About this event
Play by Jaroslav Rudiš | Commissioned work by the Gerhart-Hauptmann-Theater Görlitz-Zittau | World Premiere
The forest tells stories. The beech forest in the Jizera Mountains tells very special ones. They are stories of accidents and misfortunes, of hikers and hunters, poachers, assassins, and foresters, of high-spirited drinkers, of railway and forestry workers, and of the beautiful suicide, Marie. There are many of them.
They tell of forgetting and of remembrance; they remind us of people who could be rescued from mortal danger, but above all of those who remained in the forest, the lost, the dead. In the former German-Bohemian, now Polish-Czech border mountains between Liberec and Jelenia Góra, one can find their traces. Amidst the majestically towering beeches—sometimes on moss-green rocks, sometimes by the wayside, sometimes well-hidden in the thicket of the forest—stand about 500 modest iron crosses, about half a meter high: so-called 'Marteln' (wayside shrines). One cross is dedicated to the forester Johann Bäumel, who was presumably killed on November 22, 1842, south of Hejnice, the pilgrimage site of Haindorf, by an accidentally discharged shot from his assistant.
Jaroslav Rudiš, the literary border-crosser between Bohemia and Saxony, indeed between the Czech Republic and Germany, has set off into the forest on behalf of the Gerhart-Hauptmann-Theater. He has written a play. About the mountains at the border triangle and about the boundaries of life and death, a piece full of poetry and wonderfully whimsical humor. Rudiš lets the forest and the dead speak.
Dates & Venues
This event takes place at 2 different venues
