish businessman, who gives Antas an important skilled role in Annagrube, his amber mine. Kazimira stays at home looking after the house and child – neither of which she ever wanted. She has difficulty suppressing her irresistible urge to be allowed to work like a man.
The industrialisation of the coastal stretch brings wealth and well-being, but also provides fertile ground for nascent anti-Semitism and national socialism. The Hirschberg family is driven out and Kazimira’s son returns home from World War I a broken man. Always branded an outsider, she never gives up the struggle for self-determination: she falls in love with a woman, cuts off her hair and sews herself trousers. The amber region’s brief heyday is over, but Kazimira endures. Decades later, at the end of World War II, she is the last witness when the SS drives 3,000 naked Jewish women and girls from the evacuated subcamp of a concentration camp to the empty Annagrube mine and makes a mass grave of the former amber mine.
Svenja Leiber, born in Hamburg in 1975, uses tender and poetic linguistic force to tell of the raw and difficult life of an independent woman and her children and grandchildren in her family saga. Besides painting a precise portrait of a remarkable hero, she also traces the history of East Prussia over four generations, from the German Empire and smouldering anti-Semitism to the end of National Socialism.
Production Staff
Director: Krystyn Tuschhoff
Stage and Costumes: Anike Sedello
Musical Leader, Music and Sound: Clemens Giebel
Choreographie: Alessandra Corti
Dramaturg: Saskia Zinsser-Krys
Bilder
Trailer
Pressestimme
„Mit der Uraufführung von „Kazimira” nach dem episch-zeitgeschichtlichen Roman von Svenja Leiber zeigen sechs Schauspielerinnen und fünf Schauspieler „ganz großes Kino”. Und sie vertrauen dabei ganz auf die Magie ihres Spiels, pointierter Dialoge – und eines wieder einmal staunenswerten Bühnenbildes.” Ralph Wilms, WAZ
