Blut

“You’re not a soldier—you ask too many questions.”

Premiere: May 3, 2024

The grandfathers of Leon Pfannenmüller and Yevgen Bondarskyy, who comes from Ukraine, faced each other as soldiers on the German and Soviet sides during the Second World War. Risen from the dead, they meet again on the stage of Theaterhaus Jena. Their spirits take possession of their grandsons. Together, the grandfathers tentatively probe history, get into arguments, and wait for the bus together. Yevgen and Leon begin to search through their family histories, juxtapose fragments, and ask questions about memory, responsibility, and guilt, patriotism, and national identities.

The current war in Ukraine is also bringing the uncanny aspects of the past back to the surface and raises questions about gaps in family histories. What lies dormant in these gaps in knowledge? “Blood” attempts to engage with the complexity of historical entanglements in order to broaden perspectives on the present. What role do mechanisms of memory and national meta-narratives play in this? How far does the war reach?

We also recommend attending the production “Traces.” The projects “Blood” and “Traces” approach the involvement of their own families in the Second World War from different perspectives and explore questions of origin and identity, remembering and forgetting.