Stadt der Engel

oder The Overcoat of Dr. Freud nach dem Roman von Christa Wolf

At the beginning of the 1990s, a German writer spends a research residency in Los Angeles. In the unfamiliar setting of the United States, she is confronted with her identity as a German and is compelled to grapple both with history at large and with her own personal past. Again and again, against a sun-drenched backdrop, she finds herself faced with the blind spots of her history, with forgetting and remembering. How can she succeed in telling her own story—and what story has she constructed for herself?

With City of Angels or The Overcoat of Dr. Freud, published in 2010, the writer Christa Wolf offers an analysis of the turning points in her life. In this late work, she sends a literary alter ego on a psychoanalytically inspired excavation of her own memory. In doing so, she confronts the transformation of her relationship to the GDR—from a committed comrade devoted to the goals of socialism, through a gradual process of detachment, to open dissent with the ideologically rigid leadership of the SED.

Together, Lizzy Timmers and Charlotte Puder develop an intimate chamber play. In this production, director Lizzy Timmers also continues her exploration of Germany’s complex pasts.